SOURCE: “Solitude and Society,” in In Search of Stability: The Poetry of William Cowper, Bookman Associates, 1960, pp. 28-54.

[In the following essay, Golden explores the symbolism in Cowper's poetry in an attempt to uncover the poet's attitudes about himself.]

Cowper has been pictured variously as a friendly little man eager to proclaim his brotherhood with men, beasts, and insects; as a morose recluse, hating men and the world; as a psychotic hovering on the edge of terror at all times; as a frigidly aloof specimen of the breed that produced Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century gentleman. He is in part all of these, and I should like to examine his attitude toward himself in relation to the rest of the world in an attempt to discover whether any one category encloses him most, whether he is a shaky synthesis of all, or whether he is something else completely. Besides his comments on his own situation, it is worth looking at the images and structures of his poems, for these may give unconscious expression of certain basic attitudes that he does not wish to make overt.

The general tone of his letters, the eagerness with which he accepted new correspondents if he was assured of their good will, his 31-year attachment to the unexceptionable Mrs. Unwin, his delight in discovering as close friends first William Unwin, then Lady Austen, then the Throckmortons, then his cousin Lady Hesketh, then Hayley and John Johnson, as well as a number of clergymen in and around Olney and Weston, are all substantiated by his poem “Friendship,” by a few minor poems, and by a great many references to his need of friends. In one of his earliest extant letters (1762), he wrote to his old school-fellow Clotworthy Rowley, “Upon the whole, my dear Rowley, there is a degree of poverty that has no disgrace belonging to it; that degree of it, I mean, in which a man enjoys clean linen and good company; and if I never sink below this degree of it, I care not if I never rise above it” (Correspondence, I, 19). His fondness for society, limited to a few similarly disposed people, is further evidenced in a revealing passage in “Retirement”:

… solitude, however some may rave,
Seeming a sanctuary, proves a grave,
A sepulchre in which the living lie. …

(735-7)

The “stricken deer” retreats from the world, as Mr. Gilbert Thomas reminds us,¹ not alone but “with few associates” (“Garden,” 117). In Cowper's greenhouse, flowers from many lands “form one social shade” (“Garden,” 586); developing an associative connection later in The Task, Cowper says that

Man in society is like a flow’r
Blown in its native bed: ’tis there alone
His faculties, expanded in full bloom,
Shine out. …

(“Winter Evening,” 659-62)

Sympathy among men causes all man's delights, for “’Tis woven in the world's great plan,” and those who do not sympathize with others are “sullen elves” (“To Miss Macartney”). Friendship, he advises in his poem of that name, must involve decent and polite manners as well as such more elevated requisites as honesty, sincerity, compatibility, and so on. A lonely cottage, described in the “Sofa,” is a fine place to visit, but Cowper would not want to live there—it lacks civilized conveniences and is too far from the society of other humans.

In “The Garden,” he deals generally with the problem of self and society, and among other things points out that he is a brother of all men and therefore is disturbed by man's folly. One of the reasons that he was drawn to young Unwin, he wrote in 1765, was that Unwin, “having nothing in his heart that makes it necessary for him to keep it barred and bolted, opens it to the perusal even of a stranger” (Correspondence, I, 45). More than other people, Cowper wrote in 1766, he himself needed the sympathetic concern of others: “My circumstances are rather particular, such as call upon my friends, those, I mean, who are truly such, to take some little notice of me, and will naturally make those who are not such in sincerity rather shy of doing it. To this, I impute the silence of many with regard to me, who, before the affliction that befel me, were ready enough to converse with me” (Correspondence, I, 60). Very soon after this letter, a correspondent asked whether there was any social intercourse in heaven, and Cowper answered that “reason seems to require it so peremptorily, that a society without social intercourse seems to be a solecism and a contradiction in terms. …” (Correspondence, I, 73). Society, the society of sober friends, he sees pre-eminently as a civilizing influence: in the country,

Such friends prevent what else would soon succeed,
A temper rustic as the life we lead,
And keep the polish of the manners clean,
As their’s who bustle in the busiest scene. …

(“Retirement,” 731-4)

It becomes apparent, I think, that to Cowper heaven was the essence of civilization; the fervors and ecstasies of his faith, though he shared them for a short space after his conversion in 1764, seem essentially alien to his temperament, as many critics and biographers have pointed out. In a fairly late echo of the requirements of breeding in friendship, he wrote in 1788 of a new Vicar of Olney: “He is a man with whom, when I can converse at all, I can converse on terms perfectly agreeable to myself; who does not distress me with forms, nor yet disgust me by the neglect of them; whose manners are easy and natural, and his observations always sensible” (Correspondence, III, 275-6). Addison himself could not have put it less evangelically.

Here, then, are the members of Cowper's ideal society: a chosen few friends, with similar interests (as he developed, this included primarily evangelicalism or at least a serious concern with religion), sympathizing warmly with each other's sorrows and joys, and contriving to pour out their hearts to each other and at the same time to maintain the reserves of good breeding and avoid causing embarrassment. There is a touch of aloofness still about this ideal, though the warmheartedness predominates; and in his retreat from anything approaching undue familiarity or lack of proper cultivation in his poem “Conversation,” we can see that this state requires a very delicate sense of balance. Furthermore, Cowper sees the ideal of friendship as subsumed under the greater ideal of a cultivated religion—a subtle, though important, step from the Augustans, whose larger goal was a cultivated morality.

