Cowper
wrote of the joys and sorrows of everyday life and was content to describe the
minutiae of the countryside. In his sympathy with rural life, his concern for
the poor and downtrodden, and his comparative simplicity of language, he may be
seen as one in revolt against much 18th-century verse and as a forerunner of
Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While he is
often gently humorous in his verse, the sense of desolation that was never far
below the surface of his mind is revealed in many of his poems, notably “The
Castaway.”
One
of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of
18th-century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the
English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic
poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet",
whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem
"Yardley-Oak".
After
being institutionalised for insanity, Cowper found refuge in a fervent
evangelical Christianity. He continued to suffer doubt about his salvation and,
after a dream in 1773, believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation. He
recovered, and went on to write more religious hymns.
His
religious sentiment and association with John Newton (who wrote the hymn
"Amazing Grace") led to much of the poetry for which he is best
remembered, and to the series of Olney Hymns. His poem "Light Shining out
of Darkness" gave English the phrase: "God moves in a mysterious way/
His wonders to perform."
He
also wrote a number of anti-slavery poems, and his friendship with Newton, who
was an avid anti-slavery campaigner, resulted in Cowper's being asked to write
in support of the Abolitionist campaign. Cowper wrote a poem called "The
Negro's Complaint" (1788) which rapidly became very famous, and was often
quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. during the 20th-century civil rights movement.
He also wrote several other less well-known poems on slavery in the 1780s, many
of which attacked the idea that slavery was economically viable.
His
major work was undertaken when Lady Austen complained to Cowper that he lacked
a subject. She encouraged him to write about the sofa in his parlor. The Task
grew into an opus of six books and nearly five thousand lines. Although the
poem begins as a mock-heroic account of a wooden stool developing into a sofa,
in later sections of the poem Cowper meditates on the immediate world around
him (his village, garden, animals, and parlor) as well as larger religious and
humanitarian concerns. His work found a wide audience; Samuel Taylor Coleridge
called him "the best modern poet." His attention to nature and common
life along with the foregrounding of his personal life prefigured the concerns
of Romantic poets such as Wordsworth. William Cowper died of dropsy on April
25, 1800. At the time of his death, his Poems had already reached their tenth
printing.
Early life
Cowper
was born on November 15, 1731 at the rectory in Great Berkhamstead (now
Berkhamsted), Hertfordshire, the first surviving child of the Reverend John
Cowper and Ann Donne Cowper, the daughter of Roger Donne of Ludham Hall,
Norfolk. Cowper was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, where his father John
Cowper was rector of the Church of St Peter. His father's sister was the poet
Judith Madan. His mother was Ann née Donne. He and his brother John were the
only two of seven children to live past infancy. Ann died giving birth to John
on 7 November 1737.His family was well connected on both sides: his father’s
great-uncle had been the first Earl Cowper and twice lord chancellor of
England, while the Donnes claimed descent from Henry III and Elizabethan poet John
Donne. After short periods at dame school and under the Reverend William Davis
at Aldbury, Cowper went, from about 1737 to 1739, to Dr. Pittman’s boarding
school at Markyate Street on the Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire border, where,
as he recalled 30 years later in his Memoir of the Early Life of William
Cowper, Esq. (1816), he was so severely bullied that he knew his tormentor “by
his shoe-buckles better than any other part of his dress.” This experience
seems to have been second only to the death of his mother when he was not quite
six in promoting the mental health problems that were to determine the course
of his life. The child’s traumatic bereavement was to be seen by the aging poet
himself, in the powerful verses of 1790 on his mother’s portrait, as the primal
scene in a relentless drama of affliction and arduous survival. He was “Wretch
even then, life’s journey just begun.”
His
mother's death at such an early age troubled William deeply and was the subject
of his poem "On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture", written more
than fifty years later. He grew close to her family in his early years. He was
particularly close with her brother Robert and his wife Harriot. They instilled
in young William a love of reading and gave him some of his first books – John
Bunyan's Pilgrim’s Progress and John Gay's Fables.
Cowper
was first enrolled in Westminster School in April 1742 after moving from school
to school for a number of years. He had begun to study Latin at a young age,
and was an eager scholar of Latin for the rest of his life. Older children
bullied Cowper through many of his younger years. At Westminster School he
studied under the headmaster John Nicoll. At the time, Westminster School was
popular amongst families belonging to England's Whig political party. Many
intelligent boys from families of a lower social status also attended, however.
Cowper made lifelong friends from Westminster. He read through the Iliad and
the Odyssey, which ignited his lifelong scholarship and love for Homer's epics.
He grew skilled at the interpretation and translation of Latin, an ability he
put to use for the rest of his life. He was skilled in the composition of Latin
as well and wrote many verses of his own.
After
the death of his mother when he was six, Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”), the son
of an Anglican clergyman, was sent to a local boarding school. He then moved to
Westminster School, in London, and in 1750 began to study law. He was called to
the bar in 1754 and took chambers in London’s Middle Temple in 1757. During his
student days he fell in love with his cousin, Theodora Cowper, and for a while
the two were engaged. But Cowper was beginning to show signs of the mental
instability that plagued him throughout his life.
His
father had died in 1756, leaving little wealth, and Cowper’s family used its
influence to obtain two administrative posts for him in the House of Lords,
which entailed a formal examination. This prospect so disturbed him that he
attempted suicide and was confined for 18 months in an asylum, troubled by
religious doubts and fears and persistently dreaming of his predestined
damnation.
Religion,
however, also provided the comfort of Cowper’s convalescence, which he spent at
Huntingdon, lodging with the Reverend Morley Unwin, his wife Mary, and their
small family. Pious Calvinists, the Unwins supported the evangelical revival,
then a powerful force in English society. In 1767 Morley Unwin was killed in a
riding accident, and his family, with Cowper, took up residence at Olney, in
Buckinghamshire. The curate there, John Newton, a leader of the revival,
encouraged Cowper in a life of practical evangelism; however, the poet proved
too frail, and his doubt and melancholy returned. Cowper collaborated with
Newton on a book of religious verse, eventually published as Olney Hymns
(1779).
