SOURCE: “Cowper's Olney Hymns,” in Essays and Studies, Vol. 38, 1985, pp. 45-65.

[In the following essay, Watson offers a close reading of Cowper's hymns.]

Cowper's share in the Olney Hymns of 1779 has received less attention than the remainder of his poetry. This is partly because of a prejudice against hymns, those ‘quatrains shovelled out four-square’ as Robert Lowell described them,¹ which led early critics such as Goldwin Smith into a brusque and sweeping dismissal (‘Cowper's Olney Hymns have not any serious value as poetry. Hymns rarely have.’²); and even if we reject this as unconsidered and intemperate, there is linked with it the suggestion that the composition of the hymns was a duty imposed upon Cowper by Newton rather than a poetic pleasure. ‘Cowper’, says David Cecil, ‘dutifully carried out his part of the bleak task.’³ A glance at the hymns which Cowper wrote should convince any fair-minded reader that their composition was anything but a bleak task: that it was rather a matter of joy, following the examples of Watts and Charles Wesley. But there remains the suggestion that the hymns are, somehow, not quite central to Cowper. So Patricia Meyer Spacks writes:

What is particularly striking about Cowper's hymns as compared with his other work is their essentially slight dependence on imagery: their strength derives almost entirely from the quality of their psychological insight, and their attempts to translate that insight into images are rarely and incompletely successful.⁴

Vincent Newey, on the other hand, sees the hymns as all too central. In his fine book, Cowper's Poetry, he sees the hymns as evidence that Cowper was fundamentally anxious, uncomfortable, helpless, imprisoned: ‘What his hymns most powerfully realize is not so much even a “struggle for faith”, but the struggles of a mind for which assured faith, and the repose that goes with it, are impossible.’⁵ Newey's main argument is that ‘Cowper's true convincing voice is to be found, almost without exception, in expressions of longing, uncertainty, desperation, weakness.’⁶ A corollary of this is that when Cowper tries to celebrate the joys of religion (as in ‘I will praise the Lord’, the last of his hymns in the collection) his emblematizing, in Newey's words, ‘could hardly be flatter’ and there is a consistent ‘inability to be inspired in the presence of the Saviour’.⁷

In this section, as elsewhere, Newey writes with great sensitivity: he sees the outward strength of the hymns, but also a spiritual unease that exists beneath, a certain doubt which adds complexity to the hymn form's undoubted robustness. Even ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ is seen as having its ironic undercurrents. The same pattern emerges from Donald Davie's comment on ‘Sometimes a light surprises’ in his Introduction to The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse:

‘Sometimes’—only sometimes, not always, not even very often! The ‘holy contemplation’ that is thereafter evoked, the sweet security, the unforced adoration—all this is distinctly not what any one, it seems, should expect to experience at all often, in church or out of it. It is not presented as the normal condition of the Believer … it is only sometimes, on one or two Sundays out of many, that ‘a light surprises’ and the words take on heartfelt meaning, ‘while he sings’.⁸

We can see a modern portrait developing here, that of a tentative, hesitant, half-believer; it is part of the way in which, quite naturally, we seek to remake Cowper in our own image. Newey, for instance, would like us to see the hymns in the context of Cowper's other work, and of the ‘psycho-drama’ of confinement which makes Cowper so close in spirit to our own. And, as an extreme example, Erik Routley has said that ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ was ‘written by a man conquered by despair’.⁹

It is not difficult to see how this idea came into being. It began with Samuel Greatheed's discussion of the nervous collapse of 1773 in his memorial sermon for Cowper:

Our departed friend conceived some presentiment of this sad reverse as it drew near; and during a solitary walk in the fields, he composed a hymn, which is so appropriate to our subject, and so expressive of the faith and hope which he retained so long as he possessed himself. …¹⁰

The presentiment, the solitary walker, the imminent breakdown, all suggest a figure with whom we have become familiar: Cowper as the unfortunate, muddled, bullied Christian, the victim of too much Newton and too much Calvinistic evangelicalism. And yet the Olney Hymns do not suggest this (nor do the letters of the same period, from 1767 to 1773). They suggest a figure who has found, however precariously, some kind of assurance; a figure who is quite different from the angst-ridden unstable soul of the Cowper myths.