Since he so evidently needed proper company and properly solicitous friends, his mental illness exaggerated to him the solitude in which everyone inevitably finds himself. For him more than for most people, the mind and soul were a battlefield, and he alternately bemoaned the impossibility of help from others and its lack. He was alone with God (or was it the Devil? he could never resolve the question), whom he feared far too much for equanimity and whom, after a few years of the ecstatic joy of the convert, he suspected of trickery. It was a solitude made more fearful by his steady brooding over God's huge power, manifest most conspicuously in the excesses of nature (storms, wildernesses, tidal waves) that form so substantial a part of his imagery from the beginning of his writing to its culmination in “The Castaway.” These internal dangers, the dangers of the battlefield, he twice develops: of nervous fevers like his own, he wrote in 1776, “Other distempers only batter the walls; but they creep silently into the citadel, and put the garrison to the sword” (Correspondence, I, 139); “Interior mischiefs must be grappled with. There is no flight from them” (Correspondence, II, 257). In an early verse letter to his friend Robert Lloyd he had described the fierce banditti that attacked his brain insidiously and kept him confused. And later in his solitude, particularly at night in his sleeping and sleepless moments, in critical times of major decisions, divine or infernal voices threatened him with horrible punishments.

An evil effect of this conviction of being singled out was Cowper's corollary conviction of being isolated from society. Several times, he writes that he is not an inhabitant of this world, and he sometimes adds that he consequently has no interest in it. In the “Winter Morning Walk” he beholds the stars

As one who long detain’d on foreign shores
Pants to return. …

(832-3)

That this is a fairly conventional idea for a religious person is not to the point; many other religious people do not have it, and some that do are not so constantly aware of it. In Huntingdon, though he in time made friends, particularly of the Unwins, he was conscious of being suspected, ever so subtly, even by them. He had arranged for William Unwin to visit his cousin Maria Cowper, he wrote, partly because

You know I am a Stranger here; all such are suspected characters, unless they bring their Credentials with them. To this moment I believe it is a matter of Speculation in the Place, whence I came, and to whom I belong. My story is of such a Nature that I cannot satisfy this Curiosity by relating it, and to be close and reserved as I am obliged to be, is in a manner to plead guilty to any Charge their Jealousy may bring against me.²

He is a poor horseman, he writes: “What nature expressly designed me for I have never been able to conjecture; I seem to myself so universally disqualified for the common and customary occupations and amusements of mankind” (Correspondence, I, 314). More specifically, he writes in 1782 on his strangeness: “Reminded as I am continually, and always knowing it to be true, that I am a foreigner to the system I inhabit, I cannot, if I would, deceive myself into an opinion that I have any real interest in anything here” (Correspondence, I, 451). This image reveals an attitude essentially the same as that in a letter of two years later: “Had I dropped from the moon into this system eleven years ago, the concerns of a world to which I did not naturally belong would not have engaged me much; and just as little engaged I feel myself under a persuasion which nothing has yet shaken, that I am an extra-mundane character with reference to this globe of yours; and that, though not a native of the moon, I was not, however, made of the dust of this planet” (Correspondence, II, 172-3). Similarly, though with a significant variation, he writes in 1786: “It has pleased God that I should, like Joseph, be put into a well; and because there are no Midianites in the way to deliver me, therefore my friends are coming down into the well to see me” (Correspondence, III, 3). One of his last letters, of 1795, complains that “I have been tossed like a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me” (Correspondence, IV, 494-5). His isolation is, in some moods completely and in others at least partly, that of a being unlike any others in this world (consequently, of one whose relations to its inhabitants cannot be as warm as his social ideal demands). A famous short poem, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity” (1763), much quoted by commentators on Cowper, most terribly conveys this feeling:

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever hungry mouths all
                                                                                          Bolted against me.
Him [Abiram] the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
                                                                                          Buried above ground.

In one of Cowper's visions of his fate during his final illness, this theme became agonizingly specific; according to Mr. Quinlan, John Johnson's letters show that Cowper's “most constant dream was that a group of bailiffs or soldiers were about to seize him and lead him off to a public execution.”³

Elsewhere, Cowper sees himself as more normally isolated. In an early poem “On the Death of Sir W. Russell” (1757), before Cowper's second and permanently affecting attack of melancholy, he wrote:

See me—ere yet my destin’d course half done,
Cast forth a wand’rer on a wild unknown!
See me neglected on the world's rude coast,
Each dear companion of my voyage lost!

“The Valediction” (1783), on his abandonment by his now-important old friends Thurlow and Colman, complains that though friendship may be professed,

The heart of man …
… summon’d to partake a fellow's woe,
Starts from its office like a broken bow.

