[In the following essay, Free offers a comprehensive analysis of Cowper's shorter poems, demonstrating that a sense of control, and reference to external objects as markers of internal states are important to Cowper's verse.]

At the end of the fourth book of The Task, Cowper, after referring to the placidness of his life at Olney, hails rural life, the “patroness of health and ease / And contemplation,” and resolves never to add himself “to the pursuit / Of honors, or emolument, or fame.” “Great offices,” he continues,

                              will have
Great talents. And God gives to every man
The virtue, temper, understanding, taste,
That lifts him into life, and lets him fall
Just in the niche he was ordained to fill.
To the deliverer of an injured land
He gives a tongue t’enlarge upon, an heart
To feel, and courage to redress her wrongs;
To monarchs dignity, to judges sense,
To artists ingenuity and skill;
To me an unambitious mind, content
In the low vale of life, that early felt
A wish for ease and leisure, and ere long
Found here that leisure and that ease I wished.

Two tendencies should be observed in this passage. One, which might be labelled “Pre-Romantic,” is not so much indicated by Cowper's love of life in the country as by his insistence on the individuality of his way of life. There is no attempt to overrate Olney, to pretend that it is “sweet Auburn,” to make it into the pastoral ideal. Nor, continuing in this vein, is there any sign that Olney symbolizes the need for all men to seek retirement from the city. Life there is the “low vale,” satisfying only to Cowper, and then only because of his own psychological needs. If elsewhere the garden, a paradigm of life in the country, does seem an Eden when compared to the depraved life of the city, this symbolic meaning is lost for a moment in our contemplation of it as the place where Cowper's personal regeneration occurred.

But, however Romantic may seem the impulse to build a way of life which is, if not unique, at least individual, in the above passage it is almost lost amid assertions of the old truisms “everything has its place” and “whatever is, is right.” The assumption that underlies praise of life in Olney is the same notion of order in variety which Pope and Adam Smith, among others, celebrate in different ways. Although retirement distinguishes the poet from others, it “has its place”; it fits in the spectrum of social and moral attitudes which constitute the whole of eighteenth-century civilization. Had he known what direction poetry would take in the generation following his, Cowper undoubtedly would have given even greater emphasis to his notion that true social harmony can exist only when each person seeks his enlightened self-interest.

The tendency to anticipate what was to come while looking backward exists in Cowper's shorter poems as well as in The Task. Although a relatively small number of these poems are concerned with life in Olney, they exhibit the same impulses toward individualism and conventionalism in idea and form which are seen in the Olney-centered parts of The Task. If Cowper uses “Boadicea,” “Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk,” and “On the Loss of the Royal George” as platforms for expressing sentiments which are peculiarly English, he also has the capacity for strikingly original statements about his personal condition, most notably in “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity” and most artistically in “The Castaway.” And if in “The Castaway” feelings seem to triumph over form, or at least form seems not to contribute crucially to the development of feeling, in the mock odes and elegies form is used with the subtlety of the Augustan masters.

The distinction between Cowper and the Romantics seems clear when we compare his poems on the slave issue with those of Blake. Cowper appeals to humanitarian values in a not very novel, or interesting, way; Blake, transcending satire and the issue itself, makes his “Little Black Boy” another revelation of his personal myth of innocence. Cowper's “Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce or, the Slave-Trader in the Dumps” and “Pity for Poor Africans” do not stand apart from many other poems on the same subject which flooded periodicals in their use of modified ballad stanzas, in their irony, and in their exhortations to the public to acknowledge its selfishness and hypocrisy:

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see?
What? give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea!

Blake's use of form and irony and his assertion of moral values are much less conventional than Cowper's. First of all, Blake writes from the Negro's point of view and makes no direct appeal to the English public. But more important are the innocence and compassion with which his little boy responds to his plight and that of his civilized white “brother.” As a child and primitive, he is superior to his white brother, but not because of the favorite eighteenth-century myth of the “noble savage” nor because Blake's humanitarianism dictates that he should be, but because suffering has taught him compassion, and the abjectness of his state has ground into him a sense of his personal unworthiness. The sweetness and purity of the boy's voice as it speaks through ballad stanza and the profundity of Blake's irony and moral make Cowper's conventionalism seem hollow and trivial.

But, if the distinction between Cowper and the Romantics seems clear in this case, it is not so in others. The author of “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” which is as close to “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” as poetry ever comes, seems remote to the cool satirist or polemicist on the slave issue, as does the poet who in “The Castaway” projects his own feeling of abandonment into the story of a drowning sailor.