In the face of such complex disagreements and contrary impressions, there seems room for an examination of the hymns themselves. I take as a point of departure the remarks of Bill Hutchings, in his chapter on the Olney Hymns in The Poetry of William Cowper. Hutchings introduces a further complication by seeing the hymns as stepping stones to the real poetry, successful but only a ‘limited form of success’.¹¹ He also argues that:

As soon as a writer uses words other than those taken exactly from sanctified material, he is committing himself to solving all the problems of achieving an effective organization of those words. For the development of the hymn, this means that, as soon as he deviates from the exact language of the psalmist, the hymnographer becomes a poet.¹²

I propose to look carefully at Cowper's ‘effective organisation’ of word, image, rhythm, and structure, regarding the Olney Hymns not as psycho-drama but as poetry. This is a very different approach from that of Spacks or Newey, who find the strength of the hymns in their psychological insight and rendering of experience; I prefer to suggest that the power of Cowper's hymnody lies not so much in what it says as in the way in which it says it. The psychological insight is commonplace, the heritage of all convertites and believers; but the expression is the unique property of Cowper's own poetic instinct as it engages with the evangelical experience. That evangelical experience cannot be left out, of course, because it is always necessary to remember that Cowper was writing as an eighteenth-century evangelical and not as a proto-existentialist. Some of the qualities of the hymns are owing to the influence of prose writers, poets, and hymnographers, Bunyan, Herbert, Milton, Watts, the classics of a religious and evangelical library. For once the word ‘intertextuality’ seems appropriate, for their presence is pervasive as well as conscious, second only to the Bible where, as Cowper wrote in ‘The Light and Glory of the Word’, ‘A glory gilds the sacred page, / Majestic like the sun’. And yet, I shall argue, the result is not just conditioned by the mode of expression, not just an eighteenth-century set of paraphrases and versified experience; it is also a poetry of a high order, in which the words have a life and energy in relation to one another that is profoundly moving and effective.

As a first example we may take Routley's hymn of a despairing man, ‘God moves in a mysterious way’. If we look at this without reference to Greatheed's memorial sermon, it is clear that it is not a hymn of despair at all, but one of assurance, of faith in the promises of God. Its title ‘Light shining out of darkness’ is a reference to John 1:5, but also to numerous other occurrences of light-darkness imagery in the Old Testament (Isaiah 9:2, 60:1) and the New Testament (2 Peter 1:19; 1 Peter 2:19). It is, therefore, a common Biblical image for the working of God in redemption; and yet the hymn begins with the most astonishing line:

God moves in a mysterious way,(13)

which gathers into itself an entirely different set of attributes. How, and in what sense, does God ‘move’? If he does move in anything like the usual human sense, he does so ‘in a mysterious way’, in a manner that is un-knowable to human sense. One way of saying this is that he plants his footsteps in the sea (where, of course, they cannot be seen) and rides upon the storm. But ‘God moves’ also carries the sense that he ‘makes moves’, he acts, carries out his purposes, has a strategy like a chess player who makes moves. He does so in a way which is unfathomable, mysterious, like a chess player whose moves are so clever and purposeful that his opponent cannot discover them. The first line beautifully articulates these impressions: from ‘God moves’, apparently so straightforward and simple, monosyllabic, the reader is led to the polysyllabic word ‘mysterious’, which lengthens out the line with its stress on the second syllable. The effect of ‘mysterious’ is to complicate wonderfully the first ‘God moves’, producing a resonance which echoes through the remaining verses of the hymn. Not only are God's movements or actions unknowable; they are also ‘mysterious’ in another sense. The meaning now is that of a secret practice, some highly technical operation in a trade or art which is therefore designated a mystery. It is this sense which leads Cowper into the bright imagery of the second verse:

Deep in unfathomable mines
          Of never failing skill;
He treasures up his bright designs,
          And works his sovereign will.

From the swift-moving God of the first verse, planting his footsteps in the sea and riding on the storm, we turn to a God who is deep within the earth, working like a craftsman or artificer at his ‘bright designs’ which shine through the darkness of the mine (light shining out of darkness in a more localized form).

Beyond this meaning of ‘mystery’ is a further meaning, from the later Christian Greek μυsτήριον, which was often rendered as ‘sacrament’, that is the ultimate mystery of God himself, the mystical presence of God, the truth so sacred that, like the Eleusinian mysteries, it is profoundly secret and holy. ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ thus becomes a movement in a sacred and holy manner, one which is unapproachable, except that its fundamental and mysterious truth is that of mercy, God in redemption:

Ye fearful saints fresh courage take,
          The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
          In blessings on your head.

