William Cowper- Collected Poetical Works

by William Cowper

  Here again is a little picture of rural life from the Winter Morning

  Walk.

  The cattle mourn in corners, where the fence

  Screens them, and seem half-petrified to sleep

  In unrecumbent sadness. There they wait

  Their wonted fodder; not like hungering man,

  Fretful if unsupplied; but silent, meek,

  And patient of the slow-paced swain’s delay.

  He from the stack carves out the accustomed load

  Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft,

  His broad keen knife into the solid mass:

  Smooth as a wall the upright remnant stands,

  With such undeviating and even force

  He severs it away: no needless care,

  Lest storms should overset the leaning pile

  Deciduous, or its own unbalanced weight.

  Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcern’d

  The cheerful haunts of man; to wield the axe

  And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,

  from, morn to eve, his solitary task.

  Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with pointed ears

  And tail cropp’d short, half lurcher and half cur,

  His dog attends him. Close behind his heel

  Now creeps he slow; and now, with many a frisk

  Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow

  With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;

  Then shakes his powder’d coat, and barks for joy.

  Heedless of all his pranks, the sturdy churl

  Moves right toward the mark; nor stops for aught

  But now and then with pressure of his thumb

  To adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube,

  That fumes beneath his nose: the trailing cloud

  Streams far behind him, scenting all the air.

  The minutely faithful description of the man carving the load of hay out of the stack, and again those of the gambolling dog, and the woodman smoking his pipe with the stream of smoke trailing behind him, remind us of the touches of minute fidelity in Homer. The same may be said of many other passages.

  The sheepfold here

  Pours out its fleecy tenants o’er the glebe.

  At first, progressive as a stream they seek

  The middle field: but, scatter’d by degrees,

  Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land.

  There from the sun-burnt hay-field homeward creeps

  The loaded wain: while lighten’d of its charge,

  The wain that meets it passes swiftly by;

  The boorish driver leaning o’er his team

  Vociferous and impatient of delay.

  A specimen of more imaginative and distinctly poetical description is the well-known passage on evening, in writing which Cowper would seem to have had Collins in his mind.

  Come, Evening, once again, season of peace,

  Return, sweet Evening, and continue long!

  Methinks I see thee in the streaky west,

  With matron-step slow-moving, while the Night

  Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employed

  In letting fall the curtain of repose

  On bird and beast, the other charged for man

  With sweet oblivion of the cares of day:

  Not sumptuously adorn’d, nor needing aid,

  Like homely-featured Night, of clustering gems!

  A star or two just twinkling on thy brow

  Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine

  No less than hers, not worn indeed on high

  With ostentatious pageantry, but set.

  With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,

  Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.

  Beyond this line Cowper does not go, and had no idea of going; he never thinks of lending a soul to material nature as Wordsworth and Shelley do. He is the poetic counterpart of Gainsborough, as the great descriptive poets of a later and more spiritual day are the counterparts of Turner. We have said that Cowper’s peasants are genuine as well as his landscape; he might have been a more exquisite Crabbe if he had turned his mind that way, instead of writing sermons about a world which to him was little more than an abstraction, distorted moreover, and discoloured by his religious asceticism.

  Poor, yet industrious, modest, quiet, neat,

  Such claim compassion in a night like this,

  And have a friend in every feeling heart.

  Warm’d, while it lasts, by labour, all day long

  They brave the season, and yet find at eve,

  Ill clad, and fed but sparely, time to cool.

  The frugal housewife trembles when she lights

  Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear,

  But dying soon, like all terrestrial joys.

  The few small embers left, she nurses well;

  And, while her infant race, with outspread hands

  And crowded knees sit cowering o’er the sparks,

  Retires, content to quake, so they be warm’d.

  The man feels least, as more inured than she

  To winter, and the current in his veins

  More briskly moved by his severer toil;

  Yet he too finds his own distress in theirs,

  The taper soon extinguish’d, which I saw

  Dangled along at the cold finger’s end

  Just when the day declined; and the brown loaf

  Lodged on the shelf, half eaten without sauce

  Of savoury cheese, or batter, costlier still:

  Sleep seems their only refuge: for, alas’

  Where penury is felt the thought is chained,

  And sweet colloquial pleasures are but few!

  With all this thrift they thrive not. All the care

  Ingenious Parsimony takes, but just

  Saves the small inventory, bed and stool,

  Skillet, and old carved chest, from public sale.

  They live, and live without extorted alms

  from grudging hands: but other boast have none

  To soothe their honest pride that scorns to beg,

  Nor comfort else, but in their mutual love.

  Here we have the plain, unvarnished record of visitings among the poor of Olney. The last two lines are simple truth as well as the rest.

  “In some passages, especially in the second book, you will observe me very satirical.” In the second book of The Task, there are some bitter things about the clergy, and in the passage pourtraying a fashionable preacher, there is a touch of satiric vigour, or rather of that power of comic description which was one of the writer’s gifts. But of Cowper as a satirist enough has been said.