(67-70)

Most to the point here is, of course, “The Castaway.” In it, what Mr. Fausset has perceptively seen as Cowper's terrible “detached self-possession,”⁴ his ability to watch reasonably and realistically the irrational nature of his own preoccupations, intensifies the horror of Cowper's position. The friends on the ship do their best—subject, of course, to the limitation that they cannot endanger themselves. The poem strikes deep, it seems to me, because it affirms, with chilling politeness, the awful truth that every man is for himself, and that no man can help himself.

As a foreigner and as one abandoned, Cowper has no interest in politics: “It is truly a matter in which I am so little interested, that were it not that it sometimes serves me for a theme, when I can find no other, I should never mention it” (Correspondence, II, 224). Longevity, similarly and necessarily, forces the thought of isolation on Cowper: “We must all leave, or be left; and it is the circumstance of all others that makes long life the least desirable, that others go while we stay,—till at last we find ourselves alone, like a tree on a hill-top” (Correspondence, III, 395). This passage, like the next, is important in an understanding of Cowper's conception of his relation to the world, suggesting (as almost always, unhappily) an identification of himself with something above the ordinary course of existence. In one of his last letters, he wrote to Lady Hesketh: “At two miles distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high water-mark. I have visited it twice, and have found it an emblem of myself. Torn from my natural connections, I stand alone and expect the storm that shall displace me” (Correspondence, IV, 490).

Inevitably, one who considers himself singled out from mankind, whether for good or ill, must necessarily see himself symbolically in a position above it, or at least distinct from it. Goldsmith in The Traveller, for example, places himself on a mountain top, where he suffers the disadvantage of loneliness and enjoys the advantage of superiority to mankind; Churchill, Cowper's old schoolfellow, steadily and smugly projects himself above his fellow man in his poems, delighting in the superiority and the dangers of the eminence. But while Cowper, when appraising his position consciously, speaks with humility and denigrates himself, he very often portrays figures reaching above the crowd, and usually their position is unhappy.

Comparing himself to great poets, he writes that they are like nightingales, and

The nightingale may claim the topmost bough,
While the poor grasshopper must chirp below:
Like him, unnotic’d, I, and such as I,
Spread little wings, and rather skip than fly;
Perch’d on the meagre produce of the land,
An ell or two of prospect we command;
But never peep beyond the thorny bound,
Or oaken fence, that hems the paddoc round.

(“Table Talk,” 576-83)

Writing in 1765, after setting up his home in Huntingdon, his first great move from London, he says: “For my own part, who am but as a Thames wherry, in a world full of tempest and commotion, I know … well the value of the creek I have put into …” (Correspondence, I, 48).

Possessing greatness, being in some way above the crowd, suggests to Cowper danger and the great likelihood of being misunderstood—his horror of conspicuousness, it will be recalled, precipitated his first severe attack of madness. Similarly, he reacted to the possibility of taking orders, in 1766, with

I have had many anxious thoughts about taking orders, and I believe every new convert is apt to think himself called upon for that purpose; but it has pleased God, by means which there is no need to particularise, to give me full satisfaction as to the propriety of declining it; indeed, they who have the least idea of what I have suffered from the dread of public exhibitions, will readily excuse my never attempting them hereafter

(Correspondence, I, 81).

A less exacting, and therefore more revealing, demand on his inconspicuousness nearly caused another breakdown. After the move to Olney, in a new house, Cowper was called on to lead family prayers:

I trembled at the Apprehension of it, and was so dreadfully harrass’d in the Conflict I sustained upon this Occasion in the first Week, that my health was not a little affected by it. But there was no Remedy, and I hope the Lord brought me to that point, to chuse Death rather than a Retreat from Duty. In my first Attempt he was sensibly present with me, and has since favour’d me with every possible Assistance. My Fears begin to wear off, I get rather more Liberty of Speech at least, if not of Spirit, and have some Hope that having open’d my Mouth he will never suffer it closed again, but rather give Increase of Utterance and Zeal to serve him. How much of that Monster Self has he taken Occasion to shew me by this Incident. Pride Ostentation, and Vain glory have always been my Hindrance in these Attempts. These be at the Root of that Evil Tree which the world good natur’dly calls Bashfullness.⁵

Even this objectively trivial prominence Cowper was able to dramatize into a life-and-death battle, in which his antagonist, however kindly, was no less than God. On greater occasions, at more dismal stages in Cowper's life, God does not treat his conspicuousness so gently.

Most images of conspicuousness, as I have said, are for good reason fearful, or at least uneasy; one, however, is quite admiring: the great poet, in a passage which includes Cowper's disclaimer of the title, needs

… as the sun in rising beauty dress’d
Looks to the westward from the dappled east,
And marks, whatever clouds may interpose,
Ere yet his race begins, its glorious close;
An eye like his to catch the distant goal,
Or ere the wheels of verse begin to roll;
Like his to shed illuminating rays
On ev’ry scene and subject it surveys. …

(“Table Talk,” 706-13)

Cowper's whole attitude toward the fancy (imagination), whose range he considers an index to the poet's greatness, is, as is usual with him, complex and ambivalent; he mistrusts it elsewhere and, though yearning for its consequence, poetic stature, everywhere complains that even greatness as a poet is vanity. The very poem in which this passage appears ends with a firm preference for piety in verse over talent, even if that means supporting Sternhold and Hopkins at the expense of such as Pope. In “Truth” Cowper points out that few great or conspicuous people “win one inch of heav’nly ground” (338). A great man (Whitefield)

Stood pilloried on infamy's high stage …
The very butt of slander, and the blot
For ev’ry dart that malice ever shot.