In
1773 thoughts of marriage with Mary Unwin were ended by Cowper’s relapse into
near madness. When he recovered the following year, his religious fervour was
gone. Newton departed for London in 1780, and Cowper again turned to writing
poetry; Mrs. Unwin suggested the theme for “The Progress of Error,” six moral
satires. Other works, such as “Conversation” and “Retirement,” reflected his
comparative cheerfulness at this time.
Cowper
was friendly with Lady Austen, a widow living nearby, who told him a story that
he made into a ballad, “The Journey of John Gilpin,” which was sung all over
London after it was printed in 1783. She also playfully suggested that he write
about a sofa—an idea that grew into The Task. This long discursive poem,
written “to recommend rural ease and leisure,” was an immediate success on its
publication in 1785. Cowper then moved to Weston, a neighbouring village, and
began translating Homer. His health suffered under the strain, however, and
there were occasional periods of mental illness. His health continued to
deteriorate, and in 1795 he moved with Mary Unwin to live near a cousin in
Norfolk, finally settling at East Dereham. Mrs. Unwin, a permanent invalid
since 1792, died in December 1796, and Cowper sank into despair from which he
never emerged.
Career
After
education at Westminster School, Cowper was articled to Mr Chapman, solicitor,
of Ely Place, Holborn, to be trained for a career in law. During this time, he
spent his leisure at the home of his uncle Bob Cowper, where he fell in love
with his cousin Theodora, whom he wished to marry. But as James Croft, who in
1825 first published the poems Cowper addressed to Theodora, wrote, "her
father, from an idea that the union of persons so nearly related was improper,
refused to accede to the wishes of his daughter and nephew." This refusal
left Cowper distraught. He had his first severe attack of depression/mental
illness, referred to at the time as melancholy.[9]
In
1763 he was offered a Clerkship of Journals in the House of Lords, but broke
under the strain of the approaching examination; he experienced a worse period
of depression and insanity. At this time he tried three times to commit suicide
and was sent to Nathaniel Cotton's asylum at St Albans for recovery. His poem
beginning "Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portions" (sometimes
referred to as "Sapphics") was written in the aftermath of his
suicide attempt.
After
recovering, he settled at Huntingdon with a retired clergyman named Morley
Unwin and his wife Mary. Cowper grew to be on such good terms with the Unwin
family that he went to live in their house, and moved with them to Olney. There
he met curate John Newton, a former captain of slave ships who had devoted his
life to the Christian gospel. Not long afterwards, Morley Unwin was killed in a
fall from his horse; Cowper continued to live in the Unwin home and became
greatly attached to the widow Mary Unwin.
At
Olney, Newton invited Cowper to contribute to a hymnbook that he was compiling.
The resulting volume, known as Olney Hymns, was not published until 1779 but
includes hymns such as "Praise for the Fountain Opened" (beginning
"There is a fountain fill'd with blood")[10] and "Light Shining
out of Darkness" (beginning "God Moves in a Mysterious Way"),
which remain some of Cowper's most familiar verses. Several of Cowper's hymns,
as well as others originally published in the Olney Hymns, are today preserved
in the Sacred Harp, which also collects shape note songs.
In
1773, Cowper experienced an attack of insanity, imagining not only that he was
eternally condemned to hell, but that God was commanding him to make a
sacrifice of his own life. Mary Unwin took care of him with great devotion, and
after a year he began to recover. In 1779, after Newton had moved from Olney to
London, Cowper started to write poetry again. Mary Unwin, wanting to keep
Cowper's mind occupied, suggested that he write on the subject of The Progress
of Error. After writing a satire of this name, he wrote seven others. These poems
were collected and published in 1782 under the title Poems by William Cowper,
of the Inner Temple, Esq.
In
1781 Cowper met a sophisticated and charming widow named Lady Austen who
inspired new poetry. Cowper himself tells of the genesis of what some have
considered his most substantial work, The Task, in his
"Advertisement" to the original edition of 1785:
...a
lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and
gave him the SOFA for a subject. He obeyed; and, having much leisure, connected
another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his
situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, instead of the
trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair – a Volume!
In
the same volume Cowper also printed "The Diverting History of John
Gilpin", a notable piece of comic verse. G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy,
later credited the writing of "John Gilpin" with saving Cowper from
becoming completely insane.
Cowper
and Mary Unwin moved to Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire, in 1786, having
become close with his cousin Lady Harriett Hesketh (Theodora's sister). During
this period he started his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into blank
verse. His versions (published in 1791) were the most significant English
renderings of these epic poems since those of Alexander Pope earlier in the
century. Later critics have faulted Cowper's Homer for being too much in the
mould of John Milton.
In
1789 Cowper befriended a cousin, Dr John Johnson, a Norfolk clergyman, and in
1795 Cowper and Mary moved to Norfolk to be near him and his sister Catharine.
They originally stayed at North Tuddenham, then at Dunham Lodge near Swaffham
and then Mundesley before finally settling in East Dereham (all places in
Norfolk) with the Johnsons, after Mary Unwin became paralysed.
Mary
Unwin died in 1796, plunging Cowper into a gloom from which he never fully
recovered. He did continue to revise his Homer for a second edition of his
translation. Aside from writing the powerful and bleak poem "The
Castaway", he penned some English translations of Greek verse and
translated some of the Fables of John Gay into Latin.
Robert
Southey edited his writings in 15 volumes between 1835 and 1837. Cowper is also
considered one of the best letter writers in English, and some of his hymns,
such as “God Moves in a Mysterious Way” and “Oh! For a Closer Walk with God,”
have become part of the folk heritage of Protestant England. The Letters and
Prose Writings, in two volumes, edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp , was
published in 1979–80.
His
Poetical Career
William
Cowper (pronounced Cooper) was the foremost poet of the generation between
Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth. For several decades, he had probably the
largest readership of any English poet. From 1782, when his first major volume
appeared, to 1837, the year in which Robert Southey completed the monumental
Life and Works of Cowper, more than 100 editions of his poems were published in
Britain and almost 50 in America.
