Hope and Despair in the Writings of William Cowper

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Barbara Packer

When he was at liberty again, he left London for the countryside where he could be near his brother John, a fellow at a Cambridge college. There Cowper sought out the company of other evangelical Christians who had experienced conversion. It was common among evangelicals to write some account of their spiritual lives, conversion narratives that sought to glorify God's mercy by dwelling upon the shameful, sinful behavior of the wretch he saved from damnation. As one of Cowper's biographers notes: "The typical memoir served as a confessional, and there was always an interest in a memorable story--in stirring, almost Gothic details" (Ryskamp, 1959).

Some time around 1767, Cowper wrote a conversion narrative of his own, published only after his death. It interprets the two major depressions from which he had already suffered as punishments from God for the dissipated life he had led, and it ascribes his miraculous recovery to the superabundance of God's grace. At about the same time, he condensed his story into a hymn, entitled "Song of Mercy and Judgment," which recounts with even more candor the horrors he suffered when insane even as it celebrates the sweet grace that rescued him.

His pastor in the village of Olney, the celebrated John Newton, a converted sinner who had once been a slave-trading sea captain, encouraged Cowper to collaborate with him in writing a hymn book for the use of other evangelicals.(2) Most of the hymns Cowper wrote are conventional, but one or two of them contain disturbing signs of a renewed slide into depression. By 1773, Cowper was again psychotic: hearing voices assuring him of his damnation, refusing to eat, convinced that his body was loathsome and deformed and that his spirit was more damnable than that of Judas Iscariot. He was not hospitalized again, but his servants, friends, and family had to watch him constantly to prevent him from committing suicide. Sometime during this period Cowper managed to write a short poem in English sapphics beginning with the line "Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion," an anti-hymn in which the sinner expresses the sense of despair without any sense of redeeming grace.

The depression of 1773 brings to a close the second phase of Cowper's life. He eventually recovered his reason, but this time there was no corresponding sense of elation: from then until the end of his life Cowper alternated between chronic and severe states of depression. He managed to return to his creative life, partly as a form of distraction from his mental sufferings; the poems that brought him fame during his lifetime date mostly from this latest period. But the sense of God's presence that had once brought him such comfort deserted him. He indeed retained his belief in the truth of the strongly Calvinistic theology he had espoused at the time of his religious conversion. But he became convinced that in sliding into despair after once having experienced God's mercy he had committed the gravest of sins, that of refusing grace. In his public poems he continued to speak of salvation and to recommend it to others; privately, he clung to the notion that he had been marked out for condemnation by a God who hated him.