WILLIAM COWPER, CHARLOTTE SMITH
William Cowper wrote some of the best-known hymns and poems in English—so well known that they travel incognito, having acquired the authority of anonymity, like the ballads “Rule Britannia,” “Drink to me only” and “The Passionate Shepherd.” Such a fate never overtook a Romantic poem. Cowper is not quite a Romantic, though his hand is on the latch. He is the other poet with a claim to being the “greatest” between Pope and Wordsworth. As mad as Smart, though with a different kind of madness, he broke through to God in his hymns, and in “social” and “normative” verse discovered the social language, if not the society, of his time.
His poetry proved of value to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Coleridge’s original lectures on English poetry define three periods, the third running from Cowper to “the present day.” For him something important begins with Cowper, a poet who read the poems of George Herbert with delight when Herbert was almost forgotten, who knew Milton’s work as few before him had, and developed a personal, discursive, blank-verse style that in directness and variety of tone foreshadows Wordsworth’s. He loved Robert Burns and regretted only the dialect, not because it was inexpressive but because English readers gave up on it too easily (“His candle is bright, but shut up in a dark lantern”). De Quincey often joins Cowper’s name with Edward Young’s and Wordsworth’s as meditative poets of a kind, always allowing to Wordsworth the greenest laurel.
Cowper’s spiritual and secular unhappiness were of a piece with those of other poets of his century. But he dwells insistently on his own guilt, with the hubristic humility of a Protestant who knows himself to be the most abject of all sinners: such exaggeration guarantees him the attention, even if derisive, of God.
Your sea of troubles you have past,
And found the peaceful shore;
I, tempest-tossed, and wrecked at last,
Come home to port no more.
Critics are reluctant to make the claims for Cowper that he deserves. There’s something about him: the self-obsession of Hoccleve, the variable copiousness of Thomson, the excellence of the hymns, which are a genre not quite polite... In one anthology the head note for Cowper begins, “Of all the poets in this selection, Cowper is perhaps the smallest in poetical stature. He would probably have counted himself lucky to figure in such grand company.”
In important ways Cowper is original, and the emotional and intellectual range of his poems is wide. A “milder muse” dominates, but there are reasons for this: Cowper had to court that Muse more intensely than any poet in the language, because for him poetry was a means of talking himself back from the edge, not—in the fashion of the 1960s and 1970s—of coaxing himself over it. Acquaintance with his darker verse makes the “milder muse” a formidable and healing figure. Cowper’s work gains in definition when we understand his motives in writing. His Augustanism is illuminated when we realize, as Donald Davie does, that the poems “were written under the shadow of psychosis.”
Cowper was born in 1731 at Great Berkhamstead, where his father, a grand-nephew of the first Earl Cowper and onetime royal chaplain, was rector. On his mother’s side he could claim remote kinship with John Donne. His first trauma was his mother’s death when he was six, a loss consolingly weighed in the remarkable poem “On the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture out of Norfolk,” written after his earliest experience of madness. “Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass’d / With me but roughly since I heard thee last...” Intense pathos, untouched by sentimentality. At his first school he was bullied. He went on to Westminster School, where he was happier and able to excel. Among his classmates was the satirist Charles Churchill. Cowper read Homer, Milton and Cowley deeply. He translated Homer and the Latin poems of Milton.
At the age of eighteen he entered the Middle Temple and in 1754 he was called to the bar. He fell in love with his cousin Theodora, whose father, sensing Cowper’s instability and poor prospects, opposed the match. It was another blow to him. His “Delia” poems, addressed to Theodora, though not his best work, attest to his devotion. He came to expect failure—even, at times, to court it. He began to withdraw from the world, and his father’s death, leaving him only a modest inheritance, precipitated his decline. He was a commissioner of bankrupts (1759–65). His family exerted itself to secure him a better post, but when it was offered he was unable to accept it. He attempted suicide and was confined to an asylum. He was not surprised by his breakdown: it was part of the pattern he expected.
Recovery coincided with an evangelical conversion. Later he could write, “The path of sorrow, and that path alone, / Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.” He was lifted up by reading a biblical text in Romans. Tenuously “cured,” he went to live in Huntingdon with the Reverend and Mrs. (“My Mary”) Unwin (1765–67). The Unwins, Anglican evangelicals, supported him, and after her husband’s death Mrs. Unwin tended Cowper in his illnesses. His love for her was the subject of several poems more mature and memorable than the “Delia” poems:
Thy indistinct expressions seem
Like language uttered in a dream;
Yet me they charm, whate’er the theme,
My Mary!