Sea: storm: mines: clouds: the great mystery of God's purposes (his ‘movements’) is unfolded in the imagery which the poet uses. Each image explores a different aspect of the mysterious and holy God, and it is the imagery which carries the developing meanings through which the word ‘mysterious’ is differently defined. Cowper's own note to verse 6 line 1 gives a reference to John 13:7:

Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.

This underlines further the kind of mystery that Cowper is concerned to tease out: he is aware of the loving purposes of God, but he knows also that these are often difficult for human beings to understand. Peter's amazed question, ‘Lord, dost thou wash my feet?’ is an emblematic moment, typical of the partial sight of human beings; they are taken in by appearances, which often belie the reality. So Cowper can use a word such as ‘behind’ in verse 4:

Behind a frowning providence,
          He hides a smiling face.

The image is that of a mask, with God as a fatherly figure behind it. The mask has a frown on it, but behind is a benevolent and smiling face, which may be revealed at any time (at the end of the game, so to speak). Similarly the words ‘ripen’ and ‘unfolding’ in verse 5 suggest the image which emerges beautifully in the second two lines of the verse (the movement of the verse enacting the emerging):

The bud may have a bitter taste,
          But sweet will be the flow’r.

In the original version (‘But wait, to Smell the flower’), Cowper has his own fun with the rhythm of the lines, forcing the reader to pause, to play the poet's game: the colloquial, homely force of ‘wait’ and ‘smell’ are part of this playfulness, which is lost in the refining of the 1779 printed version. In the manuscript, the sudden stop is part of the sheer delight of this hymn, signalled by the exuberance of its imagery, and by the incongruity (in a pleasing, Metaphysical Poetry sense) of treating the relationship between mankind and Almighty God as, at times, a game with a benevolent father.

The images, the ‘big’ clouds, the frowning providence, the bitter-tasting bud, are part of this play, because they all hold the promise of the future. Indeed Cowper introduces them in order to give himself room to predict better things, and the future tense is vitally important in this hymn. The clouds ‘shall break’; the purposes ‘will ripen’; and, above all, God the interpreter ‘will make it plain’. The last line of the hymn triumphantly governs the first: the mysteriousness of God's ways will be made clear in the fullness of time. Cowper is echoing Genesis 40:8—‘Do not interpretations belong to God?’—but also the New Testament assurance that we shall know God: ‘now I know in part’, writes St Paul, ‘but then I shall know even as also I am known’ (1 Corinthians 13:12).

The imagery conducts the meaning: it supplies emblems of the power and majesty of God, and the inability of human beings to comprehend his ways. The natural posture before such a God is one of humility, awe, and fear (‘ye fearful Saints’), but Cowper acknowledges this only to exhort the faithful to courage. For Cowper (of all people) to be exhorting the fearful Saints to take courage is a feature of the hymn which must not be ignored: the hymn has too frequently been interpreted as an expression of fragility because of the clouds, the frowning providence, and the bitter-tasting bud. But Cowper is introducing these things in order to re-assert the fundamental greatness and benevolence of God; beneath the exhortation there is a quiet confidence, which is felt in the hymn through its rhythms. There are two ways in which this is done, and they complement each other nicely. The first is the steady progression through the four-line verses, so that the sense is amplified throughout and is only complete at the end of the verse:

Deep in unfathomable Mines,
          Of never failing Skill,
He treasures up his bright designs,
          And works his Sovereign Will.

This assured and gentle forward movement is delightfully varied by the surprise which Cowper contrives to introduce from time to time. The most obvious example is ‘wait, to Smell the flower’ which has been already mentioned; but consider the beautiful pauses, the exquisite use of line endings in

The clouds ye so much dread
          Are big with Mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Here the expectations are delicately and delightfully contradicted: the clouds are … big, but big with Mercy, and they will break … In blessings. The hymn abounds in such fine turns of meaning, and it is only because it is so familiar that we do not notice its originality and charm; until finally, the ending eschews surprise in favour of something more simple and decorous:

God is his own Interpreter
          And he will make it plain.

The straightforward simplicity of the last line is a fitting conclusion to a hymn which has investigated a labyrinth of images and ideas. Now Cowper envisages a time in which all will be revealed, in which concealment, confusion, and ignorance will have been dispelled in the serene light of Heaven (there is even perhaps a reminiscence of ‘the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain’, from Isaiah 40:4).

