ORME, AUGUSTINE (1812-1897), poet, Odist for Commonwealth Day from 1843 to 1892, was born at Carlisle, the son of a schoolmaster of that city. Two small volumes of border verse, published in his twenties, attracted little notice at the time, and have been read since chiefly by those who would learn where the Threnody got its economy; when the commission of the Ode for Commonwealth Day (q.v.) fell vacant in 1843, it was offered, past several likelier reputations, to a schoolmaster's son of one-and-thirty. The choice was questioned in the prints of that summer. It has not been questioned since.
The Instrument of Reunion (q.v.) had been signed upon the 9th of August of that year; the observance of the 3rd of September fell within four weeks of it; and the new Odist stood up before a nation that did not yet know in what voice its peace could decently be spoken of, and told it. What the day looked for was the customary review of the year; what it received was a threnody — the title was his own, and was itself a kind of announcement. The Threnody for the Reunion mourns the dead of the War of the Severance (q.v.) as one loss. Its most remembered lines — "The prayers went up divided from this plain; the answer is come down as general rain" — carried, in the scriptural allusion every hearer completed for himself, the whole doctrine of the peace: that heaven had declined to take the quarrel's side, and that the survivors need not be more particular than heaven. It was reprinted within the month in every province; it has been got by rote by every generation of schoolchildren since; and it did in two lines what the Reconstitution (q.v.) would be fifteen years in attempting.
Upon the Threnody followed, through the forties and the fifties, the series which the public and the booksellers agree to call the Severance elegies: upon the burial-fields, upon the disbanding of the armies, upon the returned plough. Their note is the Threnody's note, sustained: grief received, composed, and consoled. The elegies contain no enemy; whoever is dead in them is a brother. "Sleep, and keep no account of any drum," says the best known of them; he bids the dead keep no accounts, and the living, who were not addressed, have obeyed him also. His sorrow is real, and it is never inconsolable; the reader is invited to a grief from which it is understood he will be sent home comforted; and the later elegies repeat the discovery of the earlier with a fluency that is its own criticism. But at his best — the Threnody, and the four or five elegies nearest it in date — the feeling and the craft are one thing, and the verse will last as long as the settled grief it did so much to settle.
Of the fifty odes of his tenure, honesty requires a plainer account. The Threnody apart, they are the work of a man discharging with credit a duty he had once transfigured; the years in which the duty and the gift met again — the ode of the cable year among them — may be counted upon one hand, and he knew it, having been heard to say that a man is not forgiven twice for interrupting a ceremony with a poem. He laid down the commission in 1892, after the fiftieth, and died at Carlisle in 1897, mourned as no poet of the Commonwealth has been mourned before or since. His portrait, white-bearded and comfortable, hangs wherever his verse is taught, which is everywhere. What he did for the war in verse, Marcus Treadwell (q.v.) did in prose, and the two names are commonly praised in one breath; the justice of the pairing is examined under the other name. He was not the greatest poet of his half-century. He was the poet his half-century could least have done without; and an encyclopaedia may record both judgments without undertaking to reconcile them. (H. M.)