(“Hope,” 556, 558-9)

But a great preacher will “storm the citadels they [wastrels] build in air” (“Hope,” 626). Here, applied to conspicuousness, are a pair of pervasive symbols in Cowper that involve himself and the world at large—the target and the attacker. In response to a friend's poem on indifference, Cowper argued that he did not at all want to be indifferent: only

Some Alpine mountain, wrapt in snow,
                    Thus braves the whirling blast,
Eternal winter doom’d to know,
                    No genial spring to taste.

(“To Miss Macartney,” 33-36)

The structure of Cowper's most famous jeu d’esprit, “John Gilpin,” is pre-eminently a reflection of this same preoccupation: the poem is concerned with a man who, in the course of an ordinary event, becomes ludicrously and disagreeably prominent. In another poem, the first in Cowper's first book (“Table Talk”), kings, the chief subjects at the beginning, are, because of their eminent positions, suspected, misunderstood, thwarted, gossiped about by all sorts—the main speaker in the dialogue says that he would not be such a king for anything. In “The Winter Evening” Cowper sees himself as temporarily on a more than mortal height, as he surveys the world's doings from his Olney home—but note the emphasis that he has placed on his safety (presumably from darts and other missiles) behind the “loop-holes of retreat” (l. 88). With the lone tree on the hilltop representing those who live while others die and with the imminently endangered pillar in the sea already referred to, it becomes clear that to Cowper any picture of something above the crowd suggests insecurity, danger, warfare. Both consciously and unconsciously, Cowper uses such objects to reflect his own sense of danger.

But this sort of attitude cannot be limited for a man with Cowper's mental fixations; and the image or symbolic structure involving the sympathetic character at bay, even when he is not in any way distinguished above the world, is among the most frequent in his writings. He suffers either the attacks of a deluded world or, in the storm and other natural images which have been so often commented on, he is battered by an arbitrary God (in a letter of 1781, Cowper wrote that one striking aspect of the sea that had always affected his imagination was that it was the most immediate agent of God).⁶ We can further extend our understanding of Cowper's themes if we note that objects—England, the quiet countryside, the converted sinner—similarly pictured are, for a short while, being identified with Cowper's own mental states.

In “Table Talk” this complex of attitudes affects, among other things, Cowper's homeland:

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 stand’st at bay.
Undaunted still, though wearied and perplex’d,
Once Chatham sav’d thee; but who saves thee next?

(362-7)

Cowper's self-identification with that which is hunted, evident here, most conspicuous in the famous stricken deer passage in “The Garden,” and continuing to the end of his life, helps to explain his humanitarian kindness to animals and his conception of himself as harried by both man and God.

Adherence to the world's requirements makes a man foolish and perhaps even conspicuous; if now truth must be

… cut short to make a period round,
I judg’d a man of sense could scarce do worse
Than caper in the morris-dance of verse.

(“Table Talk,” 517-9)

The world forces us out of our proper human mold. In conversation, fashion makes us talk like apes: though a nightingale will never give up his own song for “the twitt’ring of a meaner bird,”

Yet fashion, leader of a chatt’ring train,
Whom man for his own hurt permits to reign,
Who shifts and changes all things but his shape,
And would degrade her vot’ry to an ape,
The fruitful parent of abuse and wrong,
Holds an usurp’d dominion of his tongue. …

(“Conversation,” 457-62)

The world, grown old,

Claps spectacles on her sagacious nose,
Peruses closely the true Christian's face,
And finds it a mere mask of sly grimace. …

(“Conversation,” 742-4)

Man plunders and enslaves his different-colored brother, “Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey” (“Time-Piece,” 15). Note here the hunting image, again contributing to illuminate the motives for one of those benevolent attitudes for which Cowper is so properly admired. In “The Garden” comes the most famous of these hunting images:

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg’d, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had himself
Been hurt by th’archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.

(108-14)

The identification with Christ is important in this picture, emphasizing as it does the frequent undercurrent of self-justification in Cowper. He could never convince himself, as his very late “Spiritual Diary” shows most painfully,⁷ that he had been fairly chosen for such punishment, being well aware that by most standards he was a good man. At the time of his conversion and on through the 1760's he seems to have accepted the obvious theological argument that man, since the fall, was intolerably sinful, and that consequently he himself deserved his punishment; but he cited without comment Lady Hesketh's reaction to his Memoir, that he did not seem to have deserved his tortures;⁸ and in the Memoir itself he suggested that his overpowering sense of guilt during his madness might well have been the work of the devil. The stricken deer passage is, moreover, biographically curious, since it implies that Cowper had been stricken by the same hunters as Christ, i.e., sinful men. However, this deer has left the herd, and not it him—and of what could the herd be composed but these same sinful, malicious men? In point of fact, Cowper's madness had not been the fault of men but of his own mental constitution—except for the parliamentary group interested in challenging Ashley Cowper's patronage power, Cowper's associates in London seem to have been singularly kindly to him. The inference is, I believe, that Cowper had been stricken by God, in the same way that, in one of his mortality poems for the clerk of Norwich, numbers of crowded forest trees are yearly singled out for death.