It may be attractive to twentieth-century agnostics to see this hymn as one in which Cowper is at breaking-point, but such an interpretation does not fit the poem as we have it. Nevertheless, Cowper is very good at longing, uncertainty, and even desperation; what I wish to argue is that this must be seen within the context of the doctrine of penitence and forgiveness, and that it is not, in itself, evidence of a failure of faith or of trust.

Spacks gives an example of Cowper's apparent weakness when she quotes ‘The Contrite Heart’:

The Lord will happiness divine
          On contrite hearts bestow:
Then tell me, gracious God, is mine
          A contrite heart, or no?

The hymn is a particularly clear example of Cowper's seeming fragility of belief, expressed with humility and candour:

I sometimes think myself inclin’d
          To love thee, if I could;
But often feel another mind,
          Averse to all that’s good.
Thy saints are comforted I know,
          And love thy house of pray’r;
I therefore go where others go,
          But find no comfort there.

If we link such verses with Cowper's insanity, the combination suggests a convincing picture of a man under pressure, struggling for repose, desperately searching for faith, and finally driven insane by the evangelical insistence on the conviction of salvation. As a theory this may well fit Cowper himself: nobody knows how much damage the evangelicals did to him, or how much their repellent doctrines upset an already precarious balance. But it does not fit the Olney Hymns. Even ‘The Contrite Heart’ has at its centre the comforting thought that God will save those of a broken heart and be near those of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:18). Cowper is here producing something very difficult indeed, a hymn of true confession: he has to do so in such terms that he cannot possibly be accused of spiritual pride in his own humility. Very properly, he confesses his own failure to hear the word of God, his lack of love towards God, his weak desires, his feeble worship: above all, perhaps, he does not know whether his heart is broken or not. If he could be sure that he had a contrite heart, he would be able to rejoice, but he cannot:

Oh make this heart rejoice, or ache;
          Decide this doubt for me;
And if it be not broken, break,
          And heal it, if it be.

The prayer is staggering in its bravery. This final stanza has been described as ‘Donnean’ by Spacks,¹⁴ and certainly it has a most effective call to God to ‘batter’ the poet's heart. The bold alliterative patterns, ‘decide … doubt … broken … break’, help to increase the tension because they lead up to the violent word ‘break’. Even the release of tension in the last line is somehow productive of more tension, because it is the tension of uncertainty that is emphasized in the final phrase. But that uncertainty is creative, because there are two ways out: to be broken, and to be healed. Cowper has anticipated the kind of penitential uncertainty which is expressed in T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday, the uncertainty which is a part of humility and which prevents confession becoming one more kind of self-satisfying religious experience.

Cowper was powerfully aware of how easily humility can become pride:

My God! how perfect are thy ways!
          But mine polluted are;
Sin twines itself about my praise,
          And slides into my pray’r.

(‘Jehovah our Righteousness’)

The serpent image of twining and sliding is neatly controlled, as so many of Cowper's are. Here he faces the baffling problem of pride which enters everywhere, even into praise. Like many others, Marvell and Bunyan among them, Cowper finds this an intractable problem, and sometimes comes to a dead stop:

How shall I secure my peace,
And make the Lord my friend?

The lines come from ‘The Heart Healed and Changed by Mercy’, one of Cowper's most Herbert-like poems. In it sin and fears are embodied and active:

Sin enslav’d me many years,
          And led me bound and blind;
Till at length a thousand fears
          Came swarming o’er my mind.

He has the help of others, but this proves ineffective; so does the reliance on the law. Cowper is echoing Romans 3 and Galatians 3, and his stabbing simplicities are very close to Herbert in feeling, tone, and rhythm:

Friends and ministers said much
                    The gospel to enforce;
But my blindness still was such,
                    I chose a legal course:
Much I fasted, watch’d and strove,
Scarce would shew my face abroad,
Fear’d, almost, to speak or move,
                    A stranger still to God.

The final verse relates how the poet falls at God's feet, and then is broken in spirit—but broken by love, not fear:

Then my stubborn heart he broke,
And subdu’d me to his sway;
By a simple word he spoke,
‘Thy sins are done away.’

The result is an evangelical equivalent of Herbert's ‘The Collar’, with the same pattern of struggle followed by a concluding and surprising simplicity. Cowper lacks the sinewy wit of Herbert, the power that comes from compression, but his poem is equally honest in excluding spiritual pride. Cowper has an unerring eye for falsity in religion, not only in his own praise and prayer, but also in the lives of others:

The Lord receives his highest praise,
From humble minds and hearts sincere;
While all the loud professor says,
Offends the righteous Judge's ear.

