‘Mrs Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading’, by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926).
‘Mrs Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading’, painted in 1876 by American impressionist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). Cowper’s vivacious friend Lady Austen once teasingly suggested he write a poem on the subject of ‘the sofa’, and he responded with The Task, a masterpiece of English verse of over 5,000 lines that takes the reader out of the house, into the garden and away on a winter’s walk. These were some of the happiest times of his life.
Part 1 of 2
WILLIAM Cowper inspired much friendship among men, and still more among women, during his lifetime; they found him the pleasantest of all companions in his bright hours, and they did not desert him in his dark hours. His books have been friends to a great many since he left the earth, because they exhibit him very faithfully in both; some of his letters and some of his poems being full of mirth and quiet gladness, some of them revealing awful struggles and despair. Whatever estimate may be formed of his poetry in comparison with that of earlier or later writers, every one must feel that his English is that of a scholar and a gentleman — that he had the purest enjoyment of domestic life, and of what one may call the domestic or still life of nature. One is sure also that he had the most earnest faith, which he cherished for others when he could find no comfort in it for himself. These would be sufficient explanations of the interest which he has awakened in so many simple and honest readers who turn to books for sympathy and fellowship, and do not like a writer at all the worse because he also demands their sympathy with him.
William Cowper (1731-1800), pronounced ‘cooper’, was a distinguished poet and classicist, whose simple style, homely themes and autobiographical candour broke new ground in English verse. Educated at Westminster School in London, he experienced a nervous breakdown in 1763 and was briefly committed to an asylum after three attempts on his own life. He was taken in by the Revd Morley Unwin and his wife Mary, who lived in Huntingdon and subsequently at Olney near Milton Keynes. After Morley died in a riding accident, Cowper remained in Mary’s household. Among his friends were John Newton, a clergyman and former slave-trader with whom Cowper collaborated on a book of hymns, and on campaigning for the abolition of slavery; Cowper composed The Negro’s Complaint, a favourite of Martin Luther King’s, in 1788. Later in life he was befriended by a cousin, the Revd John Johnson, and William and Mary moved to Norfolk to be near him. Mary died in 1796, and William four years later.
Précis
In a speech delivered in 1856, Frederic Denison Maurice shared his appreciation of poet William Cowper. He reminded us that although Cowper’s life had been full of troubles, he had always possessed the knack of making friends, and had won over many readers too by engaging their sympathies, in good times and bad, through his honest verse. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
William Cowper (1731-1800), painted in 1792 by Lemuel Francis Abbott (1760–1802). Cowper was burdened for much of his adult life by the fear of eternal damnation, so much so that when his cousin the Revd John Johnson reminded the dying man that the promises of mercy were for all God’s children and therefore for him, Cowper begged that “his companion would desist from any further observations of a similar kind”. When he wrote The Task he had seen more clearly:
But all is in His hand whose praise I seek,
In vain the poet sings, and the world hears,
If He regard not, though divine the theme.
’Tis not in artful measures, in the chime
And idle tinkling of a minstrel’s lyre,
To charm His ear, whose eye is on the heart;
Whose frown can disappoint the proudest strain,
Whose approbation—prosper even mine.
COWPER is one of the strongest instances, and proofs, how much more qualities of this kind affect Englishmen than any others. The gentleness of his life might lead some to suspect him of effeminacy; but the old Westminster school-boy and cricketer* comes out in the midst of his Meditation on Sofas;* and the deep tragedy which was at the bottom of his whole life,* and which grew more terrible as the shadows of evening closed upon him, shows that there may be unutterable struggles in those natures which seem least formed for the rough work of the world. In one of his later poems he spoke of himself as one
“Who, tempest-tossed, and wrecked at last,
Comes home to port no more.”
But his nephew,* who was with him on his death-bed, says that there was a look of holy surprise on his features after his eyes were closed, as if there were very bright visions for him behind the veil that was impenetrable to him here.*
Cowper told the Revd William Unwin in a letter dated Mary 28th, 1781: “When I was a boy, I excelled at cricket and football, but the fame I acquired by achievements that way is long since forgotten, and I do not know that I have made a figure in anything since.”
Cowper’s masterpiece The Task (1785) begins in playful imitation of Homer’s Iliad, which he had himself translated while living near his cousin Lady Hesketh in Buckinghamshire.
I sing the Sofa. I who lately sang
Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touch’d with awe
The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand,
Escaped with pain from that adventurous flight,
Now seek repose upon an humbler theme;
The theme though humble, yet august and proud
The occasion — for the fair commands the song.
‘The fair’ was his friend Lady Austen, whom he first met in 1781, and who set him the task of writing a poem about a sofa; of course, the poem proves to be anything but the trifling thing implied in the opening lines.
Cowper suffered from cruel bouts of depression, and was briefly committed to an asylum after three attempts on his own life. He was one of a legion of sensitive souls traumatised by the tenets of John Calvin (1509-1564), which unfortunately he assumed carried the authority of Scripture, and which led him to believe he had no hope of heaven. He was also unlucky in love, first when he fell for with his cousin Theodora and her father forbade the marriage, and again later in life when Mary Unwin, on whose kindness and charity he had relied for years, was upset by William’s growing relationship with kindred spirit Lady Austen, and he dutifully severed all contact with her.
This should be ‘cousin once removed’. The Revd John Johnson (1769-1833), who wrote the account of William’s death which Maurice and many others found so moving, called himself Cowper’s ‘kinsman’ but also told us that William’s mother was sister to Johnson’s grandfather, the Revd Roger Donne, rector of Catfield in Norfolk.
At about five o’clock on the morning of Friday April 25th, 1800, the ailing Cowper slipped into a comatose state. He died at about five that afternoon. It seemed to the Revd John Johnson (1769-1833), a cousin with whom Cowper had become close in recent years, that in death an expression stole across Cowper’s troubled countenance “of calmness and composure, mingled, as it were, with holy surprise.” Biographer Thomas Grimshawe (1778–1850) elaborated: “And Oh! what must have been the expression of that surprise and joy, when, as his immortal spirit ascended to him that gave it, instead of beholding the averted eye of an offended God, he recognized the radiant smiles of his reconciled countenance, and the caresses of his tenderness and love — when all heaven burst upon his astonished view.”
Précis
Cowper’s retiring habits, warned Maurice, should not suggest a man without manly qualities. They showed themselves in his battle with religious despair; and though Cowper in his later verse seemed to feel he was losing the battle, the testimony of those at his bedside was that he conquered in death the enemy he had not conquered in life. (58 / 60 words)