Cowper’s
immense popularity owed much to his advocacy of religious and humanitarian
ideals at a time of widespread Evangelical sentiment, manifest as much in the
moral zeal of the antislavery movement, which he fervently supported, as in the
tide of spiritual enthusiasm issuing directly from the great Revival. But his
importance goes far deeper. Echoing the opinion of many early reviewers, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge called him “the best modern poet;” and, though his practice
reflects in some ways a commitment to Neoclassical, or so-called Augustan,
precepts, his innovations in the treatment of nature and common life, in
meditative and conversational techniques, and in the foregrounding of
autobiography and confession constitute a crucial legacy to the first
generation of Romantics. His various achievements in satire,
didactic-descriptive verse, narrative, hymnody, and the lyric show an often
spectacular command of the potentialities of inherited forms, but the
distinctive force of his poetry derives above all from its expression of
complex psychological currents and concerns. Cowper’s melancholia, exile, and
fears of damnation—the sufferings of the “stricken deer”—are among the
best-known facts of literary biography: his writing is both their embodiment
and the site of their transcendence. As they are formulated within his works,
however, the trials and the triumphs of the self assume a significance beyond
any purely private context and beyond the tradition of Puritan soul-struggle
which influenced their shape. Viewed historically, they mark the rise of the
modern existentialist hero who must continuously create value and stability for
himself against a background of cultural dissolution and the threat of chaos
within. More generally, they have their counterparts in the subterranean lives
of all human beings.
Some
of Cowper’s happiest boyhood memories were of visits to his cousins in Norfolk,
and it was there that he acquired two books which predict a salient polarity in
his own future writing—the light moral verse of John Gay’s Fables (1727-1738)
and the Calvinistic vision of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-1684).
In 1742 he entered Westminster School, imbibing the classics, along with the
strong Whig principles for which the school was renowned. He befriended the
writers-to-be Robert Lloyd, Charles Churchill, George Colman the Elder, and
Vincent Bourne, whose animal fables he translated from the Latin at intervals
throughout his life. Intended for the law, he was enrolled in the Middle Temple
in 1748. Membership of the Inns of Court, however, was more a formality than a
training and, following the usual custom, Cowper took up articles under a
solicitor, Mr. Chapman of Greville Street, Holborn, with whom he remained from
1750 to 1753. Although he was called to the bar in 1754 and transferred
residence to the Inner Temple in 1757, the legal profession was one to which he
admitted he “was never much inclined.” The routine of Chapman’s office was
regularly exchanged for the pleasure of being “employed from Morning to Night
in giggling and making giggle” with his cousins Theadora and Harriot at the
house of his uncle, Ashley Cowper, in Southampton Row.
So
far Cowper’s poetic writing had been mostly talented adaptations of John
Milton, Abraham Cowley, and “Mat Prior’s easy jingle,” the best of them
exercises in the epistolary art of which he was always an instinctive master.
An ill-fated affair with Theadora, which began in 1752 and ended at her
father’s insistence in 1755, prompted his first substantial body of verse. In
this remarkable sequence of poems to “Delia,” which was withheld from
publication until 1825, Prior’s colloquial wit and the raffishness of the
Cavalier lyric are the starting point of a highly original chronicle of love, a
movement from compliment and playful self-observation to oneiric landscapes of
frustrated desire which introduce Cowper’s characteristic image of himself as
the object of a terrible doom, the outcast who “vainly strives to shun the
threat’ning death.” Ashley Cowper’s exact reasons for opposing the match are
not known. By all accounts Theadora never recovered from the broken romance.
Cowper, it seems, soon did, for the surviving letters of the seven years up to
1762 are amply spiced with the bravado of the man about town. The young
barrister found ready access to fashionable social and literary circles in the
metropolis, especially the Nonsense Club of former Westminster friends whose
members included Colman and Bonnell Thornton, editors of the Connoisseur, to
which he started to contribute satirical papers in 1756. The “several halfpenny
ballads” Cowper remembered writing at this time, dealing with current politics
from the Whig point of view, have been lost, together perhaps with much else of
a topical cast. The death of his friend Sir William Russell in 1757 gave rise
to the introspective elegy “Doom’d as I am in solitude to waste,” but the other
extant verse consists almost entirely of commissioned translations from
Horace’s Satires and Voltaire’s La Henriade (1728), published respectively in
1759 and 1762.
Events
took a dramatic turn in 1763. Family connections had already gained Cowper the
sinecure of commissioner of bankrupts; he now accepted from Ashley Cowper the
lucrative clerkship of the Journals in the House of Lords, but when his uncle’s
right of appointment was challenged by a rival faction, he found himself
summoned to undergo a test of suitability at the Bar of the House. The suicidal
derangement brought on by the prospect of this public ordeal drove him to
Nathaniel Cotton’s Collegium Insanorum at St. Albans, where he was gradually
restored and converted to Evangelicalism in 1764. He left St. Albans in June 1765
but lived thenceforth in retirement, at first on his own and then, from
November 1765, in the household of the Reverend Morley Unwin at Huntingdon.
After Unwin’s death from a riding accident in 1767 Cowper took up residence
with Unwin’s widow, Mary, and her daughter, moving with them to Orchard Side at
Olney in Buckinghamshire in February 1768. At Olney he came at once under the
influence of the Reverend John Newton, the one-time slave trader who was then a
prominent Evangelical of strictly Calvinist persuasion.
The
immediate upshot of these changed circumstances was the memoir which Cowper
completed for private circulation in 1767, a late and compelling example of the
Puritan conversion narrative in the manner of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the
Chief of Sinners (1666). Religion brought Cowper an outlet for his feelings and
a means of organizing them. His 67 contributions to the Olney Hymns, composed
chiefly from 1771 to 1772 as a collaboration with Newton, place him in the
first rank of English hymnodists. Many of these hymns, including “Oh for a
closer Walk with God,” “God moves in a mysterious way” and “Hark, my soul! it
is the Lord,” remain in regular congregational use. The set is distinguished by
a mastery of symbolism (the cross, the fountain, the lamb, the worm and the
thorn, the divine majesty) and the recognized stages of the ebb and flow of
faith, resourcefully cast in the chaste diction and lucid stanzaic form
pioneered by Isaac Watts but seasoned with an epigrammatic piquancy reminiscent
of John Donne and George Herbert. There is a dark underside to the hymns. The
weight of authenticity lies ultimately not with the “sweet bounty” of the
believer but with his conflicts, longings, and insecurity. “The Contrite
Heart,” for example, movingly realizes the state of being outside the company
of God’s elect:
Thy
saints are comforted I know
And
love thy house of pray’r;
I
therefore go where others go,
But
find no comfort there.
