COWPER'S SEA POEMS

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1932, Page 17

COWPER'S SEA POEMS

IMAGERY OF SHIPWRECK

(By "Ajax.")

Writing 150 years ago (26th September, 1781) Cowper expressed his dislike for "tho modern passion for seaside entertainments," just us ho. had previously expressed his dislike for 'the pleasures of tho sea itself, not because on Southampton Water tho motion of a boat was too much for him but because the narrow space unduly restricted his own freedom of movement.

I think with you, he wrote to William Unwin, that the most magnificent object under heaven is the great deep; and cannot but feel .an impolite astonishment when I consider the multitudes that view it .without emotiou, and even without reflection. In all its various forms it is an object of all others tha most suited to affect us with lasting impressions of the awful Power that created and controls it.

Though Cowper hero speaks of the sea as testifying "in all its various forms" to the power, of the Almighty, tho epithet "awful" indicates tho aspect' of the sea which seems to have made the deepest impression upon him.

.When I am held in pursuit of pretty linages, or a pretty way of expressing them, he writes to John Newton on the 21st-December, 1780, I forget everything that is irksome and, like a boy that plays truant, determine to avail myself of the present opportunity to be amused, and to put by the disagreeable recollection that I must, after all, go home and be whipt again. :

When, on the other hand, Cowper was not "held in pursuit of pretty images," and instead of forgetting what was irksome, he was overwhelmed by his troubles, his recourse to tho sea for painful images to express his condition was frequent.

Referring to the tenderness, tho melancholy, and the dependence revealed in Cowper's love poems to his cousin Theodora, Mr. Hugh Fausset says that these qualities

had their roots, even more than they had with. Coleridge, in a sense of sailing the sea of life up_on a raft that shuddered at every wave and might at any moment founder. .... Already in three of these early poems, in "The Certainty of Death," the "Last Stanzas to Delia," and "On the Death'of Sir W. Russell" he employed the imagery, of shipwreck which, he was to use so poignantly in the last poem that he ever wrote, when in truth he was shipwrecked, beyond hope of rescue.

• The relevant stanzas of the first of these poems; are as follows — The seaman thus, his shattered vessel lost, Still vainly strives to shun the threatening death; And while he thinks to gain the friendly coast, And drops his feet, and feels the sand beneath, Borne by the wave steep-sloping from the shore, Back to the inclement deep, again he beats * The surge aside, and seems to tread secure; And now the refluent wavo his baffled toil defeats. . * - * *

In tho: lines "On the Death of Sir W. Bussell" the loss of his best friend through drowning and of his lady-love through the veto placed by her father upon the marriage— "Deprived o£ every joy I valued most, My friend torn from me and my mistresslost— combined to make the comparison ■ peculiarly appropriate. See me, ere yet my destin'd cours'c; balf ..done; Cast forth a wand'rer on a world unknown! See me neglected on the world's rude coast, £aca dear companion o£ my voyage lost! JTor ask why clouds of sorrow shade my ■ ': • brow, And ready tears wait only leave to flow! .Why all that soothes a heart from . anguish free, ..All that delights the happy palls with me! .

Cowper. -was only 25 or 213 when a 'double .disaster wrung from Mm these desperate lines. He was on the verge of 50 when no specific sorrow but a general s.ense of failure found still more poignant, because simpler and less rhetorical, expression. In "The Stricken Peer" Lord. David Cecil gives this poem an admirable setting. He speaks of taking a dingy old volume of Cowper from the upper shelves of some oldfashioned library, knocking tho dust off it, and finding tho succession of "pedantic epigram, antiquated compliment, pompous, didactic apostrophe" so dead as to set one doubting whether it could ever have been alive.

• And then suddenly, Lord David continues, one's attention is caught by a cfiahce word; the page stirs into life; a bit of the English countryside appears before one's mental eye as vividly anfl exactly as though one really saw it; or tin ephemeral trifle; a copy of verses addressed to j\liss M. or Mr. D., laughs out of the page with the pleasant colloquial intimacy of a voice heard over the tea-cups in the next room. And, now and again, as if from the strings of a tarnished disused harp stumbled against in one's rambles round the library, there rises from the old book a strain of music; simple, plangent, and of a piercing pathos, that fairly clutches at the heart.

Lord David Cecil then quotes the last two stanzas of a, poem, of which I prefer to quote the whole:— TO THE REVEREND MR. NEWTON ON HIS RETURN FROM RAMSGATE. That ocean you of late surveyM, Those rocks I too have seen, But I, afflicted and dismay'd, You, tranquil and serene.

You from the flood-controlliug steep Saw stretched before your view, ■With conscious joy, the threat'nine deep, * No.loDger such, to you. To me the waves that ceaseless broke Upon the dang'rous coast, Hoarsely and ominously spoke Of all my treasure lost. your sea of troubles you have passed, And found the peaceful shore; I, tempest-toss'd, and wreck'd at last, Come home to port no more.

Here, Lord pavid Cecil adds, ia no Byr"on"ie'. pessimism, rhetorical, exaggerated, the expression of a posture or at best a passing mood. Through these quiet verses trembles the true voice of despair. And the contrast between them and the.wooden versification in which they are embedded is' not more striking than it is between them and the poems of Nature or of home in which, alone of all his other work, Cowper rises to real poetry. These are the parallels in verse o£ "Cranford" and "Our Village" iv prose

Except that both of them wore given to pessimism and to writing about themselves, the contrast between Cowper and Byron was indeed about as great as it could well be—as great almost as it was between Cowpcr and Pope. But in tho return to Nature anrl to reality Cowper has affinities to Bjron just as he has to [Wordsvrortb,

though the latter may bo the mor6 intimate. But this is by tho way. What I was really making for is tho climax of Cowper's sea verso in "The Loss of the Hoyal George" and "The Castaway," but it is clear that I cannot reach it this week.