Analysis
William Cowper’s poetic achievement is marked by a tension between subjectivity and objectivity, a tension that, at its best, produces a unique poetry defying easy classification as either neoclassical or Romantic. Cowper wrote poetry to preserve his sanity. It was a way to distract himself from the terrible brooding on the inevitability of his damnation, and even when his gloom made it impossible to focus on subjects other than his own condition, at least the very act of writing, the mechanical business of finding rhymes or maintaining meter, defused the self-destructive potential of the messages of despair that crowded his dreams and came to him in the whisperings of mysterious voices. Because the poetry was not only by Cowper but also for Cowper, it displays a subjectivity uncommon in the neoclassical tradition. Although Cowper had his own opinions about poetry and disliked the formal, elegant couplet structure that dominated the verse of his day, he was not completely a rebel. Objectivity, Horatian humor, sentimentality, respect for the classics, the very qualities that define neoclassicism are all present in Cowper’sverse. Unlike William Wordsworth, he never issued a manifesto to revolutionize poetry. Indeed, the levelheaded detachment of the Horatian persona, so popular with Cowper’s contemporaries, was a stance that he often tried to capture for the sake of his own mental stability. When Cowper manages a balance between the subjectivity that injects his own gentle humanity into a poem and the objectivity that allows universal significance, he is at his best.
“On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture Out of Norfolk”
One of Cowper’s most famous poems illustrates the poet at less than his best when he manages almost fully to withhold his own personality and allows convention to structure his message. “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture Out of Norfolk” was written in 1790, fifty-three years after his mother’s death and only ten years before his own. The poem avoids the theme of death and rather focuses on the mother with the only tool available to it: convention. The poem begins with a reference to the power of art to immortalize, a theme that might have supported some interesting content. The poet then introduces yet another worthy theme: “And while that face renews my filial grief,/ Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief”; while the art of the picture kindles an old grief, the art of the poem will provide the balm. Neither theme, however, survives beyond the first few lines of the poem. Instead, Cowper turns to the popular conventions of eighteenth century verse to produce a proper comment on a dead mother.
The verse form is the heroic couplet, the dominant form of the age. The diction is formal because the neoclassical notion of decorum—words appropriately matched to the subject matter—demanded formality in the respectful approach of a child to a parent. Ann Cowper, the poet’s mother, is unrecognizable in the poem; she has no individuality, no visual reality for the reader. Consistent with the neoclassical emphasis on the general and ideal rather than the particular and commonplace, Cowper creates a cloud of expected motherly virtues through which the face of Ann can be seen but dimly. Here it should be remembered, however, that the poet is reacting to a picture, an eighteenth century portrait, not to a tangible human being, and that portrait itself would have been an idealized representation reflective of the aesthetic principle voiced by Sir Joshua Reynolds: “The general idea constitutes real excellence. . . . Even in portraits, the grace, and, we may add, the likeness, consists more in taking the general...
(This entire section contains 3113 words.)
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air than in observing the exact similitude of feature.”
The poem, then, does accurately treat its subject if that subject is indeed the portrait. Still, the treatment is for the most part a catalog of hackneyed images—“sweet smiles” and “dear eyes”—mixed with a few images that need more than originality to save them, such as the extended simile that likens the mother to “a gallant bark from Albion’s coast” that “shoots into port at some well-havered isle,” a rather unflattering analogy if the reader attempts to use it to help visualize the mother. The overall sentimentality of the poem is also no departure from neoclassical convention. Sentimentalism in all literary genres had emerged as a popular reaction to the great emphasis placed on reason by so many eighteenth century thinkers. The universe, it was held, is logical and ordered, and all nature, including human nature, is ultimately understandable by the human ability to reason. Sentimentalism answered this by calling attention to emotions and feelings. Humanity is not merely rational; there are finer qualities beyond the power of logic to comprehend. At its best, sentiment could add an element of emotion to reason and make a work more reflective of the real human psyche. At its worst, sentiment drowned reality in maudlin fictions and saccharine absurdities. Cowper’s poem does not completely sink in the quagmire of sentimental syrup. It hangs on by the thread of an idea about the immortalizing power of art, a thread that is visible at the beginning and then again at the end but which for the greater part of the poem is lost in the swamp.
All this is not to say that “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture Out of Norfolk” is a bad poem. Indeed, it remains one of Cowper’s most frequently anthologized works. If it is conventional, it is still worth studying as a good example of several aspects of the neoclassical tradition unknown to readers who name the age after Alexander Pope or Samuel Johnson. Cowper, however, was capable of doing better. The problem with the mother poem was that rather than writing about his mother, he pretended to write about his own feelings and memories. The memories after so many years were probably dim, and he seems to have chosen to avoid an expression of his dark fears and utter isolation in favor of a conventional grieving son persona.