The essential quality which distinguishes Cowper's lyrics and satires can be defined by such words as “gentleness,” “modesty,” and “restraint.” Such terms as “restraint” remind us of the Augustan manner of viewing a subject with the irony and detachment necessary to gain proper perspective, or to put the subject in its place. Yet in Cowper's best poems personality counts as heavily as wit. In “Epitaph on a Hare,” for example, satire of Tiny's pretences gives way to poignant revelation of the poet's gentle and humane personality. This same impulse to turn away from satire to personal revelation can also be detected in The Task, and we suspect that the tendency to moralize in that poem has the same origin. Certainly the major defects of The Task, prolixity and lack of point, can be laid to the fact that satire inhibited Cowper's sensibility. The best parts of The Task and the best short poems are those in which his personality can find fuller expression.

Cowper's best poems are not those like “Boadicea” or “On the Loss of the Royal George” which gained immediate fame because they appealed to popular sentiment or because they serve as fine pieces for declamation. Nor are they those which show the effect of the vogue for sentimentalism, as “On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture from Norfolk.” They are, to use the division into Romantic and Neo-Classical with which I began this chapter, those which capture in a new and unforgettable way the peculiarities of the poet's psychological condition and those in which comic reserve interacts with personality to freshen literary convention while providing a glimpse of the poet and his life, as “Epitaph on a Hare” and “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch.” One way of isolating these peculiar excellences for examination is to look at some poems in which he did not completely succeed.

“On the Loss of the Royal George” was inspired by a calamity which occurred in 1782. We must assume that Cowper's humanitarian and patriotic feelings were aroused as deeply as anyone's by the event; but, as is so often true of poets writing on occasions of state, particularly the laureates, great distress did not result in great poetry. It must be admitted that Cowper labored under restrictions arbitrarily placed upon him: Lady Austen had wanted words to the march in Scipio. It seems clear, however, that not the form but the subject matter raised the greatest difficulties. Indeed, the best lines in the poem, those with which it begins, gain their majestic tolling quality and their sense of finality because of the form to which Cowper had to set his words. Cowper seems not to have been able to conceive of his subject matter except in terms of trivialities and moral clichés. Instead of memorializing “the brave that are no more,” as he resolves in the first stanza, he records details of the accident, none of which justify his declamatory style. How can the information that “Eight hundred of the brave / Whose courage well was tried, / Had made the vessel heel” be arranged in the traditional rhetorical patterns of parallelism, repetition, and climax? The following stanza illustrates Cowper's predicament:

                    It was not in the battle,
No tempest gave them shock,
She sprang no fatal leak,
She ran upon no rock;
                    His sword was in the sheath,
His fingers held the pen,
                    When Kampenfelt went down
With twice four hundred men.

After this stanza the poem goes down under a mass of clichés and commonplaces and the wholly irrelevant promise that the boat will be raised to “float again, / Full charg’d with England's thunder, / And plough the distant main.” After this impressive assurance it seems hardly proper that we should be reminded that Kampenfelt “is gone” and the eight hundred crewmen “must plough the wave no more.”

If “On the Loss of the Royal George” were unique in its failure to achieve pathos, we might blame an unfortunate rhetoric, one more suitable for other occasions, and turn our attention to other matters. But to do so would be to ignore the fact that Cowper is not much more fortunate in many other poems for which he is still remembered. Not only the poems of state or of patriotic sentiment but such personal lyrics as “The Poplar-Field” exhibit a falling away from emotional intensity and eloquent expression. The first stanza of “The Poplar-Field” is unforgettable for the way sound and meter evoke a scene and set a mood:

The poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer, and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives

Rhythm, sound patterns, and images in succeeding stanzas do not live up to the expectations created by the first four lines. If sound beautifully supports sense in the first stanza, the singsong of the rest of the poem seems appropriate to its clichés, platitudes, and trite sentimentalities:

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast, and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.
’Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a being less durable even than he.

“On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture out of Norfolk,” another of Cowper's well-known lyrics, presents the same problem. The poet suggests an interesting theme, the timelessness of art: “Blest be the art that can immortalize, / The art that baffles time's tyrannic claim / To quench it. …” He next introduces the paradox that art renews grief while solacing it, but nothing is made of either idea. The structure of the poem, a loosely connected and fanciful excursion through his memories, in a way gives form to the basic ideas. Art achieves its timelessness in its ability to inspire the poet's thought; the memories cause grief but offer respite from other kinds of misery. But the repose which the poet gains by thinking of his mother's goodness is poorly founded on the most trivial sentiments and hackneyed images:

Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast
(The storms all weather’d and the ocean cross’d)
Shoots into port at some well-haven’d isle
Where spices breathe and brighter seasons smile …
And thy lov’d consort on the dang’rous tide
Of life, long since, has anchor’d at thy side.