This
hymn was shortly to prove prophetic, for in January 1773 Cowper had a dream in
which he heard the words “Actum est de te, periisti” (It is all over with thee,
thou hast perished). “God moves in a mysterious way” had made magnificently
present the Calvinist God who is “his own Interpreter” and “will make it
plain"; but what He made plain to Cowper in this vision was that his soul
was eternally damned. Cowper continued to hold staunchly to his religious
beliefs, but he never again entered a church or said a prayer.
In
the nightmarish sapphics of 1774 entitled “Hatred and vengeance, my eternal
portion” Cowper conceives himself as one “Damn’d below Judas,” clearly
attributing his sentence to his having sometime committed what was considered
in Calvinist dogma to be the “unpardonable sin” of rejecting Christ. Thoughts
of an altogether different transgression, however, may have been a subconscious
factor in the obscure origins of the breakdown that had led to the dream of
damnation and, in the autumn of 1773, his fourth attempt at suicide. Worried
about the gossip that might arise after Miss Unwin’s expected departure from
the household at Orchard Side, Cowper’s friends had successfully urged him in
1772 to announce his betrothal to Mrs. Unwin—the woman whom, as Harriot Hesketh
affirmed, “he had always consider’d … as a Mother.” The engagement was broken
off by his illness, and the patient was placed under Newton’s care at the
vicarage. He nevertheless went back to Orchard Side when his health improved
during 1774, seeking diversion in carpentry, gardening, keeping animals,
drawing, and in time a return to poetry.
In
his blacker moods Cowper thought of Olney as a “sepulchre,” but it was also a
place of “blest seclusion from a jarring world,” a demi-paradise. His equally
ambivalent image of “the loop-holes of retreat” suggests not only immurement
but vantage point, and the shorter poems that began to flow from his pen in
1779 and 1780 were frequently alert, combative responses to great events in the
war with the Americans and their European allies, or else observant forays into
the ritual oddities of provincial life, such as the verse cartoon “The Yearly
Distress, or Tything Time at Stock.”
The
impetus to publication came from a curious contemporary source. The Reverend
Martin Madan was moved by his experiences at the Lock Hospital, an institution
for “fallen women,” to write a defense of polygamy as a remedy for the evils of
prostitution. Madan’s treatise, Thelyphthora, gave rise to bitter public debate
during which Cowper was persuaded by Newton to compose his own anonymous
rejoinder. Newton’s publisher, Joseph Johnson, agreed to bring out the poem of
more than 200 lines early in 1781. Anti-Thelyphthora, a mock-Spenserian
romance, shows Cowper learning to forge an adroit alliance between conflicting
demands upon his genius—religio-moral duty and a robust comic impulse.
It
was the skillful blend of profit and pleasure, along with the vigor of the
rhymed couplets, that most impressed the reviewers of the eight long essays
that formed the bulk of Cowper’s first independent volume, Poems by William Cowper,
of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). Edmund Cartwright in the Monthly Review, for
example, discovered in the volume a poet sui generis whose “very religion has a
smile that is arch, and his sallies of humour an air that is religious,” and
whose muscular, flexible versification set him apart from the pack of Pope’s
latter-day imitators who went “jingling along in uninterrupted unison."
Begun
late in 1780, this series of verse discourses, which became generally known by
readers as the “Moral Satires,” had been completed in October 1781. It
represents a comprehensive and hard-hitting proclamation of Evangelical
attitudes and doctrine. Cowper saw writing as a means of reclaiming an
enfeebled age. “Table Talk,” which is placed first in the volume, contains an
aggressive manifesto deploring the “whipt-cream” and “push-pin play” of
contemporary writing and pleading for a return to worthy purposes and the
standards of “genius, sense, and wit.” Like those expressed in the
correspondence, these principles align him with the late-Neoclassical school of
Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, and Samuel Johnson, which stressed the writer’s
legislative function, his responsibility to communicate clearly but with
imaginative and intellectual force on matters of general human concern. Cowper
shared with the poets of Sensibility—William Collins, Thomas Gray, and Joseph
and Thomas Warton—a sense of a laggard present; but whereas they sought to
exorcise the spirit of Neoclassicism by emulating the invention and fancy of
Greece, the Middle Ages, and the English Renaissance, he set himself the task
of purifying and redirecting the energies of Neoclassicism in the service of
God and the Christian ethos.
In
pursuing this project Cowper sometimes brings all tellurian art under scrutiny
as a potential source of error, or a devising “far too mean for him that rules
the skies.” Yet the art of the Moral Satires possesses its own kind of
assurance and versatility. The humorous vein that pleased Cartwright shows with
particular brilliance in the inimitable satiric portraiture. In Hours in a
Library (1879) Leslie Stephen designated Cowper “a thinker too far apart from
the great world to apply the lash effectually"; but detachment can seem a
definite advantage when compared to the unfocused, if fiery, stance of Cowper’s
former schoolfellow, the profligate parson Churchill, who, immersed in a welter
of metropolitan corruptness, flails out indiscriminately at everything in
sight. Cowper’s gaze is steady and trained on things of consequence, not only
the individual soul and man’s folly but the soul of a nation in crisis, torn by
the catastrophic course of the American war, the Gordon Riots, and the effects
of the armed neutrality of five European states:
Poor
England! thou art a devoted deer,
Beset
with ev’ry ill but that of fear.
The
nations hunt; all mark thee for a prey,
They
swarm around thee, and thou standst at bay.
Undaunted
still, though wearied and perplex’d. …
These
topical areas of the Moral Satires establish Cowper as at once journalist,
patriot, and a confirmed ideologist for whom style itself is an index of value.
Modern
readers, however, are likely to find most to engage them in the personal themes
found in the Moral Satires. There are points throughout where Cowper draws on
his own past, among them an objectification at the climax of “Hope” of his
former maniacal despair and conversion, in which he sees heightened perception
of the Creation as the primary manifestation of a new-found state of grace. His
present condition was far from the joyous assurance it describes;
contemporaneous letters insist that there is “no remedy” for the
“unprofitableness” of his life. Yet in identifying the appreciation of nature
as a sign and source of spiritual wellbeing he found a way forward both as poet
and as a man in search of an anchor for his feelings.
"Retirement,”
the last of the Moral Satires, registers a definite advance in confidence and
in the use of contemplation to bring stability to the individual’s own life.
