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WILLIAM COWPER
IV. William Cowper.
http://www.bartleby.com/221/0401.html
FEW rivers can be traced to a single
source. Water from a hundred fields and woods and springs trickles down, to
join in a score of streams, which, in their turn, join to make a river. Yet,
there is always a point at which it is just to declare any particular stream to
be the upper reach of any particular river. So, in the history of English
poetry, no single origin can be shown for the poetry of nature and simplicity
which, with Wordsworth, became a mighty river, and which is flowing still. To
mention but two poets, Gray and Collins poured their tribute of clear water
into the stream. But, with Cowper, we come to the upper reaches, and are able
to trace thence, with unbroken continuity, the course of the main stream.
Reformers
in poetry probably seldom work with a conscious aim, like social and political
reformers. A poet writes in a certain manner because that is the only way in
which he can write, or wishes to write, and without foreseeing or calculating
the effect of his work. This is especially true of Cowper, who owed more,
perhaps, than any English poet to what may be called accident, as distinguished
from poetic purpose. He did not, like Milton or Tennyson, dedicate himself to
poetry. He did not even write poetry primarily for the sake of writing poetry,
but to ward off melancholy by keeping his mind occupied. He liked Milton better
than Pope, and was careful to show this preference in his versification; but
accident—the bent of his mind and the circumstances of his life—made him the
forerunner of a great poetic revival. He drew poetry back to the simple truths
of ordinary human nature and the English countryside, because, in the limited
outlook on the world which his life allowed him, these were the things that
touched him and interested him. Being a man of fine taste, tender feelings and
a plain sincerity, he opened the road of truth for the nobler poetic pageants
that were to pass along it.
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§ 3. Olney
Hymns.
The collection entitled Olney Hymns was
published in London in 1779. Cowper’s contributions to the volume were
initialled “C.,” and among them occur several hymns still in use, together with
three or four which are among the best known of English hymns, to whatever
extent people may differ as to their morality. Oh for a closer walk with
God; There is a fountain filled with blood; Hark, my soul! it is the Lord;
Jesus! where’er thy people meet; God moves in a mysterious way—these are
among the hymns by Cowper in this collection. The salient quality of them all
is their sincerity and directness. The poet’s actual experiences in the
spiritual life are expressed with the simplicity generally
characteristic of his work. Their weakness is a
lack of profundity, and the absence of that suggestion of the infinite and the
awful, which, as in Crashaw or Newman, sometimes informs religious poetry less
carefully dogmatic than Cowper’s. His mind, indeed, was too precisely made up
on matters of doctrine to be fruitful either of lofty religious passion or of
religious mystery; and, instead of being great sacred poetry, his hymns are a
stay and comfort to souls experiencing what might be called the practical difficulties
of certain phases of spiritual life. Most of them are hopeful in tone; for,
though the book was not published till 1779, the hymns were written by Cowper
before 1773.
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§ 5. Lady Austen; The Task.
In
connection with the satire Retirement, the name of Lady Austen was
mentioned above. This charming and intelligent widow came into Cowper’s life in
the year 1781 and touched his spirits and his poetry to fine issues. Unlike
Mrs. Unwin, she belonged to the world and had a proper appreciation of the
external things of life. In suggesting to Cowper a subject for his pen, she
gave him not a moral topic but a simple object—the sofa in his room. The idea
was very likely thrown off without full prevision of its far-reaching effect;
but, in encouraging Cowper to write about something that he knew, in checking,
so far as might be, his tendency to moralise and to preach by fixing his
attention on the simple facts of his daily life, she gave him an impulse which
was what his own poetry, and English poetry at that moment, most needed. The
result of her suggestion was The Task, a blank-verse poem in six books,
of which The Sofa formed the first. Cowper starts playfully, with a
touch of the gallantry that was always his. He shows his humour by dealing with
the ordained subject in the style of Milton. Milton was his favourite poet;
Johnson’s life of Milton one of the writings he most disliked. Nevertheless,
with his gentle gaiety, he begins his work with a parody of Milton.
No want of timber
then was felt or feared
In Albion’s
happy isle. The lumber stood
Ponderous,
and fixed by its own massy weight.
