POETS Day! William Cowper

Paul Dean and his band were doing pretty well, but not headliner well. They opened for Kiss when that mattered and later opened for ZZ Top, which always matters. One night in Cape Cod, they went out in front of a crowd that was having none of them. The crowd wanted ZZ Top and had no patience for these appetizers on stage. They threw lighters, bottles, whatever was at hand. Dean and his guys gave up after four songs sung to boos and jeering and walked off stage.

Later, wandering an empty beach one afternoon he thought, “Where is everybody? Well, I guess they’re all waiting for the weekend.” His vocalist would change the phrasing and he and the rest of Loverboy scored a hit with “Everybody’s Waiting for the Weekend.”

Walk away from work. Think about the weekend. Profit.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Be like Loverboy. Skip out of work mid-afternoon and live on your own schedule. Enjoy POETS Day.

***

I have to keep reminding myself that Cowper is pronounced “cooper.” I don’t usually “hear” myself when I read unless I slow down and make a point of it as I do when reading poetry, but sometimes I stumble over words or phrases and they make a point of pausing me. With poetry I’ll concentrate on what I’d expect to hear and sound things out mentally, but with prose I usually take in mute pages unless something foreign or unfamiliar requires attention. It’s quicker that way.

Cowper trips me up because I’m conscious that the way the name should be pronounced isn’t how I want to pronounce it even though my plan wasn’t to give it any voice at all. Two things cannot not exist in the same mental space, so it’s a speed bump. Magdalen College does that to me too, and an unfortunate side effect of that read-flow-breaking conscious correction is that I occasionally read about Mary Maudlin. Cowper frustrates me further by living in a house called Olney, pronounced “Own-y.”

He was wildly popular in his lifetime. The usually excellent anonymous biographer at poetryfoundation.org, who is currently in my doghouse for imposing a speed bump of his or her own by using “potentialities” where “potential” would have sufficed, writes that Cowper was “the foremost poet of the generation between Alexander Pope and Willaim Wordsworth,” and that “For several decades, he had probably the largest readership of any English poet.” I may be naïve in assuming that the anonymous biographer working for Norton’s at the time they published the fifth edition of Norton’s Anthology of English Literature is a different he or she than the one that works for Poetry Foundation, but that person writes “he wrote letters (some of the best of the century),” – which strikes me as a very odd thing to claim – and that his poetry “brought him a measure of fame that his modest nature could never have hoped for.”

I knew of him, but I don’t think I read his work until this week. He was an inspiration to the Romantics and a poet you feel like you should be familiar with. I wasn’t, and reading about him took me aback. In Heretics, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly alien logic of predestination.”

In 1773, Cowper had a dream in which he was told “Actum est de te, periisti” which, I’m told by the Poetry Foundation, is translated from Latin as “It is all over with thee, thou hast perished.” Chesterton’s Catholic issues with predestination aside, Cowper was a believer and he spent his life convinced he was damned. Religious belief is not evidence of insanity. There were breakdowns that led to stints as a patient at, for certain, St. Alban’s asylum as it was mentioned specifically, though it may be that he convalesced at other institutions as well. His certitude must have been torture.

After the dream, he attempted suicide, which fortunately, this being his fourth attempt, he was terrible at. I can’t imagine anything more irrational than, when assured of eternal damnation, acting to immanentize that fate. At the very least, bide your time. A year later he completed this next poem, alternately titled “Lines Written During a Fit of Insanity.”

Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion
William Cowper (1731-1800)

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy master.
Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram’s.

Him 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.

He went on with a retired life. Cowper gardened and gathered friends. He had a hit with his farce “The Diverting History of John Gilpin,” in 1783 but was privately in misery. It’s hard to reconcile the wit with the man in turmoil. Chesterton wrote that though “He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin.” If humor was a refuge, he went back to it in at least the first book of his 1785 long poem, The Task. It’s considered his masterwork; an influence on Coleridge and Jane Austen, on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” in particular, and Wikipedia tells me Robert Burns claimed to “habitually” carry a copy with him in his pocket, though that would require a very impressive pocket.

The Task began as just that. He was bored and told his friend Lady Austen (not related to Jane, as best I can tell) that he had nothing to write about and so she assigned him to write about the sofa. He did, in mock heroic Miltonic style.

from Book I: The Sofa

The hardy chief upon the rugged rock
Wash’d by the sea, or on the grav’ly bank
Thrown up by wintry torrents roaring loud,
Fearless of wrong, repos’d his weary strength.
Those barb’rous ages past, succeeded next
The birth-day of invention; weak at first,
Dull in design, and clumsy to perform.
Joint-stools were then created; on three legs
Upborn they stood. Three legs upholding firm
A massy slab, in fashion square or round.
On such a stool immortal Alfred sat,
And sway’d the sceptre of his infant realms:
And such in ancient halls and mansions drear
May still be seen; but perforated sore,
And drill’d in holes, the solid oak is found,
By worms voracious eating through and through.

And on he goes through chairs and settees until a proper sofa comes along.

Here, I have said, at least I should possess
The poet’s treasure, silence, and indulge
The dreams of fancy, tranquil and secure.

Once seated he can rest his legs, forget his gout, and recall youthful walks and wanderings through the countryside. It turns from humorous to wonderous.

Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjur’d up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of them all.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slacken’d to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.

I’ve only read that first book. The remaining five – “The Timepiece,” “The Garden,” “The Winter Evening,” “The Winter Morning Walk,” and “The Winter Walk at Noon” – carry on in wonderous, from what I gather.

The last one of his hymns, many of which are still in liturgical rotation today, was published in 1774. “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” known as “Light Shining Out of Darkness” as a poem without musical accompaniment, was written after his damnation revelation. He believed in and loved God despite his dream.

I’ve read about mental illness as a drive-by layman but only enough to know that there are manic and depressive phases experienced by some without knowing how or who they strike. Cowper fully believed himself to be damned. I don’t know how he thought about anything else. Maybe he had phases.

This last poem was written in 1799, near the end. He seems resigned. It’s sad.

The Castaway

Obscurest night involv’d the sky,
Th’ Atlantic billows roar’d,
When such a destin’d wretch as I,
Wash’d headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left.

No braver chief could Albion boast
Than he with whom he went,
Nor ever ship left Albion’s coast,
With warmer wishes sent.
He lov’d them both, but both in vain,
Nor him beheld, nor her again.

Not long beneath the whelming brine,
Expert to swim, he lay;
Nor soon he felt his strength decline,
Or courage die away;
But wag’d with death a lasting strife,
Supported by despair of life.

He shouted: nor his friends had fail’d
To check the vessel’s course,
But so the furious blast prevail’d,
That, pitiless perforce,
They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.

Some succour yet they could afford;
And, such as storms allow,
The cask, the coop, the floated cord,
Delay’d not to bestow.
But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,
Whate’er they gave, should visit more.

Nor, cruel as it seem’d, could he
Their haste himself condemn,
Aware that flight, in such a sea,
Alone could rescue them;
Yet bitter felt it still to die
Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

He long survives, who lives an hour
In ocean, self-upheld;
And so long he, with unspent pow’r,
His destiny repell’d;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried—Adieu!

At length, his transient respite past,
His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in ev’ry blast,
Could catch the sound no more.
For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.

No poet wept him: but the page
Of narrative sincere;
That tells his name, his worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson’s tear.
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.

I therefore purpose not, or dream,
Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date:
But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another’s case.

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 gulfs than he.