Didacticism merges with the strategies of the poet assessing his situation and
its possibilities. Cowper makes himself the exemplar of the sincere, virtuous,
enlightened, and contented retiree of classical and recent tradition, “the
happy man” of Virgil’s Georgics. Offering his credentials to the world, he
transforms exile into a welcome calling of which the greatest privilege is
intercourse with the living organic reality of nature “in all the various
shapes she wears.” The detailed descriptions of that reality in “Retirement”
have a double yield, foreshadowing the richer fruits of his masterpiece, The
Task (1785). The harmonies of “forest where the deer securely roves” and the
minute perfection of “Muscle and nerve miraculously spun” tell of the Artificer
Divine as Cowper fulfills the anti-Deistic thrust of the Moral Satires by
arguing from the evidence of design in the universe to the existence of the
Christian God.
At
this time Cowper developed several significant friendships: with William Bull,
Independent minister of Newport Pagnell, whose encouragement led to Cowper’s
fine translations of the poems of the French Quietist Madame Guion (begun in
1782, published in 1801); with William Unwin, who replaced Newton as literary
go-between once Poems had been seen through the press; and, most importantly,
with Lady Austen, whom he met in 1781 just before she took up residence at
Olney vicarage. Relations between Cowper and Lady Austen, until Cowper broke
them off in 1784, were plagued by mutual irritation. She was domineering, he
was subject to his habitual difficulties over intimacy with the fair sex. In
1782 they quarreled bitterly when he rejected what he presumed was a veiled
proposal of romantic attachment and marriage. Yet of all his muses she was the
one who made the most difference. Her vivacity undoubtedly lay behind both the
freer creativity of “Retirement” and the inception of The Task in the autumn of
1783, and it was her idea for a narrative poem that inspired “The Diverting
History of John Gilpin,” which Cowper drafted during a single night in October
1782 and which was published anonymously soon after in the Public Advertiser.
Spectacularly
successful from the start ("hackney’d in ev’ry Magazine, in every News
paper and in every street,” as Cowper put it in 1785), the tale of citizen
Gilpin’s thwarted plans for a day out and his furious nonstop ride through an
amazed metropolis has appealed to successive generations as sheer farce and
inoffensive caricature, and may be read too as subtle parody of the genre of
the street ballad and of romance conventions. Yet this jeu d’esprit was written
in “the saddest mood,” and concentrates in its hero’s predicament a whole
cluster of the poet’s bleakest obsessions: the meaningless violence of the
world, the aloneness of being beyond self-help or the help of others, the
individual’s insecurity within a field of unaccountable force. John Calvin gave
rise to John Gilpin no less than to Cowper’s periodic reports from the “fleshly
tomb” where he was “buried above ground”; humor was not so much
lightheartedness as an antic exuberance performed on the very edge of horror.
Cowper’s
vision of the world and being-in-the-world found fullest expression in The
Task, which, originating in Lady Austen’s playful request for a blank-verse
poem on “the sofa,” grew over a period of 12 months into a magnum opus of six
books and around 5,000 lines. Poor sales of the 1782 volume of poems were of
little consequence to Cowper; the reviews had been encouraging, if mixed, and
this response, together with the popularity of “John Gilpin,” pushed him into
eager negotiations with Joseph Johnson for publication of a new volume. The
Task appeared in July 1785 to universal acclaim. In composing it Cowper had
behind him the example of Thomson’s The Seasons and other works in the
“georgic” tradition but evolved a wholly independent bent, texture, and range
of subject matter. He produced a large-scale investigation of Man, Nature, and
Society which was also the first extended autobiographical poem in English.
“God
made the country, and man made the town,” Cowper says in Book I, “The Sofa.”
The moral scheme of the work is at once apparent and is carried forward not
only in denunciations of “gain-devoted cities” but in more particularized
responses to such contemporary issues as the slave trade ("human nature’s
broadest, foulest blot"), the modishness of the Church and the
universities, and the weakness of a postwar government shamelessly winking at
what Cowper calls in Book II, “The Time Piece,” “the perfidy of France, / That
pick’d the jewel out of England’s crown.” Cowper is the conscience and monitor
of the age, tracing the faults of the England he loves to a general want of
those standards, grounded as much in the classical ideals of humanitas and
gravitas as in the Christian ethic, to which he customarily subscribes, and
speaking for many at a time of anxious soul-searching after the loss of empire.
The scope of its satiric and patriotic interests, alongside its explorations of
rural and domestic life , make The Task a truly national poem.
From
the beginning, however, the public aspects of the poem are interwoven with or
usurped by distinctly personal ones. Confessional passages like that on the
“stricken deer, that left the herd / Long since” in Book III, “The Garden,” are
the overt face of a process of self-revelation that persists elsewhere in
repeated image patterns and preoccupations involving such oppositions as
imprisonment and freedom, disease and health, chaos and order.
Books
III and IV, “The Winter Evening,” deal more particularly with the poet’s life
of retirement. The routine and objects of home and garden offer the occasion
for some of Cowper’s most adept exploitation of the disparity between high
style and ordinary subjects, that humorous magnification of Olney minutiae
which is one means by which he elevates and shares his experience with the
reader. He weaves from his materials both parables of how human beings should
function in the world and microcosmic visions of how the world should ideally
be. He does so in spite of a powerful awareness of an actual “civilization”
restructuring itself on the basis of advancing manufacture, consumerism, and
commercial enterprise, so that merchants “Incorporated … / Build factories with
blood” and the “Midas finger of the state” reaches even into the countryside,
making debauchery bleed gold for the exchequer. Unlike John Dyer in The Fleece
(1757), or sometimes Thomson (who, for example, celebrates “gay Drudgery”),
Cowper can reach no accommodation with industrialization and the other
accompaniments of an expansionist economic system reflecting the popular
doctrine, elaborated in Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714 and
1728), that “private vices” make “publick benefits”: he registers only a
perverse harmony of dehumanizing excess and a corrupt polity. Alienated from
the collective present, in a posture that emphatically signalizes the Romantic
and post-Romantic split between value and the practical sphere, he fashions in
his accounts of the innocent and fruitful pursuits of the sequestered man a
sustaining myth of optimal existence which revivifies all the traditional
motifs—friendship, books, cultivation of the mind—but stresses most the fertile
cooperation and “glad espousals” of Art and Nature.