(‘A Living and a Dead Faith’)

He is severe upon hypocrites (in ‘True and False Comforts’), and upon Antinomians:

Thy Book displays a gracious Light,
          That can the Blind restore,
But These are dazzled by the Sight,
          And Blinded still the more.

(‘Abuse of the gospel’)

He is also severe upon the exultation of newly-converted Christians. Like Bunyan, he knew that conversion was only the beginning, and in ‘The New Convert’ he writes of ‘The new-born child of gospel grace’, using the image of the babe-in-arms to denote the infant in a spiritual sense:

No fears he feels, he sees no foes,
No conflict yet his faith employs, …

Cowper's tone is that of a battle-hardened warrior addressing a new recruit:

When Gideon arm’d his num’rous host,
The Lord soon made his numbers less;
And said, lest Israel vainly boast,
‘My arm procur’d me this success.’
Thus will he bring our spirits down,
And draw our ebbing comforts low;
That sav’d by grace, but not our own,
We may not claim the praise we owe.

The point about such hymns as ‘The New Convert’ and ‘Abuse of the gospel’ is their confidence: Cowper not only has the ability to instruct others in what is true or false, but he also has the strength to expect suffering. He has the courage to see it as part of the necessary process of human and spiritual life: without the slightest trace of cant, he knows that the Christian life is a struggle, and without the slightest trace of pride, he feels its sorrow. It is found, for example, in ‘Walking with God’, a poem which sees Mrs Unwin's illness of 1767 as demanding Cowper's surrender to the will of God. Only if he agrees to tear the dearest Idol (Mrs Unwin) from his heart will he find a purer light ‘That leads me to the Lamb’.

It is this extreme level of intensity which lies behind a dramatic hymn such as ‘Hark my soul! it is the Lord’. It is headed by a demanding text, ‘Lovest thou me?’, from St John's Gospel (21:16), where Jesus speaks these words to Peter. To the evangelicals, the betrayal of Peter, followed by Christ's forgiveness and the command ‘Feed my sheep’, was a favourite example of God's mercy and trust. Cowper turns the poem into a daring monologue, in which Jesus speaks quietly but insistently to every sinner. The hymn is an intricate interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament images, but its chief poetic skill is in the control which is exercised over these by rhythm and rhyme. Cowper uses the AABB rhyme to set up echoes and contrasts; he divides the lines into half-lines to create a pause followed by a continuation, which gives the impression of gentle pursuit and insistent questioning. The first verse sets the pattern:

Hark! my soul! it is the Lord;
’Tis thy Saviour, hear his word;
Jesus speaks, and speaks to thee;
‘Say, poor sinner, lov’st thou me?’

The first line suggests the Fall (‘And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day’, Genesis 3:8), but the second balances this with the redemption: ‘’Tis thy Saviour’. The heavy caesura of the first line creates the expectation of a similar caesura in the second, and this gives an important emphasis to the word ‘Saviour’.

Three points of impact occur before the heavy pauses, on ‘soul’, ‘Lord’, and ‘Saviour’, followed by the subsidiary ‘word’. This is, of course, Jesus's speech, the word of God, the word as in Holy Scripture itself, but also perhaps a reminder of the word made flesh, Jesus as λόγοs. The connection between ‘Lord’ and ‘word’ is reinforced by the tight rhyme-scheme, which sets up expectation and counter-expectation: the first line suggests the judgement, the second reminds the reader of mercy. Similarly, the second couplet identifies the central opposition between ‘thee’ and ‘me’, human and divine. At other times, Cowper varies the pattern, giving us in verse 2 ‘bound/wound’ and ‘right/light’, where the first two lines balance the second two, again continuing the pattern of Fall and Redemption. Verse 4 contains another variation:

Mine is an unchanging love,
Higher than the heights above;
Deeper than the depths beneath,
Free and faithful, strong as death.

Love/above, beneath/death: the combination is spectacular and inclusive. The rhymes suggest an opposition between love, which is above, and death, which is beneath; and yet the strong middle lines make it clear that above and beneath are connected, and through that connection there is also the outer link between love and death. Death, the great changer, is faced by love, the unchanging, and love is as strong as death. Similarly the final verse works across a single, sharp contrast between ‘complaint/faint’ and ‘adore/more’.