  “What there is of a religious cast in the volume I have thrown towards the end of it, for two reasons; first, that I might not revolt the reader at his entrance, and secondly, that my best impressions might be made last. Were I to write as many volumes as Lope de Vega or Voltaire, not one of them would be without this tincture. If the world like it not, so much the worse for them. I make all the concessions I can, that I may please them, but I will not please them at the expense of conscience.” The passages of The Task penned by conscience, taken together, form a lamentably large proportion of the poem. An ordinary reader can be carried through them, if at all, only by his interest in the history of opinion, or by the companionship of the writer, who is always present, as Walton is in his Angler, as White is in his Selbourne. Cowper, however, even at his worst, is a highly cultivated methodist; if he is sometimes enthusiastic, and possibly superstitious, he is never coarse or unctuous. He speaks with contempt of “the twang of the conventicle.” Even his enthusiasm had by this time been somewhat tempered. Just after his conversion he used to preach to everybody. He had found out, as he tells us himself, that this was a mistake, that “the pulpit was for preaching; the garden, the parlour, and the walk abroad were for friendly and agreeable conversation.” It may have been his consciousness of a certain change in himself that deterred him
from taking Newton into his confidence when he was engaged upon The Task. The worst passages are those which betray a fanatical antipathy to natural science, especially that in the third book (150 — 190). The episode of the judgment of heaven on the young atheist Misagathus, in the sixth book, is also fanatical and repulsive.

  Puritanism had come into violent collision with the temporal power, and had contracted a character fiercely political and revolutionary. Methodism fought only against unbelief, vice, and the coldness of the establishment; it was in no way political, much less revolutionary; by the recoil from the atheism of the French Revolution its leaders, including Wesley himself, were drawn rather to the Tory side. Cowper, we have said, always remained in principle what he had been born, a Whig, an unrevolutionary Whig, an “Old Whig” to adopt the phrase made canonical by Burke.

  ’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower

  Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,

  And we are weeds without it. All constraint

  Except what wisdom lays on evil men

  Is evil.

  The sentiment of these lines, which were familiar and dear to Cobden, is tempered by judicious professions of loyalty to a king who rules in accordance with the law. At one time Cowper was inclined to regard the government of George III as a repetition of that of Charles I, absolutist in the State and reactionary in the Church; but the progress of revolutionary opinions evidently increased his loyalty, as it did that of many other Whigs, to the good Tory king. We shall presently see, however, that the views of the French Revolution, itself expressed in his letters are wonderfully rational, calm, and free from the political panic and the apocalyptic hallucination, both of which we should rather have expected to find in him. He describes himself to Newton as having been, since his second attack of madness, “an extramundane character with reference to this globe, and though not a native of the moon, not made of the dust of this planet.” The Evangelical party has remained down to the present day non-political, and in its own estimation extramundane, taking part in the affairs of the nation only when some religious object was directly in view. In speaking of the family of nations, an Evangelical poet is of course a preacher of peace and human brotherhood. He has even in some lines of Charity, which also were dear to Cobden, remarkably anticipated the sentiment of modern economists respecting the influence of free trade in making one nation of mankind. The passage is defaced by an atrociously bad simile: —

  Again — the band of commerce was design’d,

  To associate all the branches of mankind,

  And if a boundless plenty be the robe,

  Trade is the golden girdle of the globe.

  Wise to promote whatever end he means,

  God opens fruitful Nature’s various scenes,

  Each climate needs what other climes produce,

  And offers something to the general use;

  No land but listens to the common call,

  And in return receives supply from all.

  This genial intercourse and mutual aid

  Cheers what were else an universal shade,

  Calls Nature from her ivy-mantled den,

  And softens human rock-work into men.

  Now and then, however, in reading The Task, we come across a dash of warlike patriotism which, amidst the general philanthropy, surprises and offends the reader’s palate, like the taste of garlic in our butter.

  An innocent Epicurism, tempered by religious asceticism of a mild kind — such is the philosophy of The Task, and such the ideal embodied in the portrait of the happy man with which it concludes. Whatever may be said of the religious asceticism, the Epicurism required a corrective to redeem it from selfishness and guard it against self-deceit. This solitary was serving humanity in the best way he could, not by his prayers, as in one rather fanatical passage he suggests, but by his literary work; he had need also to remember that humanity was serving him. The newspaper through which he looks out so complacently into the great “Babel,” has been printed in the great Babel itself, and brought by the poor postman, with his “spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks,” to the recluse sitting comfortably by his fireside. The “fragrant lymph” poured by “the fair” for their companion in his cosy seclusion, has been brought over the sea by the trader, who must encounter the moral dangers of a trader’s life, as well as the perils of the stormy wave. It is delivered at the door by

  The waggoner who bears

  The pelting brunt of the tempestuous night,

  With half-shut eyes and puckered cheeks and teeth

  Presented bare against the storm;

  and whose coarseness and callousness, as he whips his team, are the consequences of the hard calling in which he ministers to the recluse’s pleasure and refinement. If town life has its evils, from the city comes all that makes retirement comfortable and civilized. Retirement without the city-would have been bookless and have fed on acorns.