This was written in the twentieth year of their friendship; she is fading, and he believes himself (as usual) responsible for her decline. They had almost married, but desisted at a recurrence of Cowper’s malady. She fell ill in 1791 and he helped look after her until her death in 1796. He died, miserable and ill, in 1800, having composed his harrowing poem “The Castaway” two years earlier:
No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone;
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
The “he” was mercifully drowned; the “I” survives to suffer. Images of storm, shipwreck, drowning and isolation are leitmotifs through the poetry, even in unexpected humorous contexts. Shipwreck and drowning epitomize human vulnerability. Theological and psychological elements coexist in the images: they come at points when Cowper is peculiarly, darkly, himself. “Alexander Selkirk,” ostensibly about the human prototype for Robinson Crusoe, is a personal vision: Cowper as castaway. “The Loss of the Royal George,” a superb dirge, comes fraught with personal cargo. The ship sank in calm water, unexpectedly.
Toll for the brave—
The brave! that are no more:
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore.
Happy or at least contented times precede his miserable end. With Mrs. Unwin he moved to Olney. There they encountered a rather dreadful Calvinist, the Reverend John Newton. Whatever else he may have done, he elicited from the poet the Olney Hymns at a time when Cowper was again suffering mental and spiritual torment. His faith revived, but he still doubted his own election for salvation. He dreamed that God had damned him and the hymns are heavy with a hopeless hope. Davie suggests that Cowper’s depressive madness was connected with the extreme Calvinism of the evangelicals. He recovered from the dream of damnation, resigned worldly ambitions, accepted his fall from grace. In nature he found external solace. Tending leverets and birds gave purpose to his retirement. The nature he describes in his verse with minute and loving particularity appealed to those caught up in the vogue for the picturesque. Unlike them, he came to nature directly, not through art.
His earliest attempts at extended verse were the eight Moral Satires, suggested to him by Mary. He worked best when someone requested poems from him. Newton catalyzed the hymns, Lady Austen provoked The Task, the roistering ballad “John Gilpin” and other poems. Occasions for poems were offered by those solicitous for his health and keen to prevent him from reflecting on his spiritual condition. The verse is much more than therapy. It has the mild urgency of a man intent to look abroad, away from himself, to attach his vision to the created world. At least nature won’t condemn or rebuff him. What he writes is strenuously normative, judiciously moralized: self-doubt in quest of certitude. The tenuous structure of the long poems reveals the uncertainty of his control, but it is hard to fault the surface. Coleridge praises above all the “clarity of diction” and “harmony” of the blank verse.
Cowper translated widely. His blank-verse Homer is not a masterpiece: set beside Pope’s couplet version it shows how much even late Augustans abandon when they abandon rhyme. But his Horace, Virgil and Ovid are variously excellent. He translated from French and from the Greek Anthology, displaying technical competence in epigrams, hymns, anthems, elegies, lyrics, pastorals, discursive poems and epistles (in verse and prose: he is among the best letter writers in the language).
Norman Nicholson concentrates on the paradoxical nature of the poet: “a recluse who became the spokesman of a great popular religious and democratic movement; and an oddity, an eccentric, a refugee from society, who, perhaps more than any other English poet, expressed the aspirations of the average man of his time.” The poems have “the merit of good conversation,” an intimacy with their readers. Normative verse is powerful when it is hard won, when the troubled poet willfully achieves normality.
Conversational verse is uncommon in an age still overshadowed by Pope, whom Cowper admired with reservations, and under the spell of Milton. Cowper’s Milton is not mediated through Thomson: it is Milton himself, whose Latin he translated, whom he set out to edit in 1791. He avoids Milton’s grandiloquence because he is aware of having particular readers, concerned with specific issues and images. He has a defined personality, and he selects in The Task a loose associative form over a narrative structure. His debt to Milton is not, like Gray’s and Collins’s, to the shorter poems, but to Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. His other master is Homer; he doubts only the morality of devoting so much time to a pagan poet. The absence of Shakespeare is evidence of how essentially literary a poet Cowper was in his earlier work.
D. J. Enright compares Cowper with Herbert. Cowper asks that we assent to his presentation of faith, while Herbert’s representations are of faith as experience. Cowper teases out his morals, Herbert as often as not leaves the moral implicit. Cowper is didactic where Herbert is devotional, with the immediacy of prayer and not the remove of sermonizing. Coleridge admires in The Task the “vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with the sombre hue of its religious opinions.” “Opinions” is the right word, opinions argued and affirmed, only seldom conveyed to the pulse. Yet the opinions must have been widely held, for between its publication in 1782 and 1800 eleven editions of The Task appeared.