His ambivalence is reflected in his attitude toward one aspect of society, the state. When it is a beleaguered, oppressed figure of stability at bay, he sees

… the old castle of the state,
That promis’d once more firmness, so assail’d
That all its tempest-beaten turrets shake,
Stand motionless expectants of its fall.

(“The Winter Morning Walk,” 525-8)

But when it represents collective society in its oppressive relation to the individual, he fears it and attempts to placate it. If the good man is not violently attacked, he is at least scorned: by kindness within his sphere, the contemplative man

… recompenses well
The state, beneath the shadow of whose vine
He sits secure, and in the scale of life
Holds no ignoble, though a slighted, place.

(“The Winter Walk at Noon,” 968-71)

But at times the man is in much greater danger from smaller and more intense groups: in an occasional piece thanking Mrs. King for a quilt to which many women had contributed, he is grateful that they are not coming to reclaim their own:

Thanks then to ev’ry gentle fair
Who will not come to peck me bare
                    As bird of borrow’d feather. …

(“To Mrs. King”)

“Table Talk,” significant for its discussion of the discomfort of kings as elevated targets for the crowd, is perhaps even more significant for its general tenor. Placed first in the poems of 1782, it serves as a prologue to the rest, justifying the kind of poetry that Cowper writes and the subjects that he chooses. Its ending is a thorough defense against and disclaimer of anticipated criticism from the world: poor religious poems, he argues, are better than good nonreligious ones. One of the central points of “Charity,” in which Cowper refers to himself as “disgrac’d and slighted,” is that a man with vision in the land of the blind is derided—note again the faint urgency toward self-justification in the steady battle between himself and society. In “Retirement,” one of the character types going to nature is the melancholy man (Cowper saw his own illness as an aggravation of melancholy), who is laughed at by blockheads without nerves. It is pertinent that the melancholy man is one of those who seek nature for the wrong reasons—the right one is to observe God's appearance in it—and that though Cowper frequently justifies himself against man's misunderstanding on the ground that he sees the truth that the crowd misses, when he addresses God he is more likely to plead for kindness than for justice. After all, the hare is no more “right” than the hunter. Its position is pathetic, and hunting it is an arbitrary exercise of brute power, but its vision of the world is not necessarily a true one.⁹

In his strife with society and its fashions, Cowper argues, in a long passage in “The Time-Piece,” that there is a pleasure in overcoming difficulties in the poetic craft, but that readers cannot understand or appreciate the subtlety of technique (lines 285-310). In “The Garden” there is, to balance the stricken deer passage, one attacking hunters, who misuse the country (and hunters, in the allegory of Cowper's own soul, often suggest God). Cowper here says that it is good to retreat from the world, since thus one avoids passion, which is caused by the world's temptations aimed at one's senses. “The Winter Evening” is a long poetic essay symbolically on the theme of attack on the innocent—the city's staining of the country. In the beginning, the sallies are minor and are easily repulsed: the noisy post-horn announces the arrival of news of the world's doings, but Cowper can overcome it and them from his fortified position of retreat. Later attacks, however, are successful and cause permanent effects—the generic country girl has been corrupted by fashions in dress, the country “clown” has been ruined by his service in the army, the lazy peasant, sick with the drinking contagion derived from sources outside the country, has become a drunken thief. The lesser poems, as well, exhibit these preoccupations: banditti attack Cowper's brain; a sensitive minister (William Unwin) is hurt by coarse farmers' dislike of paying tithes; Gilpin's motives and actions are misconstrued by the world; a rat murders a favorite bullfinch.

In a letter soon after the one complaining that his friends should take more notice of him, he implied (so much was his isolation on his mind during a period supposed to have been happy with rebirth, 1766) that they had deliberately abandoned him: “My friends must excuse me, if I write to none but those who lay it fairly in my way to do so. The inference I am apt to draw from their silence is, that they wish me to be silent too; and my circumstances are such as not only justify that apprehension in point of prudence, but even make it natural” (Correspondence, I, 62). He is steadily “Conscious that my religious principles are generally excepted against, and that the conduct they produce, wherever they are heartily maintained, is still more the object of disapprobation than those principles themselves. …” (Correspondence, I, 7). This sensitivity to the world's opinion, as the last passage shows, and as his reactions to Huntingdon gossip about him and Mrs. Unwin show even more, is overtly connected with the justified group sensitivity of the Evangelicals; but Cowper's reasons for feeling a conspicuous butt of man's and God's derision, as the mass of his work makes clear, are private and inevitable. It seems to me quite likely that his need to feel persecuted (combined with other needs, such as that for certainty) caused him to join so unpopular a movement. Of its unpopularity he was consciously aware, if not before his conversion then very soon after it; in August, 1767, he wrote to Mrs. Madan that “Our Friends here define a Methodist to be—One who committs every Sin he can think of and invents New Ones every Day,—that he may be saved by Faith.”¹⁰ I cannot see that the continuing argument, beginning very soon after Cowper's death in 1800 and affecting such comparatively recent work as the studies by Gilbert Thomas, Hugh l’Anson Fausset, and David Cecil, over the issue of whether Evangelicalism contributed to Cowper's madness, has any point except the airing of prejudices. A neurotic of Cowper's cast inevitably seeks some assurance of his unique inadequacy, and if he does not find it in severe Calvinism he will impose rigid moral qualifications on lotus eating.

