WILLIAM COWPER

Evening Star, Issue 20995, 8 January 1932, Page 11

WILLIAM COWPER

THE COMPANIONABLE POET The bicentenary of Cowper, born November 15, 1731, fell on Sunday, November 15. In an appreciation of the poet and his work Mr Edmund Blunden writes in the London *’ Times ’ (weekly edition): In the ‘ Autobiography of an Infantry Officer,’ by Mr Sassoon, the principal character is shown us at last in a dilemma, and finds himself at that moment repeating two lines of verse. They come from the poems of William Cowper; they are not of his best, nor at that crisis had they any remarkable appropriateness; but from their recurrence in the mind of Sherston it is impressed upon us how, after so many changeful decades, the poetry of Cowper retains its familiar place in general memory. We may easily use the term “ household words ” in regard to the utterance of one who, more than most men of genius, stayed at home; nor was there any reeling but tenderness in the parodist who ended his lines in Cowper’s style with his resuming:

the nightcap dear to all Familiar with my illustrated works,

It is as though Cowper peculiarly was domesticated with all of us. Companionship with some great poets is difficult; itr never was with him, from the-day in 1796 when the youthful Charles Lamb wrote fervently: “ Cowper, I thank my God that thou

art heal'd.” until this present hour, when many quiet readers have in their rooms the delicate sympathies of biography achieved in Lord David Cecil’s volume on Cqwper, or Mr Hugh Fausset’s. It is not easy to define or measure the excellence of Cowper tho poet. While the tendency of modern apprehensions is to consider verse as only, or almost invariably, a proper medium for some poignant, rapid symbol of impassioned experience, ho inevitably may lose some votes. One of his outstanding characteristics was his willingness to undertake topics as poetical topics that were suggested to him by his friends or acquaintances. A John Newton could induce him to write a series of hymns; a Lady Austen could in a phrase or two originate The Task. “ A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from tho author, and gave him the sofa for a subject. He obeyed . . In the end his excellence is twofold; he reveals with equal light and music subjects of his own intimate concern, and those which transcend tho personal circumstance. In Doadicea we see a Cowper moving in the world of imaginative creation no less than in On tho Receipt of My Mother’s Picture we have the record of sad Or even, one may say, tho dynamic and the domestic Cowper can unite in one poem; they do so even in the piece last mentioned, where high imagery and familiar matter of a day alternate, where you may read how

The violet, the pink, and jessamine, I picked them into paper with a pin, Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tos’d, Sails ripp’d, seams opening wide, and compass lost.

As a harmonist of country life—for to call his descriptions only descriptions is to lose the sense of his poetical variety —Cowper may be even more beloved in future than he is now. Born of a race to which (“ with all thy faults ”) the triumph of life is often the simplest cottage, hedge row, steeple, and copse, one of a multitude of writers in verso and prose who have been happy to respond in their best grace to the fresh world about them, he has succeeded in being our most natural interpreter, perhaps, of the Kngland we go out to sec. After a century and a-half his spirit haunts the scene, and his love and consolation enrich the beautiful as wo desire it. It is not necessary that wo should have visited Olney or Weston Underwood in order to have the benefit of his presence and his accord. His doctrine, clothed in clear and

friendly shapes and colours, is constant through the countries:

But three, and rivulets, whose rapid course defies the check of winter, haunts of deer, And sheep walks populous with bleating lambs, Ami lanes in which the primrose ere her time Peeps thro’ the moss, that clothes the hawthorn root, Deceive no student.

Wo may loso more of onr primroses; our hawthorns arc not as safe as they were; but Cowpor’s secret will grow even mure precious. “ There is a spirit in the leaves,”-