In “Table Talk,” the first of the Moral Satires, Cowper modestly presents his claims as a poet. “I play with syllables, and sport in song.” The understatement goes too far. This poem begins with philosophy and politics and, like good table talk, takes much else in its stride, most memorably the halcyon poetic genius. His literary firmament includes Homer, Virgil and Milton.
In 1783, the year of Crabbe’s The Village and Blake’s Poetical Sketches, Cowper began The Task. Lady Austen requested an epic about a sofa. “I sing the Sofa. I, who lately sang / Truth, Hope and Charity.” Soon enough he gets back to Truth, Hope and Charity. After a history of seats, a comment on the suitability of sofas for sufferers from the gout, he expresses a desire that he may never experience that illness. Why?
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep,
And skirted close with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs...
The sofa establishes a tone: drawing room, comfort, conversation. It inaugurates, too, what is virtually a theme: the rich texture of things in the world, physical sensations, and the theme of illness and enforced repose. The poem connects not by argument or narrative but through tone. It develops by association an interchange between particular observation and moral generalization. Cowper’s blank verse suggests the tone and subject matter of Wordsworth:
Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds,
Exhilarate the spirit, and restore
The tone of languid Nature.
“Languid” may not be Wordsworthian, but more than a common debt to Milton associates the poets in our minds. They partly share a vision of nature. Of the cacophonous birds, Cowper writes that they
...have charms for me,
Sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh,
Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns,
And only there, please highly for their sake.
Cowper is less elemental, more comforting than Wordsworth.
Abstracted from the poetry, the thought of The Task is not distinguished, but in context it is realized and vivid. Only the positive moral exhortations, against slavery and blood sports, for example, or in favor of certain religious views, weary the reader. In promoting reform Cowper prefers exhortation to satire. Yet in poetry, satire is generally the more effective.
One of the triumphs of Cowper’s art and vision comes in the third book, “I was the stricken deer,” evoking the function of Christ and the true nature of redemption, which for an exalted moment sets Cowper almost on a par with Herbert.
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 eek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had himself
Been hurt by th’ archer. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal’d, and bade me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few associates, and not wishing more.
This is oblique autobiography. Other vivid descriptive passages, about cucumbers, greenhouses, animals, the winter landscape and the hearth, add a documentary interest to the poem, but always animated by a spiritual and a psychological interest. One need only compare The Task with Thomson’s The Seasons to see how the Augustan imperatives were being questioned and eroded by a first-person singular coming to terms with its singularity.
In “John Gilpin,” “Epitaph on a Hare” with its accuracy and gentle humor, “The Poplar-Field” which meant a great deal to both Coleridge and Hopkins, and “Yardley Oak”—the majestic unfinished moral poem—readers find the readiest access to Cowper. They first hear him (without proper introduction) in church when they sing his Olney Hymns, “Oh! for a closer walk with God” and “God moves in a mysterious way.” In the poems it is the same voice, and a music not of organs but of intimate speech.
Eighteen years after Cowper’s birth, in 1749, an unaccountably neglected poet, Charlotte Smith (half remembered as a novelist) was born. If Cowper had his hand on the latch of Romanticism, her foot was firmly in the door. Wordsworth read her: Dorothy Wordsworth recalls his turning the pages of her Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays—the fifth edition, for she was popular in her time; and he visited her in Brighton. She treated him politely, introducing him to other women writers in the town. In London at the end of the century she dined with the young Coleridge. A recurrent footnote, doggedly represented in anthologies by a sonnet that is wonderful (“Pressed by the moon, mute arbitress of tides”) and to which few attend closely, she is a key poet of the transition to Romanticism.
Among women writers she is, after Mary Sidney, the first substantial poet. The sonnets resemble Cowper’s verse in tone, but without his specific anxieties. Meditative, judicious, Smith also has a clear, unconventional vision. Her language seeks out representative detail; too many exclamations and vocatives irrupt into the verse, yet scene and sensibility are sharply delineated:
The wild blast, rising from the western cave,
Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed,
Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,
And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!
With shells and seaweed mingled, on the shore
Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
But vain to them the winds and waters rave;
They hear the warring elements no more:
While I am doomed—by life’s long storm oppressed,
To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.
Gothic, yes: but beneath or despite the gothic, astonishing in visual, prosodic and tonal precision. Her coy description of herself as “an early worshipper at Nature’s shrine” sells her short. It is true that she observes nature, walking out on the hills and along the shore, but her “worship” is more “witness,” her nature is not transcendent, despite her rhetoric. What distinguishes her as a writer is her formal assurance. In the much-anthologized “Thirty-Eight” she masters with wit and wisdom a difficult form and develops a crucial theme, that of growing older, with tact, feeling and wit.