The hymn thus works in a variety of one-two patterns: its other chief delight is the delicate patterns of repetition, beginning with the chiasmus

Hark, my soul, it is the Lord;
’Tis thy Saviour, hear his word;

the repetition of ‘Hark … hear’ is taken up in the next line, ‘Jesus speaks, and speaks to thee’. Now the caesura allows a statement, a pause, and then an amplification, acting out the insistence of the still small voice through its rhythms and placing within the lines. So in the second verse we find:

I deliver’d thee when bound,
And, when wounded, heal’d thy wound;
Sought thee wand’ring, set thee right,
Turn’d thy darkness into light.’

The two middle lines continue the pattern of repetition, ‘wounded … wound’, ‘Sought thee … set thee’; outside them are the opposites, deliverance and bondage, darkness and light. Repetition and opposition combine in this hymn: the voice that speaks, and speaks again, tells of tremendous oppositions, of sin and love, of forgetting and remembering, of depth and height, of human love that is weak and faint and divine love that is free and faithful. The alliterative pattern of the last pair is taken up in the next verse:

Thou shalt see my glory soon,
When the work of grace is done;

glory … grace: the alliteration encompasses the two great attributes of Almighty God who is both judge and Saviour. As Isaac Watts had written:

How shall affrighted mortals dare
To show thy glory and thy grace?

(‘God is a name my soul adores’, Horae Lyricae, 1706)

Glory and grace are a pair here, but a pair which allows Watts to signify in their relationship the whole Christian doctrine of God as majestic creator and God as redeemer. Cowper also works in repetitions and pairings, and the last verses contain both. In the penultimate verse there is the contrast between the two nouns, ‘Partner’ and ‘sinner’:

Partner of my throne shalt be,
Say, poor sinner, lov’st thou me?

This is followed by the final verse, where the final repetition of ‘love thee … love thee’ takes up the rhetorical pattern for the last time:

Lord, it is my chief complaint,
That my love is weak and faint
Yet I love thee and adore,
Oh for grace to love thee more!

As so often in Cowper, the control masks an amazing distance: in this case between the first line and the last. The first line sounds as though the writer has a grievance, and indeed one of the surprises of the verse is the turn between the first and second line, when the grievance becomes a self-accusation: thereafter the thrice-repeated ‘love’ marks a series of steps upward from a weak and faint love, to an adoration, and then to a possibility of grace in which that love can become more.

In addition to this consummate art of pause, rhyme, opposition, and repetition, it should be noted that the hymn is an intricate tissue of Old Testament and New Testament images. This is found throughout Cowper's hymnody. His typographical mind takes an Old Testament text and re-interprets it, giving it life and meaning in the process. In ‘Old-Testament Gospel’, for instance, he describes how

Israel in ancient days,
Not only had a view
Of Sinai in a blaze,
But learn’d the gospel too:
The types and figures were a glass
In which they saw the Saviour's face.

He uses texts from Leviticus in this hymn, applying them to the emblems of salvation through Jesus Christ; the same process is subtly applied in ‘Jehovah-Rophi, I am the Lord that healeth thee’. The text-title comes from Exodus 15:26, but Cowper gives it a New Testament centre:

Heal us, Emmanuel, here we are,
          Waiting to feel thy touch;

By using ‘Emmanuel’, God with us, the name given to Jesus by the prophet and fulfilled at his birth as told by St Matthew (1:23), Cowper makes it clear that the Jehovah-healer is now Jesus, whose garment was touched in the crowd by the woman who had an issue of blood (Mark 5:25-34).

The most unusual instance of Cowper's Old Testament and New Testament imagery is ‘Praise for the fountain open’d’, which has a text from Zechariah 13:1 but which again begins with Emmanuel:

There is a fountain fill’d with blood
          Drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
And sinners, plung’d beneath that flood,
          Loose all their guilty stains.

This is an extraordinary example of the way in which Cowper's confident use of words affects his presentation of the gospel. It is deliberately shocking, and it has predictably aroused strong emotions. Hutchings gives two examples, Hugh I’Anson Fausset (who complains of ‘the barbarous concomitants of sacrifical suffering inflicted by the God of Evangelicalism’) and the parsonical Routley, who calls the first stanza ‘crude’ but then adds ‘the reality is crude’:

Sin is not polite or polished, and the measures which God took for its redemption were not, in earthly terms, fit for fastidious minds to contemplate.¹⁵

Hutchings, who rightly suggests that neither of these comments is of much help, points out that the first verse has a place in the structure of the hymn as a whole, and that the fourth verse is crucial:

E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream
          Thy flowing wounds supply:
Redeeming love has been my theme,
          And shall be till I die.