In the battle between the self and the world, Cowper's imagery and structures show a variety of reactions: defensiveness, coupled with the assertion of his own importance; fearful retreat (which Kenneth MacLean has so brilliantly discussed);¹¹ superiority toward the world, assertion of its triviality, and downright attacks upon it. Everywhere in his poetry and letters are evidences of the importance of defensiveness in his mental constitution. Poetry, at the end of “Table Talk,” is defined as a “gift, whose office is the Giver's praise” (750); it should not be used

To purchase, at the fool-frequented fair
Of vanity, a wreath for self to wear

(756-7)

but should be an instrument (as in Cowper it professedly is) to direct men to God's path. Of his writing of satire, he says,

An individual is a sacred mark,
Not to be pierc’d in play, or in the dark;
But public censure speaks a public foe,
Unless a zeal for virtue guide the blow.

(“Expostulation,” 434-7)

Here the fear of being misunderstood is immediately answered by an assertion of public-spiritedness. Of his digression and playfulness in “Charity,” he writes:

Thus have I sought to grace a serious lay
With many a wild, indeed, but flow’ry spray,
In hopes to gain, what else I must have lost,
Th’attention pleasure has so much engross’d.

(“Charity,” 628-31)

Again, defense is mixed with reproof—he blames the world for forcing him out of his proper path to please it. A similar apology for digression appears in “Conversation”:

Digression is so much in modern use,
Thought is so rare, and fancy so profuse,
Some never seem so wide of their intent,
As when returning to the theme they meant;
As mendicants, whose business is to roam,
Make ev’ry parish, but their own, their home.
Though such continual zigzags in a book,
Such drunken reelings, have an awkward look,
And I had rather creep to what is true,
Than rove and stagger with no mark in view;
.....[but he does not want to] give good company a face
          severe,
As if they met around a father's bier. …

(855-74)

The contemplative man at the end of The Task “recompenses well” the state by his example of kindness. As “Table Talk” defends Cowper's techniques and subjects, so “Truth” defends the current enthusiasts: the poem begins with the ways to heaven that the world believes to be true, shows that they are false, and goes on to point out that faith (like that of Cowper and his friends) wins heaven while pride goes to hell. In “Charity,” besides the essentially defensive description of the contempt in which the man with vision is held by the blind, Cowper again defends his satire—satire that is not virtuously motivated is destructive of man's proper tie to man, but there is no question about the motivation of Cowper's. And the “Winter Walk at Noon” ends with the assurance that the man who has a foretaste of Judgment Day is happy though the world neglects him and scorns his pleasures; it is possible, says Cowper, that the world owes its successes to his prayers.

In the retreat from the world that is a favorite way of dealing with its propensity to hurt Cowper, the stricken deer's is again the most conspicuous passage. But note that in it the deer and his associates have found a path that is not merely different from, but also better than, the herd's. They ruminate over the ways of the world and conclude that

… all are wand’rers, gone astray
Each in his own delusions. …

(“The Garden,” 124-5)

The religious man, in another image combining the two attitudes of retreat and superiority,

… cannot skim the ground like summer birds
Pursuing gilded flies; and such he deems
Her [the world's] honours, her emoluments, her joys.

(“Winter Walk at Noon,” 921-3)

Again, in the “Winter Walk at Noon” the fortunate man who sees that God animates every detail of nature is contemptuous of fashionable pleasures. The “Thames wherry” image is primarily of retreat, though in his reference to “a world full of tempest and commotion” there is a suggestion that the world is not worth being in. At the same time, Cowper was occasionally aware that his retreat was also one of the mind, and that it distorted his vision: “… when we circumscribe our estimate of all that is clever within the limits of our own acquaintance (which I, at least, have been always apt to do), we are guilty of a very uncharitable censure upon the rest of the world, and of a narrowness of thinking disgraceful to ourselves” (Correspondence, I, 54). He could, furthermore, in accordance with his horror of solitude and of oblivion, pity his own retreat: of Olney, he wrote, “It is no attachment to the place that binds me here, but an unfitness for every other. I lived in it once, but now I am buried in it, and have no business with the world on the outside of my sepulchre; my appearance would startle them, and theirs would be shocking to me” (Correspondence, I, 175). His letter of 1784 in which he praises the virtue that flies temptation has already been alluded to. In 1785 comes yet another example of the combination of retreat with superiority: walking home with Mrs. Unwin he wrote to her son, “a glimpse of something white, contained in a little hole in the gate-post, caught my eye. I looked again and discovered a bird's nest with two tiny eggs in it. By and by they will be fledged, and tailed, and get wing-feathers, and fly. My case is somewhat similar to that of the parent bird. My nest is in a little nook. Here I brood and hatch, and in due time my progeny takes wing and whistles” (Correspondence, II, 318-9). Some years later refusing an invitation to visit a friend some distance away, he wrote, “My fate and fortune have combined with my natural disposition to draw a circle round me which I cannot pass; nor have I been more than thirteen miles from home these twenty years, and so far very seldom” (Correspondence, IV, 37).