In
Cowper’s garden skill and nature are seen in a perfectly balanced and creative
union that represents the apogee of man’s relationship with his environment, a
union operating in the work not only of the sensitive laborer but of the true
poet, who ultimately traces in his surroundings the model of a goodly social
order:
Few
self-supported flow’rs endure the wind
Uninjur’d,
but expect th’ upholding aid
Of
the smooth-shaven prop, and, neatly tied,
Are
wedded thus, like beauty to old age,
For
int’rest sake, the living to the dead.
Some
clothe the soil that feeds them, far diffus’d
And
lowly creeping, modest and yet fair,
Like
virtue …
All
hate the rank society of weeds,
Noisome,
and ever greedy to exhaust
Th’impov’rish’d
earth. …
Such
moments of visionary insight underline one of the major messages of the
poem—that imagination, which gives access to the ideal and the beautiful, is
superior to every other form of production. The task of the writer, which the
world might consider mere idleness, is presented in the end as the most
important “business” of all , for it keeps people alive to “wisdom” and the
best they may aim for.
Books
V, “The Winter Morning Walk,” and VI, “The Winter Walk at Noon,” move back from
a mythopoeic to a more contemplative register and bring to a climax Cowper’s
experiential and religio-philosophic interest in the natural world. One notable
feature is their buoyant expansion of the anti-Deist arguments of
“Retirement.” For Cowper, there is “A
soul in all things, and that soul is God”—the God of divine revelation rather
than mechanical causes. Yet he insists that this God is not only the end of
inspired perception but also its source ("Acquaint thyself with God, if
thou would’st taste / His works"), so that responsiveness to nature is
made more forcibly than ever the touch-stone of spiritual wholeness. The desire
to worship and the longing for grace are satisfied in the temple of the
universe, Cowper’s substitute church, but leave room still for humbler, yet
necessary, dispensations of harmony and repose:
The
roof, though moveable through all its length
As
the wind sways it, has yet well suffic’d,
And,
intercepting in their silent fall
The
frequent flakes, has kept a path for me …
The
redbreast warbles still, but is content
With
slender notes, and more than half suppress’d:
Pleas’d
with his solitude, and flitting light
From
spray to spray, where’er he rests he shakes
From
many a twig the pendent drops of ice.
Here
the poet’s double is the redbreast happy in his solitude and at home in a
closed recess of beauteous forms. Yet Cowper finds in meditation not only entry
to a private earthly paradise but a medium of enlightenment for all: in one of
the poem’s most influential statements he offers a philosophy elevating wise
passiveness, where “the heart” gives lessons to “the head,” above the “spells”
and “unprofitable mass” of intellectual knowledge and learning from books.
The
Task closes, however, in irresolution. Cowper’s enjoyment of a second Eden
fades before renewed thoughts of postlapsarian conflict and depravity. These
thoughts bring on a wishful prophecy of the Last Day, when all will be swept
away and the greater Paradise restored. But Cowper was no mystic: his heart is
not in the distant hope, and the reality pressed upon the reader in a final
return to the theme of the sequestered life is the struggle of the individual
to glean what consolation he can in the here and now of a fallen world. The
classical “happy man” and the Puritan introspective saint shade perceptibly
into the Romantic solitary, trying yet vulnerable, armed with the powers of
creation and self-creation but endlessly threatened by uncertainty and despair.
Cowper’s
own pride in The Task is summed up by his flourish in a letter of October 10,
1784 to William Unwin: “My descriptions are all from Nature. Not one of them second-handed.
My delineations of the heart are from my own experience. Not one of them
borrowed … In my numbers … I have imitated nobody.” The reviews, rising in
degrees of favorableness to the near-ecstasy of the contributor to the Monthly
Review (June 1786) who had “got on fairy ground,” read like expansions of these
claims, recommending Cowper for his depth of feeling, fluency, descriptive
realism, and the interest of his character. Coleridge later put this reaction
in a nutshell when emphasizing Cowper’s originality in uniting “natural
thoughts with natural diction” and “the heart with the head.”
Coleridge
must have been thinking mainly of the unprecedented use of blank verse as a
vehicle for the flow of consciousness, of Cowper as the progenitor of an “interior”
mode in which the poetry is a continual outgrowth of the mind. This inwardness
is an outstanding feature of Cowper’s influence, although subsequent criticism
tended to stress his more obvious contribution in furthering accurate
observation of the countryside. Moreover, he brought to humanity’s relationship
with nature a religious and philosophic dimension that proved central, in the
“natural faith” and “One Life” theory of Coleridge and Wordsworth, to the
Romantic quest for models of well-being and numinous design in a world rendered
potentially void of meaning by Newtonian science and John Locke’s mechanistic
psychology, which indicated particles of matter as the only reality and made
the objects of perception a mere illusion. The poem made the self, though cast
out to the periphery of an antipathetic society and inhabiting a small corner
of an infinite universe, not only an abiding center of attention in its own
right but the bastion of moral, spiritual, and aesthetic value. What the
concluding movement then brings into focus, however, is the less comforting
seam of the same post-Enlightenment subjectivity: the promise of ceaseless
mental struggle and incompleteness of which the closest analogue is the
existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(1812-1818).
His
major undertaking while The Task was at press was the translation of the Iliad,
begun toward the end of 1784. In The Task Cowper had unwittingly produced a
revolutionary work, and a whole poetry of nature and the private realm soon
flowed. Yet the task that exercised him most during his career was deliberately
conservative and painstakingly objective—the faithful rendering into his own
tongue of the harmony and energy of Homeric epic. The encounter with Homer lasted
on and off for the rest of Cowper’s life, first in the prolonged preparation of
The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer (1791) and afterwards in regular spates of
revision. It was in some ways a heroic enterprise: ambitious, scrupulous, and
driven by an unshakable antagonism toward Pope, whose standard version in rhyme
he had set out to supplant on the grounds that blank verse would do greater
justice to both the unaffected grandeur and the detail of the original. Though
Cowper loved Homer and wanted fame, his motivation was in part (like Pope’s
before him) undoubtedly financial. Publication of the Homer translation through
the old-fashioned subscription method earned him 1000 pounds and the copyright;
but it was a daunting affair. Even among his contemporaries the translation
achieved only a modicum of critical success. The basically literal approach
helped to ensure a readership for the work well into the 20th century; but as
Fuseli and others were quick to suggest, Cowper succumbed to the dullness nor
the awkwardness likely to arise from the use of Miltonic syntax. The opinion of
informed posterity finds neat expression in Matthew Arnold‘s view in On
Translating Homer (1861-1862) that “between Cowper and Homer … there is
interposed the mist of Cowper’s elaborate Miltonic manner, entirely alien to
the flowing rapidity of Homer.”