It may be that one of the reasons for the insufficiency of the poem is that, to use Cowper's own image, it describes a love that never rises above a “constant flow” and knows no “cataracts and brakes.” As a result, the attempts at pathos seems excessive; and when Cowper, striving for greater poignancy on which to found his eloquence, introduces the theme that love can be selfish and cruel, he can do so only in the most bathetic way:

Could those few pleasant hours again appear,
Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here?
I would not trust my heart,—the dear delight
Seems so to be desir’d, perhaps I might—
But no—what here we call our life is such,
So little to be lov’d and thou so much,
That I should ill requite thee to constrain
Thy unbound spirit into bonds again.

Those who particularly admire this poem usually rely on an argument familiar to readers of The Task: it is moving because of its autobiographical content. According to this line of thought, when we remember the effect on the poet of the loss of his mother, we are more willing to accept a certain lack of control and to abandon ourselves to the intensity of feeling which obviously lies behind the poem. Of course, such arguments only turn our attention from what is inartistic; they do not justify the poem as art.

Like “On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture,” the second poem “To Mary” is little more than bald statement of fact and feeling. What ostensibly is a poem to Mrs. Unwin becomes unsuitable as an address to her because it reflects on the most unpleasant aspects of her illness and on the wasting away of qualities that formerly distinguished her. When Cowper does turn to the more appropriate theme of the abiding nature of his love, he does so in a way characteristic of the rest of the poem. His assurance that she remains the sustaining force in his life merely accentuates the burden that has been forced upon her and which she can no longer carry.

It can be observed in these poems that strong feeling often stultified Cowper's imagination. Instead of giving new and interesting form to statement, his emotions turned him down the easy path of moralism, of platitude, and of sentimental cliché. In satiric poetry, which presents a different kind of challenge, Cowper was more often successful. Satire did not force him to confront his own deepest and darkest feelings but focused his attention outward on the world around him. Hence, though it may at first seem damning to admit that poetry for Cowper was a mental exercise and a kind of therapy, ultimately such nonartistic motives, by detaching him from his materials and allowing his wit and fancy to play more fully and easily, account for his success.

The danger that inheres in poetry shaped by a need for relief from anxiety is that it will be merely facetious or clever. Admittedly, many of Cowper's burlesque poems fall in this category. The “Ode to Apollo” and “The Colubriad” are examples picked at random. Yet while noting this tendency, we must remember that comic masterpieces like “Epitaph on a Hare” and “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch” have the same source. As I have pointed out in the previous chapter, Cowper's satire was always relaxed and gentle; he was incapable of the kinds of intensity that are variously revealed in the satiric works of Pope, Swift, Fielding, and Sterne. Cowper did have wit, a sense of humor, and generous impulses. He apparently had no desire to take upon himself the responsibilities of a gadfly; consequently, his satire touches in only a glancing manner on serious problems and seldom gives pain.

If Cowper's best satire did not spring from indignation, an aroused moral sense, or hatred of human folly and was not inspired by occasions of great moment nor of universal significance, it still made an original contribution and breathed vitality into the genre. His contribution consists of a peculiar interaction of personality with forms that had been in use since classical times. Unlike the Augustans who vented their indignation on follies in which they did not participate, Cowper involves himself in the absurdities which he ridicules. There is no persona, no Gulliver, Scriblerus, Cibber, Theobald, nor “Modest Proposer” to stand between author and subject and to present a point of view which, through its imperfections, implies the values of the author. In the satire of Swift and Pope, folly is usually distributed evenly between the subject and speaker (for example, between the Irish in “A Modest Proposal” and the scientist who would solve their problem); through understanding the defects in both, and in particular the incompetence with which the persona handles his subject, we arrive at the author's point of view.

When Cowper uses the first person in satire, it is not to trick the reader into accepting a point of view which he must ultimately reject. As in The Task, the “I” conveys the poet's own attitudes. Moreover, even when he uses the third person, Cowper finds a way to involve himself in the poem. Either he shares in the follies satirized, as in “Epitaph on a Hare,” or in some other way manages to make the reader conscious of the role his feelings play in a particular situation.

“Vice” and “ridicule,” the two words most frequently used to describe the object and intent of satire, are too harsh to be employed in a discussion of Cowper's short poems. Since the follies against which the poet directs his wit rarely are of great importance, the prevailing attitude of the satire must necessarily be mild and humorous, not slashing and acerbic. Yet this lack of seriousness does not seem to justify the charge that the satire is trivial. As a group, Cowper's witty poems leave the same impression as Pope's classic mock heroic, “The Rape of the Lock”: that, among people in an advanced state of civilization, problems often seem more serious than they really are. Moreover, Cowper seems to imply that undeniably serious problems demand a generous or pathetic response instead of invective. Harsher satire belongs in a more heroic environment, where vice or folly are of greater moment; and it presupposes a more heroic temperament, one that is rigid, unbending, filled with a sense of its own dignity and lacking in charity. If Cowper's subject matter is usually domestic, perhaps the reason is that domestic matters are closer to the center of civilized life.