The assertions of the world's triviality relate, quite obviously, to the superiority just suggested. People unconcerned with religion, he wrote in “Truth,”

Sport for a day, and perish in a night;
The foam upon the waters not so light.

(42-3)

Those who attack the true religion resemble in their noise

… the clamour of rooks, daws, and kites,
Th’explosion of the levell’d tube excites,
Where mould’ring abbey walls o’erhang the glade,
And oaks coeval spread a mournful shade.

(“Hope,” 349-52)

The stricken deer discovers that

… The million flit as gay
As if created only like the fly,
That spreads his motley wings in th’eye of noon.

(“Garden,” 133-6)

Notice that the image of light and useless matters—ephemeral insects, foam, summer birds pursuing gilded flies—pervades these descriptions of mankind at large.

A most important category of images and structures expanding Cowper's view of himself to all mankind in its stay on earth deals with the confusion of man's lot, the impossibility of man's finding his way in a world arbitrarily uncertain. Though it was Cowper's conscious intention to show that conversion, the acquisition of grace, would clearly guide man's steps, one notices in this steady development of man's inability to see the right way through dangers an undercurrent of Cowper's resentment, or at least suspicion, of God's purposes with respect to him. In the “Progress of Error” he gives this view its most direct, and acceptable, theological form: man is “Plac’d for his trail on this bustling stage” (23). In “Truth,” which is designed to show the enlightening effect of grace, he writes that

Man, on the dubious waves of error toss’d,
His ship half founder’d and his compass lost,
Sees, far as human optics may command,
A sleeping fog, and fancies it dry land:
Spreads all his canvass, ev’ry sinew plies;
Pants for’t, aims at it, enters it, and dies!

(1-6)

The world is a prison house, he says in the “Time-Piece”; and a man who has been restored through hope of salvation is like a felon pardoned at the last moment (“Hope,” 712-31). It is, note again, the arbitrariness of his Calvinism that he stresses here, as he does also in his “Spiritual Diary” and in a letter to Newton, both to be considered in a later chapter. Similarly, “The Sofa” contains a long passage on the joy of the long-time prisoner who has been released to savor nature (436-44).

The theme of delusion, as well as its culmination in disaster, is a repeated one: in “The Sofa,” among the examples of those who have true love for nature is a sailor who so longs for his native countryside that he mistakes the ocean for it, jumps overboard, and drowns. In another place (“Hope,” 674-741) we are given a description of two sinners hoping for grace and of their reactions when one is granted it and the other is not. Similarly, in two parables in “The Winter Walk at Noon” the same theme is developed in the same way. Cowper is concerned with the treatment accorded horses by heedless and vicious riders (and the image clusters suggest that in such a situation Cowper identifies himself with the despoiled, the prey, and is likely to identify an arbitrary God with the hunter or exploiter). In one case,

With unsuspecting readiness he takes
His murd’rer on his back, and, push’d all day,
With bleeding sides and flanks that heave for life,
To the far-distant goal, arrives and dies.

(427-30)

For the expected contrast, there is a moral tale some 100 lines later (possibly the silliest that Cowper ever wrote) of a headstrong youth who twice safely spurred his horse to the edge of a precipice to tempt fate but was finally hurled into the gulf when the horse, on his own initiative, rushed to the edge and stopped short:

So God wrought double justice; made the fool
The victim of his own tremendous choice,
And taught a brute the way to safe revenge.

(557-9)

As has been suggested, Cowper often saw man's lot symbolically as his own; but he also tended to project on general human existence his own special problems. The city, for example, became for him the epitome of the confusion of existence. When he reads the news of the active world in the paper, he is happy in his retirement

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates
At a safe distance, where the dying sound
Falls a soft murmur on th’uninjur’d ear.

(“The Winter Evening,” 91-93)

All of fashionable life is the type and symbol of confusion, of wandering from the true path, and is so described again and again. Cowper's aim is to direct it right. His satire, in general, is not of the kind of Juvenal or, in his own period, of Churchill, a kind that often cries, “You are evil. Disappear!” It is, rather, the call, “You are wrong. Change your ways!”

Cowper sees his relation to God and to man in a complex way. From one point of view, in one mood, he can speak as a man who has grace and loves society, and is therefore on a good footing with both. But more frequently the conviction at the root of his melancholy that he was the one sinner of the universe, cast out by both God and society, dominates him; it, and its subtle ramifications, really determine his picture of himself. Overtly, he loves God with ecstasy, as he had loved Him when he was reborn from his violent attack of madness in 1764; but basically, as I shall try to show more fully below, he hates and fears Him. Paradoxically, this fear of God's arbitrariness, hatred because Cowper felt himself the chief sufferer from it, helps much to explain the humanitarianism that Mr. Lodwick Hartley's recent study has so well dealt with.¹² Seeing himself often as a hunted animal—a deer, a hare—and sympathizing with the fears of the animal, he eloquently protested against man's arbitrary commission of acts proper only to God (it is possible that this explanation could be true of the general evangelical objection to blood sports). God has placed man on earth to be judged, without providing at least one man, Cowper, with adequate faculties for choosing, and has arbitrarily decided without concern for human conceptions of justice. Cowper wanted “a closer walk with God,” but always in the front of his mind was a great fear of God's might, which is expressed typically in storms, mountains, tidal waves, earthquakes, all the terrors of the natural world.