This marks the beautiful transition from the contemplation of the fountain of blood to the fountains of water, for the hymn is based not only upon Zechariah's vision of the fountain but also upon Isaiah 1:18 (‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow’) and Revelation 7:13-17, where those in white robes ‘have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’:

For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.

As so often in these hymns, Cowper is handling gigantic contrasts, and the shock of the first line is calculated and necessary. It is the same treading on the edge of decorum that is found in Herbert's ‘The Agonie’:

                                                            all his hair
          His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

Herbert links this brilliantly with the wine of the Holy Communion; Cowper uses blood as an emblem of salvation:

Dear dying Lamb, thy precious blood
          Shall never lose its pow’r;
Till all the ransom’d church of God
          Be sav’d, to sin no more.

The first three words are still shocking: the Lamb is the Lamb of Revelation 7, but it is still dying, as if the reader were watching it losing the last of its blood. As we notice this, we become aware of the contrast between present participles and past participles in the hymn: the Lamb is dying, the wounds are flowing, the love is redeeming; opposed to this is the fountain filled, the blood drawn, the sinners plunged, the church ransomed. It can be seen that there is a complex interaction between active and passive, God and man, between the Lamb who dies and redeems and the sinners who are plunged. Plunged by whom?—by the same Lamb who prepares the golden harp, the ‘blood-bought free reward’:

’Tis strung, and tun’d, for endless years,
          And form’d by pow’r divine;
To sound, in God the Father's ears,
          No other name but thine.

The harp, like the player, is made good by God; from a beginning in blood, we move to an end in music. All the human being can do is to wash his sins at the fountain (verse 2) and sing in paradise; the rest (in T. S. Eliot's words) ‘is not our business.’¹⁶

The subtle organization of this hymn is characteristic of Cowper's art. The same control is found in the hymns about Divine Providence, such as ‘Wisdom’ with its lovely 7.6.7.6.D. rhythm, or ‘Joy and Peace in Believing’, the hymn so rightly admired by Donald Davie:

Sometimes a light surprizes
          The christian while he sings;
It is the Lord who rises
          With healing in his wings:
When comforts are declining,
          He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining
          To cheer it after rain.

The power of this verse is in the feminine rhymes—surprizes/rises, declining/shining; the second word lifts the first, and this is also enacted in the sound pattern, when the high ‘i’ sounds of ‘Sometimes a light surprizes’ fall on the heavy syllable of the iambic foot, pushing the voice upwards as in a musical phrase.

The images in the first verse are principally to do with light and sunshine, and they articulate most beautifully the sense of ‘inner weather’ that Cowper is describing in the second part of the verse. The rhyme words declining/again, shining/rain are again particularly important: the ‘shining … after rain’ is notably skilful, for it gives the end of the verse a visual weather image to act as an emblem for the idea of God as comforter and provider. The words ‘healing’, ‘season’, and ‘clear’ are all associated with this, and they act as a counterpoint to the ‘n’ sounds of the rhymes. Into this Constable-like landscape of sunshine and rain (Constable was a great admirer of Cowper) the biblical references and religious themes slip with unobtrusive skill. In the season of clear shining, the mind turns naturally to thankfulness:

In holy contemplation,
          We sweetly then pursue
The theme of God's salvation,
          And find it ever new: …

The biblical imagery takes its place in the verse structure with the maximum of control and the minimum of fuss. Cowper has been declaring that the Christian can have confidence, whatever the morrow may bring (Matthew 6:34):

It can bring with it nothing
          But he will bear us thro’;
Who gives the lilies clothing
          Will clothe his people too:
Beneath the spreading heavens,
          No creature but is fed;
And he who feeds the ravens,
          Will give his children bread.

The appeal of this verse is not in its sense (difficult to believe in times of famine) but in the simple neatness of the paraphrase. It is, as Cowper promised, ‘sweetly’ pursuing its theme: Matthew 6:25-32 is abbreviated, without losing its meaning, and fitted into the verse form without a flicker of strain or hesitation.