The world of Cowper's satire, then, is enclosed by its domestic concerns. Within its narrow dimensions, it reflects in a diminished way larger concerns, but always with the assumption that, for most people, the world is a fairly tight and secure place. The frame of mind which results is one skeptical of pretenses, yet able to see value in details of life beneath the attention of “greater” men. Unable to conceive of the truly heroic or tragic, this mind feels at ease in the ordinary or pathetic. Here lies another difference between Pope's mock heroic and Cowper's.

In “The Rape of the Lock,” the beauty of Belinda's world can be seen behind its absurdity; and, in “The Dunciad,” true literary values can be perceived behind the falseness and pretentiousness of Cibber. By contrast, a poem like “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch” does not use Classical myth to symbolize a better world than the present. Behind the absurdity of Mrs. Throckmorton's behavior lie no serious allusions to a more noble pattern of behavior in the past. Instead of exhorting Maria to greater heroism, Cowper does no more than offer her his compassion. His generous, compassionate nature shapes the world of the poem, not the Greek and Roman values against which Pope's mock heroics are projected. Hence it can be seen that Cowper's personality becomes an important aspect of the form of his poem, for it serves as the framework in which the values, and even the structure, of the poem develop.

“On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch” makes use of parody in a two-handed manner. It attacks Mrs. Throckmorton's sentimentalism, and it makes fun of the usual rhetoric of elegiac poetry. In describing the birthplace of the finch, it recalls the traditional reliance of the elegy on mythical allusion: “Where Rhenus strays his vines among, / The egg was laid from which he sprung. …” The use of Classical analogy to elevate the dignity of the subject is parodied in the comparison of the bird's beak (all that was left after Bully had been eaten by a rat) to the head of Orpheus:

Maria weeps—The Muses mourn—
So, when by Bacchanalians torn,
                    On Thracian Hebrus' side
The tree-enchanter Orpheus fell;
His head alone remained to tell
                    The cruel death he died.

Following convention, Cowper calls upon the nymphs to bewail the loss of the finch, invokes the muses, and personifies nature.

The use of Classical machinery seems to be justified when the subject of a poem is the cruelty of nature to a Damon or a Lycidas, a Clough or a Hallam, or when a poem pays tribute to ordinary men in general, as in Gray's “Elegy.” But to commemorate a bird in this way is another matter. Like the metamorphosis of an inkdrop into a part of the rainbow in the “Ode to Apollo,” allusion does not seem to be warranted by intensity of emotion. Maria is seen to be guilty of misplacing values, and at the same time literary conventions are given a ludicrous turn.

As a mock elegy, Cowper's poem portrays not the spacious world of the heroic but the much diminished one of the eighteenth-century gentleman's household. As the poem proceeds, its focus steadily narrows from the world to the household, to the study, to the cage in which Bully suffered. Dawn, instead of splendidly coloring the sky, is reflected in the dimensions of a finch's bosom; and the piping winds of early morning are reduced to a bird's whistle, reminiscent of flageolet or flute:

                    And though by nature mute,
Or only with a whistle blest,
Well-taught, he all the sounds express’d
                    Of flageolet or flute. …
                    His bosom of the hue
With which Aurora decks the skies,
When piping winds shall soon arise
                    To seep up all the dew.

(ll. 9-12, 15-18)

Small as it is, the domestic world in which the finch's destiny plays itself out faintly reflects the greater world of Classical tragedy. Bully is, the poem makes clear, the victim of the good intentions of those humans who control his environment. Trying to protect him from cats, they made him vulnerable to rats. In an attempt to protect his feathers, they smoothed the grate of his cage until it no longer could keep out his enemies. Had the Throckmortons been more willing to trust fortune, he probably would have died of old age (and been a somewhat less worthy subject for poetry).

So far, nothing has been said to indicate how Cowper's poem differs from a number of mock elegies (like Gray's “On the Death of a Favorite Cat”), all testifying to the enduring popularity of a form which had flourished in Classical Rome. Unlike most writers of mock elegy, Cowper is less interested in lamenting the dead than in commiserating with the living. Had Bully occupied the center of focus, undoubtedly Cowper would have treated him as Gray did Walpole's cat, the vain and fatuous Selima. Once Bully has been mocked, however, and once the poet has pointed out with tongue in cheek that fate, the Throckmortons, the rat, and, of course, Bully all share responsibility for the “tragedy” that has occurred, there remains the need to sympathize with the bereaved, even if Maria's loss is not as great as her grief would seem to make it. In choosing to make Maria and not the finch the true subject of his poem, Cowper brings into balance wit and feeling. As well as humorously chiding her—“ridiculing” would be too strong a word—he is performing an act of friendship.