“The Castaway”
Cowper succeeds more fully when his reaction to a situation or event includes, but also goes beyond, the feelings most readers would experience when he injects enough of his purely subjective response to allow the reader to see a somewhat different but still believable dimension to what it is to be human. The loss of a mother is certainly an appropriate correlative to the emotions expressed in the poem. Moreover, the emotional response is certainly believable; it is not, however, unique. The loss of a seaman overboard during a storm is also an appropriate correlative to the emotions of the speaker in “The Castaway,” but here Cowper does more than simply respond to a situation.
The episode of the seaman swept overboard in a storm, an account of which Cowper had read in George Anson’s Voyage (1748) some years before writing the poem, is actually an extended metaphor for the poet’s own condition. Interestingly, the analogy between poet and sailor is only briefly pointed out at the very beginning and again at the end of the poem. The metaphor, the story of the sailor, is for the most part presented with curious objectivity. The facts of the tragedy are all there: the storm, the struggles of the seaman, the futile attempts at rescue. There is also a respectable measure of grief in the subdued tone of the speaker; the reader, however, could not be misled by this seeming objectivity. It is at once apparent that the poem is really about the tragic fate of the poet, but it is precisely in this tension between the objective and subjective that the poem says so much. The effect of the long metaphor in keeping the poet’s ego in the background is to illustrate that indeed the poet is an insignificant thing—a tiny, isolated being beyond the help of his fellows and the concern of his God. That curious objectivity is in fact the attitude of the universe toward Cowper. It does not seem to care, and it is not hostile. It has simply excluded Cowper from the scheme of things, a scheme that allows for the possibility of salvation for all humans.
The God in “The Castaway” seems strangely Deistic. He is unwilling to interfere with the predetermined operation of his universe, but unlike many of his contemporaries who viewed the universe with optimism, believing that if God was remote, at least the system that he set in motion was good, Cowper sees no goodness in his own portion. In “The Castaway,” Cowper can neither bless nor curse his fate, for any action would detract from the utter futility he wishes to convey. “The Castaway,” then, is highly subjective. The poet is in no way suggesting that the fate of the metaphorical sailor describes the universal human condition. Indeed, humanity is on board the ship, which survives the storm. Cowper is talking about himself, but the air of objectivity in the presentation stresses the futility and isolation he wishes to convey. In other words, the structure of the poem contributes greatly to its message. What is Cowper in the eyes of God? He is no more than the minimal first-person intrusion in the sixty-six lines that constitute “The Castaway.”
“The Poplar Field”
Cowper was a fine craftsperson in the structuring of poems. His collected works clearly show a fondness for experimentation, and as is to be expected, some of those experiments were more successful than others. An interesting example is “The Poplar Field,” a frequently anthologized lyric that deals with the fleeting glories of this world. Here, Cowper deliberately violates decorum and adopts a sprightly, heavily accented meter. The mere four feet to a line gallops the reader through musings on various reminders of mortality. The meter seems to mock the expected seriousness of the theme to produce a parody of melancholy landscape verse. The content of the poem consists, for the most part, of uninspired platitudes and clichés, but this is the necessary fodder for parody. A less generous reading might assert that parody is not an issue. The poem is rather a straightforward presentation of the joys of melancholy, the pleasures of the contemplative life. The meter is the vehicle for communicating the pleasure idea to the audience, and Cowper’s “The Poplar Field” is really a direct descendant of John Milton’s “L’Allegro.” If this is the case, the trite content cannot be justified as fuel for a satiric fire and must be held to be just that: trite content. Perhaps, then, “The Poplar Field” is of the same family as “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture Out of Norfolk”: Both poems suffer from the substitution of conventions for the presence of the real Cowper.
“The Diverting History of John Gilpin”
An experiment of unchallenged success is “The Diverting History of John Gilpin.” Structure is everything in this delightful ballad about the misadventures of a linen draper on his twenty-year delayed honeymoon. The lively meter and rhyming quatrains are ideally suited to the rollicking humor of the piece. Gilpin, a rather bombastic but totally good-natured hero, has his adventure told by a narrator who is himself satirized by the deceptively careless method of his composition. It soon becomes clear that the poem is everything and that the narrator will not be stopped or the rhythm broken by such concerns as taking time to find an appropriate figure rather than a silly one or even by running out of content to fill the quatrain: “So like an arrow swift he flew,/ Shot by an archer strong;/ So did he fly—which brings me to/ The middle of my song.” For Cowper, the poem lived up to its title; it seems to have diverted him indeed, for the reader familiar with Cowper’s voice will look in vain for a trace of the brooding author of “The Castaway.” However, beneath the funny story, the brilliant metrics, and the silly narrator, there is still the gentle poet who prefers to laugh with his characters rather than reduce them to the grotesque fools that populate so much of eighteenth century satire.