The
studied competence of the Homer stands in marked contrast to the sprightliness
of the vignettes on local events in the letters of the Olney years, such as the
elegant farce of the visit of the “kissing candidate” at election time or the
essais on the ballooning craze. In the spring of 1784 Cowper went to see a
balloon go up at neighboring Weston Underwood on the estate of the
Throckmortons, a distinguished Catholic family with whom Mrs. Unwin and he soon
became friends. At the Throckmortons’ invitation he rented the Lodge at Weston
Hall in November 1786. In an August 9, 1791 letter to James Hurdis, imitator of
The Task, Cowper was to describe how he had exchanged the life of a recluse at
Orchard Side for that of a comfortable celebrity at Weston, exposed to “all
manner of inroads” and “visited by all around.” Cultivated and pleasant
surroundings, however, could do nothing to prevent a fourth bout of extreme
depression from setting in during 1787 after the sudden death of William Unwin.
Mrs. Unwin herself cut the rope by which the poet once again tried to kill
himself.
It
was death in other quarters that gave Cowper his next chance to show a face to
the world. One day in November he received a visit from the clerk of the parish
of All Saints, Northampton, with a request for verses to affix to the
forthcoming Bill of Mortality (the annual public list and analysis of deaths in
the parish). He supplied stanzas in “the Mortuary stile” six times between 1787
and 1793, using such shrewd devices as the disconcertingly grotesque idea of a
predictive rather than retrospective Bill to bring a cutting edge to the
genre’s customary appeals for reformation, and recognition that no one can
escape the fatal, often unexpected hour: “No med’cine, though it often cure, /
Can always balk the tomb.”
Cowper
knew what a “sentence” was in more than one sense, and the aura of his private
desert places undoubtedly contributed to the vivification of functional
objectives in these poems, as it did also in the dramatic monologue of “The
Negro’s Complaint” and other lyrics commissioned in 1788 for the Committee for
the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which were widely circulated and served as an
effective guide to popular protest for Southey and later exponents of the
cause. Nearer home, the residue of the psychotic disturbance of 1787 explains
the return to nightmare at the heart of his uncanniest poem:
Just
then, by adverse fate impress’d,
A
dream disturb’d poor Bully’s rest:
In
sleep he seem’d to view
A
rat, fast-clinging to the cage,
And,
screaming at the sage presage,
Awoke
and found it true.
The
last decade of Cowper’s life began promisingly. There were attempts to get him
the laureateship left vacant by the death of Thomas Warton, the translation of
Homer was lodged with the publisher, and a surprise appearance by John Johnson,
the grandson of his uncle Roger Donne, put him in touch with his mother’s
family after a break of 27 years. Cowper felt an immediate bond with “wild boy
Johnson,” in whom he saw “a shred of my own mother,” and a few weeks into 1790
he received from his cousin, Anne Bodham, the portrait of his mother which, in
an atmosphere of spontaneous “trepidation of nerves and spirits,” inspired one
of the most unusual, and finest, poems of self-revelation in the language.
The
critic Hazlitt valued “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture out of Norfolk”
for its extraordinary pathos. But one is struck no less by the way Cowper’s
wide-awake intelligence refines and directs the unguarded feelings that emerge
as he looks back in intimate detail to the security of infancy and then to the
desolate bewilderment that descended when his mother died in his sixth year.
Where the Puritan autobiographers customarily traced in their past the
consoling patterns of a journey to salvation, Cowper here confirms, and faces
up to, a tragic destiny: the child wretchedly bereaved, “dupe of to-morrow” in
his disappointed hopes that his mother will return, is father of the man denied
all promise of reaching the heavenly shore, “always distress’d”:
Me
howling winds drive devious, tempest-toss’d,
Sails
ript, seams op’ning wide, and compass lost,
And
day by day some current’s thwarting force
Sets
me more distant from a prosp’rous course .
The
triumph of the poem is not only that of acceptance; for, building on the idea
of art being able to baffle time, he uses memory, the recovery of spots of
time, to bring solace in the present: “By contemplation’s help, not sought in
vain, / I seem t’have lived my childhood o’er again; / To have renewed the joys
that once were mine. …” In a finely balanced ending he keeps faith with the
“wings of fancy,” with wishes and the answering charms of illusion, while
admitting that they are only a provisional escape from harsh reality. “On the
Receipt of My Mother’s Picture” is related to 18th-century elegy but represents
a new species of reflective meditation, the dialogue of the mind with itself
commonly known as the “greater Romantic lyric.” It was published in 1798 and at
once entered the canon of essential English poetry.
The
rediscovery and mapping out of a lost past was a liberating experience for
Cowper. Another good chance came his way in 1791 when Joseph Johnson offered
him the editorship of the works of Milton in a major publishing venture for
which Fuseli was to design the engravings. This novel engagement, which Cowper
welcomed as adding the rank of “Critic” to his other accomplishments, had an
important offshoot in his friendship with William Hayley, who had agreed to
write a life of Milton for a rival de luxe edition. Hayley’s “handsome” and
“affectionate” approach to a potential competitor, and his subsequent loyalty,
are highlights of the later stages of Cowper’s life. It was largely through his
exertions that Cowper was granted a Crown pension in 1794 (an event made
possible by the fact that, despite his Whig sympathies, Cowper had always been
an outspoken monarchist); and it was in Hayley’s Life of Milton, published in
the same year, that Cowper’s translations of Milton’s Italian and Latin poems
first appeared. These pieces and some fragmentary annotation on Paradise Lost
(1667) and on Dr. Johnson’s Life of Milton (1779), however, were the only
elements of the Milton project ever to see the light of day. Enthusiasm had
soon given way to frustration as domestic anxieties began to impinge
mercilessly on Cowper’s labors. In late 1791 Mrs. Unwin had suffered a
paralytic stroke.