If Cowper's poem can give pleasure to a larger audience than the one for whom it was originally intended, it is because of the skill with which he manages his role as critic and sympathizer, as mock elegiast and friend. While cleverly dissociating himself from the sentimentality that the situation demands of him, he must also hint delicately that Maria's distress has aroused his own feelings. Of the two tasks, the first is much the easier. To accomplish it, Cowper skillfully blends parody and bathos. The poem begins its steady progress toward anticlimax with the entrance of the rat, and reaches its high point when the cage is assaulted and when the poet bewails the finch's beak, all that remains after the attack:

Just then, by adverse fate impressed,
A dream disturbed poor Bully's rest;
                    In sleep he seemed to view
A rat, fast-clinging to the cage,
And, screaming at the sad presage,
                    Awoke and found it true.
For, aided both by ear and scent
Right to his mark the monster went—
                    Ah Muse! forbear to speak
Minute the horrors that ensued;
His teeth were strong, the cage was wood—
                    He left poor Bully's beak.
He left it, but he should have ta’en
That beak, whence issued many a strain
                    Of such mellifluous tone
Might have repaid him well, I wote,
For silencing so sweet a throat,
                    Fast set within his own.

The persona assumed by Cowper suits his basically comic purpose. Presumably like Maria herself, the writer of the poem becomes so strongly moved that he cannot utter what occurred during that pregnant pause between the assault and the retreat. Cowper's technique is not unlike that of Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, who, by playing the role of pilgrim and drawing attention to his own absurdity, whether real or feigned, serves as a mirror of his audience. But, unlike other satirists, Cowper cannot allow his persona to become separated from his own character and personality. Only through demonstrating his affection can he achieve his purpose: to make her laugh at her folly. He must not laugh at her but with her.

The word “minute” in the above passage best describes the nature and scope of Bully's calamity. Hovering between adjective and adverb, it forbids the muse to describe the catastrophe in detail while hinting that the horrors implied were not of great proportion. With this double meaning, it might well have been used to describe another of Cowper's best satires, “Epitaph on a Hare,” where the world of Tiney, the dead rabbit, has the dimensions of the poet's living room carpet. Here again pretense and presumption are the satirist's target. Tiney conceives of himself as an Oriental potentate. In his arrogance he learns to deny the existence of the natural enemies from which the poet protects him. He shows no gratitude for the protection which he seems to think is owed him.

Ostensibly the “epitaph” is closer to Gray's elegy on the death of Walpole's cat than is “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch.” The mood comes closer to ridicule; the folly of Tiney seems less capable of inspiring pathos. But the poem reflects Cowper's personality even more clearly than “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch.” Tiney's ingratitude causes gentle—and fond—amusement. When Cowper tells us that he kept the rabbit for “his humour's sake,” two senses of the word “humour” are involved: it refers to the animal's malevolent disposition as well as to the enjoyment which the poet derived from that temperament. Tiney's antics turned Cowper's attention from thoughts that gave him pain. Hence, the surly hare is not seen in the context of moral, ethical values but in the context of the poet's psychological response.

As in the mock elegy on Mrs. Throckmorton's bullfinch, there is irony in the relationship between the author's personality, which frames the poem, and the situation described within. In the elegy, irony took the form of a contrast between Cowper's sentiment and Mrs. Throckmorton's sentimentality. In the epitaph, the contrast is between the poet's self-possession and the hare's. If Tiney was possessed by a sense of his own worth, however, the poet is too much involved in thoughts of a different cast. Cowper's introversion is as passive as Tiney's is savage and egocentric. The mock heroic nature of the poem helps to define both kinds of self-possession, reducing Tiney's arrogance to its proper size and revealing the mild and gentle personality of the poet. One of the most amusing aspects of the poem is the way the diction undercuts Tiney. His “lawn” is a carpet; his “juicy salads” are twigs and peels; sand is necessary to “scour his maw.” In such a context Cowper's own sorrows cannot become the agonies of a romantic hero but must stay within the range of his timid, retiring nature.

To say that Cowper's main innovation is the way he injects his own feelings into mock heroic is to ignore his skill with the traditional resources of the form. Just as the absurdity of using the Orpheus myth to lionize a bullfinch has little to do with the poet's personality, so the violent contrast between the first and second stanzas of the “Epitaph” creates a kind of humor which betrays nothing of Cowper's feelings:

Here lies, whom hound did ne’er pursue,
                    Nor swifter greyhound follow,
Whose foot ne’er tainted morning dew,
                    Nor ear heard huntsman's hallo’,
Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
                    Who, nurs’d with tender care,
And to domestic bounds confin’d,
                    Was still a wild Jack-hare.