But elbows
still were wanting; these, some say,
An alderman
of Cripplegate contrived,
And some
ascribe the invention to a priest
Burly and
big, and studious of his ease
Thus, for a
hundred lines or so, he plays with his subject. Then, breaking away from it by
an ingenious twist, he speaks for himself; and, for the first time, we have a
new voice, the voice of William Cowper:
For I have
loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy
swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep
And skirted
thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny
boughs; have loved the rural walk
O’er hills,
through valleys, and by rivers’ brink,
E’er since
a truant boy I passed my bounds
To enjoy a
ramble on the banks of Thames;
And still
remember, nor without regret
Of hours
that sorrow since has much endeared,
How oft, my
slice of pocket store consumed,
Still
hungering, penniless and far from home,
Still
hungering, penniless and far from home,
I fed on
scarlet hips and stony haws,
Or blushing
crabs, or berries that emboss
The
bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.
It is,
perhaps, difficult to realise nowadays how new such writing as this was when The
Task was published. Assuredly, these are not “raptures”
conjured
up
To serve
occasions of poetic pomp.
The truant
boy, his pocket store, the berries he ate—there is something in these which his
century might have called “low.” But the berries are exactly described; we feel
sure that the boy ate them. The poet who describes them was, himself, that boy;
and, looking back, he sees his boyhood through the intervening sorrow which we
know that he suffered. In every line, there is actuality and personality. The
diction is still a little Miltonic, for Cowper’s blank verse never moved far
from his master; but, all the preceding nature poetry might be searched in vain
for this note of simple truth—the record of actual experience which the poet
perceives to have poetic value and beauty. A little later, he addresses Mrs.
Unwin in a famous passage, beginning:
How oft
upon yon eminence our pace
Has
slackened to a pause, and we have borne
The
ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While
admiration feeding at the eye,
And still
unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Hitherto,
there had been nothing in English poetry quite like the passage that begins
with the lines here quoted. The nearest parallel is, probably, Collins’s Ode
to Evening, though that lovely poem wraps its subject in a glow of romance
which is absent from Cowper’s description. But, when Cowper wrote The Sofa,
he had never even heard of Collins. 2 He owed as little to Gray’s Elegy, where the scene is far
more “sentimentalised”; and nothing can deprive him of the title to
originality. Here is a very commonplace English landscape, minutely described.
The poet does nothing to lend it dignity or significance other than its own.
But he has seen for himself its beauty, and its interest; little details, like
the straightness of the furrow, the smallness of the distant ploughman, please
him. And, because he has himself derived pleasure and consolation from the
scene and its details, his poetry communicates that pleasure and that
consolation. Familiar scenes, simple things prove, in his lines, their
importance, their beauty and their healing influence on the soul of man. Nature
need not any longer be “dressed up” to win a place in poetry. And, if The
Task be the forerunner of Wordsworth, its manner of accepting facts as they
are, and at their own value, contains, also, the germ of something very unlike
Cowper, something that may be found in The Woods of Westermain.
The nature
poetry in The Task is, doubtless, of a humbler order than that of Tintern
Abbey or The Excursion, though, in many passages of simple
description, the similarity between Wordsworth and Cowper is striking. Cowper
would have been unable to compose the books of The Prelude: On Imagination
and Taste, how impaired and how restored. He would even have thought them
unchristian and reprehensible. Where the great soul of Wordsworth broods over
the world of sense, conscious of how it opens and affects the world of the
spirit, Cowper hardly even asks how it is that these loved scenes console and
enlarge the mind. He is not a philosopher, and he is not a mystic. For him, it
is enough that the things he sees are beautiful and dear; he does not ask for
anything more. But the nearness of his object, his familiarity with it and his
fine taste in expression result in poetry which, if not, in itself, great, is
wonderfully pure and sweet, and prepared the way for profounder work by others.
While his simplicity and exactness in description mark him off from all preceding
nature poets, even from Thomson, the spirit of his poetry differentiates him
equally from Crabbe, who, though even more minute and faithful in detail,
always regarded nature as a setting for the emotions of man. There are passages
in The Task which sound a nobler music than that quoted above. One is
the invocation to evening in The Winter Evening, beginning:
Come,
Evening, once again, season of peace;
Return,
sweet Evening, and continue long!