Mrs.
Unwin lingered through several further attacks until 1796. To the poet who had
undergone his own bouts of horrific stultification, the daily sight of his
helpmate’s living death must have seemed the cruelest visitation of all. “To
Mary,” written in 1793, is a marvelously poised and relentlessly painful love
poem, redeemed from sentimentality by cleaving to the hard facts of the
situation—Cowper’s dependence on Mary; her incapacity; her blindness; and her
“indistinct expressions”—and by the integrity of their artistic treatment:
Thy
needles, once a shining store,
For
my sake restless heretofore,
Now
rust disus’d, and shine no more,
My
Mary! …
But
well thou play’d’st the housewife’s part,
And
all thy threads with magic art
Have
wound themselves about this heart,
My
Mary!
Familiar
objects have become forceful symbols of a desolation Cowper cannot evade, but
which he can oppose by the magic of his own worthiest art, the sincere
affection that transforms atrophy into beauty, Mary’s lifeless hands into a
“richer store” than gold.
Cowper’s
imagination was more often gripped in these years, however, by the old
nightmare of worthlessness and damnation. He again saw himself being led to
execution, and he dreamed of his “everlasting martyrdom in fire.” Samuel
Teedon, the Olney schoolmaster to whom he sent his visions for analysis, has
gone down in biographical tradition as a sham who duped the ailing poet of his
money; but he brought some comfort as a confidant, even after Cowper came to
consider his promising notices from God about Mary’s health and his own
salvation to be a divine joke, the Almighty’s “deadliest arrows.” Less helpful
to Cowper’s condition was the dissension that broke out at Weston following his
return from a visit in 1792 to Hayley’s estate at Eartham in Sussex, where Mrs.
Unwin’s temporary improvement and the company of the painter George Romney and
other celebrities had put him in a better frame of mind. Lady Hesketh grew
increasingly antagonistic toward Mrs. Unwin. One gets the impression sometimes
of jealous dislike and sometimes of well-meaning but counterproductive concern
to prise Cowper free from an obvious burden. Whatever Harriot Hesketh’s motives
and hopes in taking personal charge of her cousin during 1793 and 1794, by 1795
there seemed little left to save: according to a June 19, 1795 letter from John
Johnson to Catharine Johnson, Cowper looked like “a Ghost”—“nothing but skin
and bone.”
It
was decided that Johnson should take Cowper and Mrs. Unwin into his care in
Norfolk. The three settled in 1796 at East Dereham. Mrs. Unwin’s death in
December had little effect on Cowper, for his health was already deteriorating
rapidly. He heard voices both night and day and suffered hallucinations,
recorded in Johnson’s diary, of drinking “rankest poison,” being “disjointed by
the Rack,” and being “taken up in his bed by strange women.” The only person
from whom he sought help was the housekeeper, Margaret Perowne, a middle-aged
woman who stationed herself in the corner of his bedroom.
At
intervals, however, another Cowper emerges from this eerie, claustrophobic
picture of introversion and inexorable decline. On leaving Weston he had
written a “farewell” to God “with a hand that is not permitted to tremble,” and
near Mundesley he had seen as an exact emblem of himself “a solitary pillar of
rock” awaiting the lashing of the storm. A conviction of uniqueness had always
run through his life and writings: “I am of a very singular temper, and very
unlike all the men I have ever conversed with,” he told Harriot Hesketh as
early as 1763. But there is something newly decisive and heroic in these later
self-projections. This is the Cowper who at last stood beyond both aid and
despair, who hugged his fate to him and drew stature expressly from it—the
lucid, unflinching Cowper of “The Castaway. ”
A
similar shift of sensibility can be seen in a hardening compulsion toward the
primitive, the oracular, and the demonic during this phase of Cowper’s career.
In “Yardley Oak,” written in 1791, he had brooded in cramped, angular Miltonic
verse on a terrible autonomous beauty and on the shattered oak as a form
companionate with his own monumental persistence and decay, but he had also
consented to the rationalizing constraints of a Christian view of nature and
human history. “Montes Glaciales,” composed immediately before “The Castaway”
in March 1799, has an entirely pagan landscape of wondrous “portents.” Godless
and forbidding, it is the obverse of the paradise of contemplative seclusion in
which he had once laid claim to spiritual ease and renovation. When he
recapitulates to Lady Hesketh in 1798 the “rapture” to be gained from
“delightful scenes” it is only to complain of a present “blindness” that makes
them “an universal blank"; the radiance of inspiration is past and gone,
“an almost forgotten dream.” Yet with the approach of death came not autistic
dereliction but power of a different order.
The
immediate trigger for “The Castaway” was a passage in George Anson’s Voyage
round the World (1748) recording the “unhappy fate” of a seaman swept overboard
in a violent storm. The opening personifications—“Obscurest night involv’d the
sky… ”—evoke a setting of actively hostile, conspiratorial forces. And
everything that happens to the protagonist in this grim universe is full of
incredible irony: his courage is admirable but futile, “supported by despair of
life”; his comrades try to help him but, “pitiless perforce,” must race away to
save themselves on the very wind that carries his cries for help toward them;
he understands their haste, yet “bitter felt it still to die / Deserted, and
his friends so nigh.” The mariner, by the greatest irony of all, is exhausted
through his own efforts to survive and voluntarily participates in the
preordained ritual of his destruction.
In
this uncompromising vision Cowper is clearly writing out of and reviewing his
own experience, his lasting strife in a world of rigid predestination. Yet the
poem is more a cathartic assertion of strength than a lament for helplessness
and suffering. When he comes to specify his interest in Anson’s bereft mariner
it is pleasure, not pain , that he stresses:
But
misery still delights to trace
Its
semblance in another’s case .
No
voice divine the storm allay’d,
No
light propitious shone;
When,
snatch’d from all effectual aid,
We
perish’d, each alone:
But
I beneath a rougher sea,
And
whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.
There
is no self-pity here, but rather equanimity and gain. Cowper’s “delight” is not
simply the commonplace consolation of finding a fellow in affliction: on the
contrary, he finally emphasizes “‘semblance” as difference, taking status from
the greater extremity of his lot in the “deeper gulphs” of inner turmoil. The
end of “The Castaway” is his most audacious act of writing the self uniquely
and positively into being.
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