The description of Tiney is always lively and amusing, and the interplay between the tamed and untamed, the sentimental and unsentimental, show skill in managing form. Cowper has succeeded in the poem, as in the “Elegy,” because he can distance himself from his feelings and make them part of the structure.

Unlike the “Elegy” and “Epitaph,” “The Diverting History of John Gilpin” did not grow out of a situation in which Cowper had directly participated. Since the poet set out to write merely an amusing ballad founded on a story he had heard, the poem succeeds in a way different from the other two. Cowper's personality plays a less important role, and formal considerations a correspondingly more important one. Gilpin himself is a burlesque figure in the tradition of Chaucer's Sir Thopas. Both are anachronisms: solid middle-class men in a romantic world. The main difference, of course, is that Chaucer's humor is turned against himself, or at least against the persona he has adopted for The Canterbury Tales; for, as an egregious bourgeois, he pretends to be unable to tell a chivalric tale. Like Thopas, Gilpin epitomizes middle-class responsibility and respectability. He is a train-band captain (a soldier drawn from the populace to supplement the regular forces) and a hard-working linen dealer, whose relationships are confined to his family and business. He stands for such solid moral values as frugality, prudence, circumspection, and modesty. Living in a commercial area, he spends his time in mundane pursuits, the everyday details of “getting and spending.” Even when enjoying his first day of vacation in twenty years of marriage, he must put business before pleasure, must be concerned with making the best use of his leisure, and must be careful not to let it appear that he is enjoying himself too much.

Cowper's narrator, like Chaucer's, is a man of mediocre social station. He speaks the language of the Gilpins and, as I have already pointed out, is overimpressed with their wit and prestige. He has difficulties making English syntax and pronunciation fit in the confines of ballad measure, and he resorts to clichés and line padding. Unfortunately, the cadence of his lines and the arrangement of words do not always emphasize the most important words and ideas:

John Gilpin's spouse said to her dear—
                    Though wedded we have been
These twice ten tedious years, yet we
                    No holiday have seen.
To-morrow is our wedding-day,
                    And we will then repair
Unto the Bell at Edmonton
                    All in a chaise and pair.
My sister, and my sister's child,
                    Myself, and children three,
Will fill the chaise; so you must ride
                    On horseback after we.
He soon replied—I do admire
                    Of womankind but one,
And you are she, my dearest dear,
                    Therefore it shall be done.

Sometimes the narrator runs out of ideas before the stanza is complete:

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.

When it comes to diction and figures of speech, the narrator is almost always unfortunate. Early in the poem the “six precious souls” of Gilpin's family are “all agog / To dash through thick and thin”; then Gilpin proceeds on his adventure “with caution and good heed.” The snorting beast next begins to trot and “gall’d him in the seat.” There is some justification in the heroic tradition for Gilpin's “reeking” head, but certainly not for the flanks of the horse to smoke “as they had basted been”! A reference to the Wash at Edmonton “so gay” introduces a string of laundry images which also increases the hero's indignity.

To further discomfit Gilpin and the narrator, Cowper, as in “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch,” introduces variations in a stanza form which in this case seems naturally to rise to moments of highest tension in the second and fourth lines. The effect is resoundingly anticlimactic:

John Gilpin at his horse's side
                    Seiz’d fast the flowing mane,
And up he got, in haste to ride,
                    But soon came down again.
What news? what news? your tidings tell;
                    Tell me you must and shall—
Say why bare-headed you are come,
                    Or why you come at all?

Moreover, the language which casts Gilpin as a knight, “nimble steed,” “snorting beast,” “smoking flanks”; the omen that anticipates his downfall; the rumors of his heroic behavior—all are ridiculously inappropriate to his situation.

The success of “John Gilpin,” then, is a triumph of form. Parody of ballad conventions blends perfectly with mock heroic. The galloping rhythms and the understatement of the ballad stanza sustain the tone of the poem and advance the characterization of both the narrator and Gilpin. Nevertheless, Cowper's personality lends a quality to his poem which separates it from other eighteenth-century satires. In the rollicking humor, so well conveyed by ballad rhythm, can be seen the poet's own good nature. His attitude is benevolent, and he joins with the speaker at the end to sing of the hero's exploits:

Now let us sing—long live the king,
                    And Gilpin long live he;
And, when he next doth ride abroad,
                    May I be there to see!

His good nature carries over into the characterization of Gilpin as a man who can accept his condition in “a merry guise”:

Now Gilpin had a pleasant wit,
                    And lov’d a timely joke;
And thus unto the calender
                    In merry guise he spoke:—
I came because your horse would come;
                    And if I will forbode,
My hat and wig will soon be here—
                    They are upon the road.

From the title, which tells us that Gilpin (perhaps like Odysseus) “went farther than he intended, and came safe home again,” rhythm and rhetoric maintain the buoyancy of the narrator's spirits and the author's humor.