Despite the success of “The Diverting History of John Gilpin,” Cowper has never been considered a leading satirist of the age. Satire, especially in the popular Horatian mode, must have had its attractions for him. The detached, witty observer who by choice leaves the herd to remark on the foibles of humanity presented an ideal persona, but it was a stance that Cowper could seldom sustain. The satirist must appear objective; the folly must appear to be a genuine part of the target and not merely in the satirist’s perception of the target. Cowper could maintain that kind of objectivity only when there was really nothing at stake. Poking fun at the world of John Gilpin is harmless, for there is no suggestion that the world is real beyond the confines of the poem. When the subject is real, however, Cowper cannot stand aside. He lacks wit, in the neoclassical sense of the word. Wit consisted of the genius needed to conceive the raw material of art and the acquired good taste to know how to arrange bits of that material into a unified whole. Wit did not allow for the subjective intrusion of the author’s personal problems. Cowper’s genius was so intertwined with his special mental condition that he could not remain detached, and when he tried, his acquired skill could only arrange conventions, substitutes for his unique raw material. Moreover, Cowper lacked the satirist’s willingness to ridicule. He had nothing against humanity. The shipmates are guiltless in the tragedy of the castaway. Humanity, to be sure, has its delusions and vanities, but Cowper preferred the deflected blow to the sharp thrust.
The Task
The Task is Cowper’s major achievement, and it is the satiric Cowper who introduces the work. His friend, Lady Austin, had suggested a sofa as an appropriate topic for a poem in blank verse. Of course, such a subject could only be addressed satirically, and Cowper elected the conventional form of mock-heroic. Specifically, he alluded to The Aeneid with “I sing the sofa” and thereby suggested that a modern Vergil would be hard pressed to find in eighteenth century society a topic deserving heroic treatment. However, the sofa is more than simply a mean subject, it is a quite appropriate symbol for sloth and luxury, the very qualities responsible for society’s falling away from the truly heroic. Having called attention to the problem, there is little more for the sofa to do, except that it led Cowper to something worth saying, and he needed a structure less restrictive of his own involvement than the mock-heroic. So with a comment on how he prefers walks in the country to life on the sofa, Cowper shifts to an appreciation of nature theme and the I who had been the Vergilian persona of the satire suddenly becomes Cowper himself.
The Task is far too long a work for detailed analysis here. Its five thousand lines are divided into six parts: “The Sofa,” “The Time-Piece,” “The Garden,” “The Winter Evening,” “The Winter Morning Walk,” and “The Winter Walk at Noon.” The question of the overall unity of the work has probably attracted the greatest amount of critical attention. Cowper’s own comments about the poem indicate that he was not aiming at tight thematic development; rather, the ideas were naturally suggested by immediately preceding ideas with the whole moving along with the ease of an intelligent but unplanned conversation.
Cowper’s style, once the mock-heroic has been dropped, certainly suggests conversation. The diction is elegant but natural, quite different from the language of the other popular eighteenth century nature poet James Thomson, whose baroque language in The Seasons (1730, 1744) imitated the grand style of John Milton. Moreover, Cowper’s blank verse avoids the end-stopped lines used by Thomson, which detracted from the conversational effect by their epigrammatic regularity. The deceptively artless ease of the poem with its several scenes, frequent digressions, and inclusion of highly personal material might easily lead the reader to conclude that the poet is recording a stream of consciousness with no central purpose or theme in mind. In fact, The Task is concerned with the need and search for balance in nature and human life. The sofa itself suggests the theme, for if it represents the scale tipping toward excessive luxury, there must somewhere in the range of experience be an ideal condition against which such excesses can be recognized and measured.
The ultimate excess to which the sofa points is the city, London, which on a physical plane reveals squalor, corruption, and insanity; its spiritual reality is sin. The opposite side of the scale also has a spiritual and physical existence. Spiritually, this extreme is the untempered wrath of God, pure divine power; on the physical level, such power is reflected in disturbances in nature and the brutalism that is the alternative to civilization. The early books explore the extremes and present the rural countryside as perhaps the best balance. This balance is insecure, however, for intrusions of both natural and human turmoil bring constant disturbance. The latter parts of the poem demonstrate the futility of finding a secure position in the physical environment. For those who enjoy God’s grace, conversion can clarify the balance and bring freedom and order. The final book reveals God as the ultimate source of harmony. In his infinite kindness and infinite sternness, the Father judges all, and that judgment is perfection.
Among the landscape descriptions, character sketches, social criticism, and personal confessions, a unifying theme is perceptible if not obvious in The Task, and interestingly, it is the theme that best describes Cowper’s life and art, the quest for a place of stability, a point of balance. In his art, he experimented to find his own voice, and he found it between the extremes of objectivity, toward which most art of his age tended, and the subjectivity that would characterize the art of the next generation. In the task of his life, he sought the balance of sanity, a quiet place of his own between the stress of urban society and the horror of being utterly alone, a castaway in a sea of despair. Tragically, he could not occupy that stable middle ground for very long; but in his best poetry, he created a remarkable sanity and said still-important things in a way that cannot easily be pigeonholed as neoclassical or Romantic but is uniquely Cowper.