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.”