It seems clear that Cowper usually had greater success with small subjects which allowed him sufficient detachment to give play to his imagination and to project his good nature into the structure of his poetry. Form itself became more complicated and more interesting in the work of lighter moments. Against the bombastic stanzas of “On the Loss of the Royal George,” or the monotonous banalities of “The Poplar-Field,” we might measure the more supple stanzas of “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch.” Pauses are varied, creating many different cadences and sentence rhythms.

A few of Cowper's best-known, most successful poems do not benefit from comic detachment; indeed, they seem to be exceptions to the generalization that powerful emotion tended to block his imagination. Foremost among these is “The Castaway,” which, for intensity of feeling and control, stands out as Cowper's most impressive poem. As I have already pointed out, it is of biographical interest that Cowper wrote the poem at the end of his life. But biographical interest alone cannot make the poem succeed as art. The success of “The Castaway” depends upon its ability to convey the poet's despair, loneliness, and exhaustion.

The tone of “The Castaway” can be most accurately defined by comparing the poem with “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” composed in 1763. The violence of the earlier poem is spent by the time of the later. Despair has so exhausted the poet's spirit that he no longer conceives of his predicament in extravagant language like “hatred and vengeance / … Wait, with impatient readiness to size my / Soul in a moment,” “Damn’d below Judas: more abhorr’d than he was,” or “Him the vindictive rod of angry justice / Sent quick and howling to the center headlong, / I, fed with judgment in a fleshly tomb, am / Buried above ground.” In “The Castaway” his diction is subdued:

No voice divine the storm allay’d.
                    No light propitious shone;
When snatch’d from all effectual aid,
                    We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.

Moreover, the complicated six-line stanzas of “The Castaway” do not tumble forth as the tormented sapphics of the earlier “Lines.” And the imagery of “The Castaway” does not have the striking originality of the imagery in the “Lines.” In the 1763 poem, for example, the conventional image of the bolted door, used to signify the closing off of divine mercy, becomes the “bolted mouth” of Hell. This metaphor carries over into the last stanza where it helps to convey a sense of utter desolation, of being completely without hope yet totally unfulfilled; but it also climaxes the grand irony of Cowper's situation: his angry God, an embodiment of the cold outside world, was a projection of his personal sense of failure. The image is juxtaposed with the apocalyptic destruction of Abiram. Instead of being destroyed, and thus completed or fulfilled, Cowper is “fed with judgment” so that his burial in the flesh may continue. If the “Lines” reveals the poet's claustrophobia, “The Castaway” shows his sense of being abandoned in a world too large for him.

In “The Castaway” Cowper views the world with greater charity than in the “Lines”; for, although no one had been able to relieve his distress, some had had the courage to try. Formerly, he thought in terms of paradox: “living death” and “buried above ground.” Now irony turns on the recognition that in everything lies a potential for good and evil: the wind which carries the sailor's voice to the ship also carries the ship away from him. It is no longer a demented universe in which the poet lives, but it nevertheless is one which has rejected him. Cowper gives us the impression that he accepts the popular eighteenth-century religious myth of a watchmaker God who sets creation in motion and then stands aside to let it operate. The poet himself, who has been caught among the cogs and wheels, knows only that the functioning of the whole seems to have little regard for his personal needs. His God is as remote as the Deistic God; but, with his basically Calvinistic overview, Cowper could not take solace in the Deistic belief that the mechanism of the material universe operates for the good of all.

If the watchmaker God comforted the Deist, allowing him to regard the world as a fairly efficient machine, for Cowper the remoteness implied that God had turned the machine against him, that he was damned. This almost paranoid feeling accounts for the difference between pathos in “The Castaway” and pathos in much of the rest of eighteenth-century poetry. In Cowper, feeling springs not from a general benevolence toward mankind or from social impulses but from a deep sense of personal involvement. He experiences intense emotion because he cannot separate himself from the predicament of the drowning sailor. Lacking detachment, he employs irony not to stress order through exposing incongruities and absurdities, as in comedy, but to emphasize disorder and lack of proportion, as in tragedy. Looking at the plight of the castaway, he discovers himself. Hence form becomes highly personal, representing a discovery on the part of the speaker (who is not a persona but the poet himself) of his own condition and expressing the feelings generated by his personal predicament.

In “The Castaway” Cowper shows that he has grasped, although unconsciously, the paradox stated by Wordsworth in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry is both the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling and feeling recollected in tranquility. We have only to compare “The Castaway” with “Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk” to see that he speaks from the heart instead of mouthing platitudes, but, at the same time, the poem is free of the maudlin sentimentality which spoils his other poems expressing deep feeling. Narrative seems to have provided the kind of detachment that he needed to ponder fully his own situation.