The earlier
part of this passage is very like Collins. The whole of it, in spite of certain
characteristic words—“ostentatious,” “modest”—is a little too fanciful and a
little too elaborate to be entirely in Cowper’s peculiar manner. He is most
himself when he is most closely concerned with the scenes and people that, in
his restricted life, he had come to know and love. The six books of The Task
(entitled The Sofa, The Timepiece, The Garden, The Winter Evening, The
Winter Morning Walk and The Winter Walk at Noon) contain many
passages of sympathetic description that have become classical. Such are the
lines on the “rural sounds” and those on hay-carting in The Sofa; the
man cutting hay from the stack, the woodman and his dog in The Winter
Morning Walk; the postman and the waggoner in The Winter Evening;
the fall of snow, in the same book. Each is the product of the poet’s own
observation; each helped to prove, in an age which needed the lesson, that
simplicity and truth have their place in poetry, and that commonplace things
are fit subjects for the poet. Cowper’s simplicity is not the simplicity of Lyrical
Ballads, any more than it is the glittering artifice of Pope. He is
Miltonic throughout; but he speaks with perfect sincerity, keeping “his eye on
the object.”
There are,
no doubt, stretches of didactic verse in The Task. That was almost
necessary to Cowper in a poem of this length. But it is more important to
observe how, in this poem, one quality, that has endeared Cowper to thousands
of readers and was by no means without its effect on public opinion, finds its chief
expression in his works. After concluding The Sofa with the famous and
beautiful passage beginning:
God made
the country, and man made the town;
he opens The
Time-piece with a cry for some refuge where the news of man’s oppression,
deceit and cruelty might never reach him. The love of man for man, the love of
man for animals, for the meanest thing that lives—this is the principal moral
message of The Task. Doubtless, this kind of “sentimentalism” was “in
the air,” at the time. It belonged, to some extent, to Cowper’s section of the
church; it was spread far and wide by Rousseau. Yet it was inborn in Cowper’s
tender, joyful nature—a nature that was playfully serene when free from its
tyrant melancholy; and Cowper remains the chief exponent of it in English
poetry.
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Despair was
to have him in the end. Mrs. Unwin sickened and died. The strain of attendance
upon her proved too much for Cowper’s mental and physical strength; and one of
the saddest stories in the world is that of Cowper at and after the death of
his heroic friend. Popularity, success, affection, royal favour (in the form of
a pension acquired for him partly by the eager, blundering pertinacity of his
friend, Hayley 3 )—nothing could relieve him. His last
original work was a powerful but ghastly poem called The Castaway. He
died on 25 April, 1800.
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Form:
ababcc
Composition
Date:
1799
1.
This, the last of Cowper's original poems, is
based on a passage in Anson's Voyage Round the World, 1740-44 (1748),
chapter VIII: "But in less than twenty-four hours we were attacked by
another storm still more furious than the former; for it proved a perfect
hurricane, and reduced us to the necessity of lying-to under bare poles ....
And as we dared not venture any sail abroad, we were obliged to make use of an
expedient, which answered our purpose: this was putting the helm a-weather, and
manning the foreshrouds. But though this method proved successful for the end
intended, yet in the execution of it, one of our ablest seamen was canted
overboard; and notwithstanding the prodigious agitation of the waves, we
perceived that he swam very strong, and it was with the utmost concern that we
found ourselves incapable of assisting him, and we the more grieved at his
unhappy fate, since we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and
conceived from the manner in which he swam, that he might continue sensible,
for a considerable time longer, of the horror attending his irretrievable
situation."
7-8.
Lord George Anson (1697-1762), commander of an
expedition against the Spanish ports in the Pacific, sailed around the world
1740-44.
60.
Cowper is quoted as saying (in 1773): "My
sin and judgment are alike peculiar. I am a castaway, deserted and
condemned." He was haunted by a conviction that he was predestined to
damnation.
61.
There is an allusion to the stilling of the
storm narrated in Matthew 8: 23-6.