  Rousseau is conscious of the necessity of some such institution as slavery, by way of basis for his beautiful life according to nature. The celestial purity and felicity of St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia are sustained by the labour of two faithful slaves. A weak point of Cowper’s philosophy, taken apart from his own saving activity as a poet, betrays itself in a somewhat similar way.

  Or if the garden with its many cares

  All well repaid demand him, he attends

  The welcome call, conscious how much the hand

  Of lubbard labour, needs his watchful eye,

  Oft loitering lazily if not o’er seen;

  Or misapplying his unskilful strength

  But much performs himself, no works indeed

  That ask robust tough sinews bred to toil,

  Servile employ, but such as may amuse

  Not tire, demanding rather skill than force.

  We are told in The Task that there is no sin in allowing our own happiness to be enhanced by contrast with the less happy condition of others: if we are doing our best to increase the happiness of others, there is none. Cowper, as we have said before, was doing this to the utmost of his limited capacity.

  Both in the Moral Satires and in The Task, there are sweeping denunciations of amusements which we now justly deem innocent, and without which or something equivalent to them, the wrinkles on the brow of care could not be smoothed, nor life preserved from dulness and moroseness. There is fanaticism in this no doubt: but in justice to the Methodist as well as to the Puritan, let it be remembered that the stage, card parties, and even dancing once had in them something from which even the most liberal morality might recoil.

  In his writings generally, but especially in The Task, Cowper, besides being an apostle of virtuous retirement and evangelical piety, is, by his general tone, an apostle of sensibility. The Task, is a perpetual protest not only against the fashionable vices and the irreligion, but against the hardness of the world; and in a world which worshipped Chesterfield the protest was not needless, nor was it ineffective. Among the most tangible characteristics of this special sensibility is the tendency of its brimming love of humankind to overflow upon animals, and of this there are marked instances in some passages of The Task.

  I would not enter on my list of friends

  (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,

  Yet wanting sensibility) the man

  Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.

  Of Cowper’s sentimentalism (to use the word in a neutral sense), part flowed from his own temperament, part was Evangelical, but part belonged to an element which was European, which produced the Nouvelle Heloise and the Sorrows of Werther, and which was found among the Jacobins in sinister companionship with the cruel frenzy of the Revolution. Cowper shows us several times that he had been a reader of Rousseau, nor did he fail to produce in his time a measure of the same effect which Rousseau produced; though there have been so many sentimentalists since, and the vein has been so much worked, that it is difficult to carry ourselves back in imagination t
o the day in which Parisian ladies could forego balls to read the Nouvelle Heloise, or the stony heart of people of the world could be melted by The Task.

  In his versification, as in his descriptions, Cowper flattered himself that he imitated no one. But he manifestly imitates the softer passages of Milton, whose music he compares in a rapturous passage of one of his letters to that of a fine organ. To produce melody and variety, he, like Milton, avails himself fully of all the resources of a composite language. Blank verse confined to short Anglo-Saxon words is apt to strike the ear, not like the swell of an organ, but like the tinkle of a musical-box.

  The Task made Cowper famous. He was told that he had sixty readers at the Hague alone. The interest of his relations and friends in him revived, and those of whom he had heard nothing for many years emulously renewed their connexion. Colman and Thurlow reopened their correspondence with him, Colman writing to him “like a brother.” Disciples, young Mr. Rose, for instance, came to sit at his feet. Complimentary letters were sent to him, and poems submitted to his judgment. His portrait was taken by famous painters. Literary lion-hunters began to fix their eyes upon him. His renown spread even to Olney. The clerk of All Saints’, Northampton, came over to ask him to write the verses annually appended to the bill of mortality for that parish. Cowper suggested that “there were several men of genius in Northampton, particularly Mr. Cox, the statuary, who, as everybody knew, was a first-rate maker of verses.” “Alas!” replied the clerk, “I have heretofore borrowed help from him, but he is a gentleman of so much reading that the people of our town cannot understand him.” The compliment was irresistible, and for seven years the author of The Task wrote the mortuary verses for All Saints’, Northampton. Amusement, not profit, was Cowper’s aim; he rather rashly gave away his copyright to his publisher, and his success does not seem to have brought him money in a direct way, but it brought him a pension of 300 pounds in the end. In the meantime it brought him presents, and among them an annual gift of 50 pounds from an anonymous hand, the first instalment being accompanied by a pretty snuff-box ornamented with a picture of the three hares. From the gracefulness of the gift, Southey infers that it came from a woman, and he conjectures that the woman was Theodora.