Not surprising in a man who had good cause to fear solitude, the state that left his mind free to ponder arbitrary damnation, Cowper needed and wanted friends. He felt himself tied to humanity (and indeed to all creation) in a bond of brotherhood. But that brotherhood was primarily one of sinfulness under God's rule. His first step out of despondence after the overwhelming experience of being nominated for the clerkship occurred when Martin Madan told him that not only he but all men were steeped in sin. Here Cowper felt some glimmering of hope; but its perverseness is borne out by the event, which was that his full attack of madness came afterwards. Furthermore, his reminders of man's brotherhood usually come in contexts where he is assailing mankind for forgetting the bond, or where he bids men to unite in the face of an angry God, or both. This is so in “The Time-Piece,” in “The Garden,” and in “Expostulation.”

Just as he wants a relationship with God which will be close but not close enough to expose him to destruction, so he seeks a similar relationship with man. Again his attitude is paradoxical. Convinced of his uniqueness, of his foreignness within mankind, he yet needs to stretch out to man for corroboration of his own significance. Repelled by the confusion of man in the mass, a confusion which aggravates his certainty of his own difference and inadequacy to deal with life, he yet needs some contact with man's activities to draw him from the contemplation of his own fearful fate. The consequence is a voluntary retirement from the world combined with a great effort to find a few friends close by with whom he could maintain a precarious balance of openness and restraint, and with a further effort to expand his influence beyond into the world without running the dangers of its forcing itself upon him. He withdraws from human activities, but takes great care, possibly because of his awareness of the danger of complete apathy (to which he succumbed for most of his last five years), to know what these activities are, providing he is safe from them. A powerful strain of self-justification, connected with if not deriving from his need to argue his case before authority (before an angry God), supports him in his relations with the world. Its activities, a huge projection of his own sense of uncertainty and terror, are the consequences of folly, delusion, and triviality; in his own retreat from the world's temptations, he achieves a certain triumph over it, a triumph which, if it were not for the horrors of solitude, would be complete.

The only victory can be in a kind of obscurity (the hare is only safe if the dogs or hunters cannot detect it), for prominence only invites assault. The towering person, like the high hill or promontory, is subjected to God's storms and man's viciousness. Greatness involves just this towering; but greatness is the most dangerous human condition, and while Cowper admires the soaring poet or the passionate statesman or preacher, he is well aware that poetic greatness involves the self-deceiving and self-defeating fancy, that Whitefield has been wrongly aspersed, and that Chatham and Wolfe are dead. Better far to be the brood bird hidden away that sends its fledglings to remind the world of it existence.

Notes

1. Gilbert Thomas, William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948), 2d ed., pp. 261-3.

2. Printed in Charles Ryskamp, William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 223.

3. Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953), p. 183.

4. Hugh l’Anson Fausset, William Cowper (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), p. 61.

5. William Cowper, Unpublished and Uncollected Letters, ed. Thomas Wright (London: C. J. Farncombe & Sons, 1925), pp. 21-2.

6. “I think with you, that the most magnificent object under heaven is the great deep; and cannot but feel an unpolite species of astonishment, when I consider the multitudes that view it without emotion, and even without reflection. In all its various forms, it is an object of all others the most suited to affect us with lasting impressions of the awful Power that created and controls it … at a time of life when I gave as little attention to religious subjects as almost any man, I yet remember that the waves would preach to me, and that in the midst of dissipation I had an ear to hear them” (Correspondence, I, 358).

7. Kenneth Povey, ed., “Cowper's Spiritual Diary,” London Mercury, XV (1927), 493-6.

8. Unpublished and Uncollected Letters, p. 27.

9. In his most interesting Harvard dissertation, “The Prisoner and His Crimes: A Psychological Approach to William Cowper's Life and Writings” (1951), Mr. Hoosag K. Gregory discusses Cowper's identification with hunted animals from a Freudian viewpoint (his Chapter 9). Similarly, my study necessarily touches on a number of issues (Cowper and the authority figure, Cowper's obsession with death, Gilpin's ride in relation to Cowper's mind, etc.) which Mr. Gregory also treats. Mr. Gregory uses Cowper's preoccupations and symbols as tools in his psychoanalysis of Cowper, while I am concerned primarily with dissecting the preoccupations and showing their relevance to Cowper's poetry, particularly to The Task. See also Hoosag K. Gregory, “The Prisoner and His Crimes: Summary Comments on a Longer Study of the Mind of William Cowper,” Literature and Psychology, VI (1956), 53-9.

10. Unpublished and Uncollected Letters, p. 13.

11. Kenneth MacLean, “William Cowper,” in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 257-67.

12. Lodwick C. Hartley, William Cowper, Humanitarian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938).