Hope and Despair in the Writings of William Cowper

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Barbara Packer

   I hear, but seem to hear in vain,
   Insensible as steel;
   If ought is felt, `tis only pain.
   To find I cannot feel.

The churchgoing which had brought him such joy of Christian fellowship now reminds him only of his exclusion from joy:

   Thy saints are comforted I know
   And Love thy house of pray'r:
   I therefore go where others go,
   But find no comfort there.

Apathy can be one of the first symptoms of approaching depression, and by 1773 Cowper's depression had returned in full force. With the terrible reverse logic of his illness, he took his loss of joy as proof that he had rejected joy, that he had turned his back on the salvation freely offered and happily enjoyed. This rejection makes him an apostate, the only kind of sinner the New Testament explicitly shuts out from forgiveness.

How violent Cowper's feelings of damnation now were appears in the most frightening poem he ever wrote. That indefatigable hymn-writer Isaac Watts had published in 1706 an Ode in English sapphics entitled "The Day of Judgement," in which he describes how the saints in heaven will enjoy looking down from Heaven on the sufferings of the damned. For a short poem written in 1774, "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity" Cowper adopts Watts' poetic form but reverses his perspective, describing Judgement as it looks like to one of the damned (Cowper, 1967). The flames of hell Cowper had seen in earlier bouts of madness now rise up eagerly to claim him.

   Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
   Scarce can endure delay of execution,
   Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
   Soul in a moment.

The fury of the unrhymed sapphics allows him to curse himself with all the vigor of the Deity he has rejected and who now abandons him.

   Damn'd below Judas: more abhorred than he was,
   Who for a few pence sold his holy Master,
   Twice betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent,
   Deems the profanest.
   Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
   Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
   Therefore hell keeps her ever hungry mouths all
   Bolted against me.

His fate is worse than Abiram's in the Bible, swallowed up by the earth when cursed by Moses.(4) Cowper is now buried alive in his own body, a "fleshly tomb," unable to reach even the dubious mercy of hell's finality.

This conviction of damnation never subsequently left Cowper. He had momentary recoveries from the deepest periods of despair, but he never again experienced the sense of exultation that had lifted him up from his first periods of insanity and had allowed him to chronicle madness from the perspective of one redeemed. In the early 1780s, however, Cowper wrote a series of poems that at times allowed him to treat the subject of mental disorder with a sense of irony that recalls the civilized balance of Adelphi. The poems were Horatian satires in pentameter couplets, conversational in tone, deliberately loose in structure, on a series of moral subjects. In one of these, "Retirement," Cowper discusses the benefits and drawbacks of rural life (Cowper, 1967). Since doctors then commonly prescribed rural retirement as a cure for melancholy, Cowper digresses into considering the whole subject of mental disorder, particularly depression; the treatments prescribed for it, the attitudes displayed toward it. He praises his former physician, Dr. Heberden, for being honest enough to admit that he has no treatment for the disease, except the common prescription of sending the sufferer into the country.