It is interesting, of course, that “The Castaway,” one of Cowper's greatest and most Romantic poems, appeared so shortly after Lyrical Ballads and so close to the publication of the famous preface in which Wordsworth articulated his theory of poetry. However, there are no signs that Cowper was influenced by what history declares to be the major literary events of the time. “The Castaway” was not the product of a theory; it was solely a reflection of the poet's psychological state, and the only work of its kind that Cowper wrote. For a more “typical” performance we might turn to a poem like “Yardley Oak.”

“Yardley Oak” is Romantic in the same way that certain passages of The Task are. It reveals a feeling for nature, not as seen in landscape or generality, but as observed in specific things. Just as Cowper, when writing of the country around Olney, did not present a composite picture, as was the standard practice, but fixed his attention on the actual scene before him, so he makes Yardley Oak not a generic tree but a particular one individualized by its decayed condition and capable of exciting in the poet's imagination certain feelings about his own life. Yet the poem is more ambitious than “The Castaway.” Personal response is not enough; the poet must strive to balance his own feelings and particularized description with general truth.

“Yardley Oak” satisfies the Neo-Classical insistence on justness of sentiment, imagery, and ideas that spring naturally from the subject contemplated and accord with the cultural heritage. Because of the enormous size and age of the tree, it seems naturally to symbolize both a life longer than that which men can know and “mutability in all / That we account most durable below.” As in most eighteenth-century nature poetry, it is not the tree but the truths about nature of which the tree reminds the poet that are the subject of the poem. Also in the Neo-Classical tradition are the moral reflections which the tree sets in motion. The impressive size of the oak draws forth a Calvinistic reflection on man's fallen nature, here symbolized by the Druid rite which the poet speculates had once been carried on under the protection of the tree. Moreover, the tree reminds Cowper of the myth of Castor and Pollux, who also sprang from a “bauble,” an “embryo vastness,” and were eventually metamorphosed to stars. Also in keeping with tradition is the view of nature as both giver and taker, its act of giving the acorn life balanced by its slow destruction of the tree.

The theme of the vanity of human wishes, then, is coupled with close observation of the image as the central factor of the poem. Like many eighteenth-century predecessors, “Yardley Oak” presents a panoramic view of history to substantiate its theme. It is also characteristic of the century that the tree, as well as symbolizing the ravages of time, should cause the poet to dwell on the social implications of his subject; each link in the chain of being reflects the others:

                    So stands a kingdom, whose foundations yet
Fail not, in virtue and in wisdom laid,
Though all the superstructure, by the tooth
Pulveriz’d of venality, a shell
Stands now, and semblance only of itself.

Yet there still remains the tendency to particularize which sets “Yardley Oak” off from Neo-Classical poetry and points in the direction of the Romantics. Not only has Cowper found in the oak a vehicle for personal or subjective statement, but the tree and the experience of seeing it are too vividly portrayed just to remind us of trees in general or of “natural” truths. Sentiments like those concerning the growth of the tree and the enormous potential of an acorn are conventional enough, but Cowper's vision of the tree as a “huge throat calling to the clouds for drink” evokes feelings beyond the scope of most social and moral poetry in the eighteenth-century. Likewise, the history of the tree, although providing an opportunity for moral reflection, seems to set the tree apart instead of identifying it with the grand scheme of things. Even in personifying the oak, Cowper seems to be giving a unique turn to convention; for the figure of speech seems to focus attention on the particular properties of Yardley Oak.

In setting the tree off as an individual, Cowper not only reflects a tendency apparent in Romanticism but also mirrors his practice in “The Castaway” of abandoning generalized statement for a more particular revelation of his feelings. The feeling akin to idolatry which he feels on looking at the oak bears a clear relationship to his own longing for security and stability, a “closer walk with God.” His personification of the tree makes it appear that in it he has found a kindred spirit, another being shattered by experience. This identification was made easier by the fact that the oak was “survivor sole, and hardly such, of all / That once liv’d here thy bretheren, at my birth.” It is even possible that Cowper's reference to the worthlessness of the tree as lumber, despite the “sincerity” of its roots, has autobiographical meaning.

In “Yardley Oak” Cowper had the kind of subject matter to which he could respond with eloquence. Like landscape in The Task, the tree engaged his feelings at just the proper level. He could avoid the sentimentality which attended stronger feeling; but, at the same time, he could feel deeply enough about his subject matter to rise above frigid generalization. Like “The Castaway,” “Yardley Oak” exhibits Cowper's need for objective subject matter that would allow him to recollect strong feelings in tranquility. Unable to confront his deepest feelings in a more direct manner or to give them imaginative form, he had to seek subjects external to himself with which he would feel a kindred spirit. In his lyric as in his comic verse, control is, therefore, the key to excellence.