She was born Charlotte Turner at Bignor Park in Sussex and enjoyed a privileged childhood, though her mother died when she was three. Terrified at the prospect of her father’s remarriage, she herself disastrously married Benjamin Smith, profligate son of a West India merchant, when she was sixteen. He spent them into debt and then debtors’ prison. She bore Mr. Smith ten children, eight of whom survived; she left him, and began—having already started in 1784 with the Elegiac Sonnets, which had success—to make her way as a writer. She wrote on average a book each year for two decades. Mr. Smith remains, in various fictional guises, the villain of her life and occasions some of the gloomy skies in her poems. But she had read Rousseau and was inspired by the French Revolution. Her poetic imagination emerges generally at night; in the dark, shapes are larger, lights brighter, the landscape takes on an alternative, accepting definition. In her major poem, Beachy Head, she does not appropriate, colonize or look through nature to an absolute. She witnesses and celebrates with gratitude to nature rather than, through nature, to God.
What makes her neglect unaccountable is that she achieved, avant la lettre, so much that is celebrated in the work of Wordsworth in particular, as well as the Coleridge of “This Lime Tree Bower” and the blank-verse narratives. Beachy Head evinces, beyond its assured tone, a mastery of blank-verse meditation and a compelling, complex syntax that mimes the movement of thought. Clearly she is rooted in the eighteenth century, but emancipation has taken place, she has created first a distance from the stylistic vices and reflexes of the age, and then a space for her own sensibility to identify a physical world and a physical and spiritual self.
The high meridian of the day is past,
And Ocean now, reflecting the calm Heaven,
Is of cerulean hue; and murmurs low
The tide of ebb, upon the level sands,
The sloop, her angular canvas shifting still,
Catches the light and variable airs
That but a little crisp the summer sea
Dimpling its tranquil surface.
Pure description, and from its purity something more comes, as though we are returning to a literal uncomplicated world after the packed diction and decorum of the “social century.” Charlotte Smith is not, like Smart and Cowper, an exception, someone set apart as a consequence of illness or the estrangements of genius. She is propelled forward by Milton, Thomson and Pope. There are the epithets, the rhetorical bric-a-brac, the large abstractions, yet in the foreground a literal vision is trained upon an actual world. And she has a landscape quite as specific as Wordsworth’s, the Sussex of her unimpeded childhood. Her personal hardship is there in tone, but seldom in the frame; celebration and reflection are given in judicious measure:
Ah! hills so early loved! in fancy still
I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold
Those widely spreading views, mocking alike
The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art.
And still, observing objects more minute,
Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms
Of seashells; with the pale calcerous soil
Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance.
Though surely the blue Ocean (from the heights
Where the Downs westward trend, but dimly seen)
Here never rolled its surge. Does Nature then
Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes
Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling
To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world?
Or did this range of chalky mountains once
Form a vast basin, where the Ocean waves
Swelled fathomless?
Such blank verse, with its variable enjambements, creating the kinds of syntactical suspense that urges us on, so that description is vibrant, unpredictable and alive in the verse reflection, is unusual in any century. The diction is assured and “modern” in the manner of Thomson, using a precise, scientific register, yet naturally, as an informed person would. If the verse were anonymous, would we be inclined to surmise that it was written by a woman? I think we would, especially if we knew the date of its composition. Beachy Head was published in 1807, the year after Charlotte Smith died. It is the work of an unsung maturity: at times humorous, full of a love of specific nature, marked too by longing, less for youth and romance than for that lost world when imagination was unconstrained, the world before Benjamin Smith and children and the labor of sustaining a family as a single parent. The world before she, like some of her intimate friends and some of the Romantics she prefigures, was an opium addict. Yet these circumstances are not adduced in the poems. They inform only the tone.
Charlotte Smith’s poetry may have been delivered from the trammels of the eighteenth century by means of her fiction writing: the verse is wonderfully efficient, in its disclosure of scene and theme, evenly measured, rising to grandeur, scaling down to microscopic observation. Her fault in the longer poems is formal: extension rather than structure. Yet if we read her as we tend to read Cowper, Pope or Thomson, in extract, she is not out of place. Her work was once popular, but it was not absorbed into the critical culture of the day; its claims were not made. We can say that she was appreciated by Wordsworth, but his appreciation was not eloquent. We can say that her example empowered Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But Charlotte Smith is not a footnote to Romanticism. She deserves to be read today.