Cowper can be controlled and purposeful, or exuberant and extravagant; in either case he seems to know exactly the effect he wishes to produce. As a final example of extravagances (Spacks's word) there is the last of Cowper's hymns in the collection, ‘I will praise the Lord at all times’. Spacks is severe on this hymn, saying that the extravagances ‘are imperfectly controlled, and likely to alienate rather than to attract the reader’;¹⁷ Newey too finds it ‘merely a set of logical “religious” equations.’¹⁸ It is worth quoting in full:

Winter has a joy for me,
While the Saviour's charms I read,
Lowly, meek, from blemish free,
In the snow-drop's pensive head.
Spring returns, and brings along
Life-invigorating suns:
Hark! the turtle's plaintive song,
Seems to speak his dying grones!
Summer has a thousand charms,
All expressive of his worth;
’Tis his sun that lights and warms,
His the air that cools the earth.
What! has autumn left to say
Nothing, of a Saviour's grace?
Yes, the beams of milder day
Tell me of his smiling face.
Light appears with early dawn;
While the sun makes haste to rise,
See his bleeding beauties, drawn
On the blushes of the skies.
Ev’ning, with a silent pace,
Slowly moving in the west,
Shews an emblem of his grace,
Points to an eternal rest.

The reason for quoting this hymn in full is that its effect depends principally on its pace, and on its inclusiveness. Its pace is unhurried, its images succeeding one another in a regular procession; its inclusiveness takes into account all times and seasons, indeed all life, and moves inexorably towards the final word ‘rest’. The hymn comes to rest at that point: the various times of year, morning and evening, all give way at last to the final end of time and season, in the eternal rest which is given by God's grace.

The appropriate decorum is new, and different. Here it can be seen that Cowper delicately structures the hymn from image to image: he does not wish to do more than point to emblems, season by season—the snowdrop, the turtle's song, the summer sun and the summer breeze, the gentler breath of autumn. Each of these celebrates a quality of the Saviour: his beauty, his sufferings, his power, and his love. Each does so in the same unhurried regularity of the seven-syllable line, which lulls the reader into an acceptance of what seem predictable and traditional attributes. The very simplicity of the concepts is a virtue: the reader's mind does not need to engage in elaborate imaginative manoeuvres to grasp the points as they are made. Then, into this lulling series of similitudes, comes the surprising fifth verse, with its likening of the red dawn to the bleeding beauties of Christ. It is suddenly daring, yet delivered with the same apparent reasonableness as the other comparisons; this forces us to take it more seriously than we might have done, to view it as an amazing attempt to see Christ everywhere, and the world as transfigured by his bleeding beauties, the suffering and redeeming love of the cross. The poem throws up this astonishing verse, and then appropriately returns to its earlier mode. Having seen the vision of the brilliant morning, it now moves slowly to the vision of rest; it is repeating, in its form and imagery, the process of the nunc dimittis—‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.’

I have chosen to conclude with this hymn because it has been criticized (even by Spacks and Newey, who are generally sympathetic to Cowper), and because I believe it to be more beautiful and effective than has hitherto been recognized. The same goes for the others: I have tried to show that they are controlled by a subtle and sympathetic poetic intelligence, which relates word to line, image to image, line to verse, rhyme to rhyme, with a considerable conscious and intuitive skill. Truly the hymnographer has become poet.

Notes

1. Robert Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’.

2. Goldwin Smith, Cowper (London, 1902), p. 42.

3. David Cecil, The Stricken Deer (London, 1929), p. 141.

4. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Poetry of Vision (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 165. See also Lowick Hartley, ‘The Worm and the Thorn: A Study of Cowper's Olney Hymns’, The Journal of Religion, XXIX (1949), pp. 220-9, and Maurice J. Quinlan, ‘Cowper's Imagery’, JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], XLVII (1948), pp. 276-85.

5. Vincent Newey, Cowper's Poetry (Liverpool, 1982), p. 287. I am greatly indebted to Mr Newey for reading a draft of this essay, and for making many valuable suggestions.

6. Ibid., p. 287.

7. Ibid., p. 296.

8. Donald Davie, ed., The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford, 1981), p. xxv.

9. Erik Routley, I’ll Praise My Maker (London, 1951), p. 109.

10. Quoted in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford, 1980), I.484.

11. Bill Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper (London, 1982), p. 45.

12. Ibid., p. 22.

13. All quotations are from the 1779 edition of Olney Hymns.

14. Spacks, The Poetry of Vision, p. 167.

15. Routley, I’ll Praise My Maker, p. 95.

16. T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, section II.

17. Spacks, The Poetry of Vision, p. 169.

18. Newey, Cowper's Poetry, p. 297.