Introduction
A work by the minor PRB painter James Collinson
(1825? - 1881), now best known as the man CR thought to marry, but
eventually threw off. The poem is the first part of the five-part
narrative poem titled
<hi rend="i">The Child
Jesus</hi>
. The work is clearly in debt to DGR's early work,
and perhaps even more to
Keble's
<hi rend="i">The Christian Year</hi>
and, of course, to
the liturgy of the “Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries.”
“The Agony in the Garden” is the
first of the Sorrowful Mysteries.
The subtitle of the five-part
poem, “A Record Typical of the Five Sorrowful
Mysteries,” underscores its typological methodology—taking
incidents (real and imagined) from the childhood of Jesus as
prefigurative of the consummating events of his mortal life.