The Winner of Sadness

On the most despairing poem in English literature

Photo: Cameron Self

Living away from home at university in the Nineties, I was darkly amused to discover that the only famous poem ever written in the small town I had left behind is possibly also the most despairing in all of English literature. The poem was “The Castaway” (1799) by William Cowper (1731—1800) and the town was East Dereham in Norfolk.

After university, I moved back to the nearby city of Norwich, where I remember once admitting to my barber that Dereham had “gone downhill”. “Was it ever uphill?” he cheerfully replied. Cowper’s last poem — to be fair — doesn’t reflect his feelings about Dereham. But we know that Cowper wrote it there, a year before he died, because his cousin, the Reverend John Johnson, recorded it in his diary for 1799:

All this, however, I only found out after I had left the town, despite its best efforts during my early years to interest me in the local poet. As well as the Cowper Congregational Memorial Church in Dereham market place, there is a window dedicated to the poet in the Anglican church, which I walked past as a choirboy every Sunday morning; and a scrap of fabric that just fell out of my copy of Cowper’s poems reminds me that on Tuesday evenings I attended 1st Dereham (William Cowper) Scouts.

Among the local street names, meanwhile, there was a William Cowper Close and — running behind the playing field of my first school — a Gilpin’s Ride, named after his popular comic poem, The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1782). I didn’t see much comedy in the NO BALL GAMES signs of Gilpin’s Ride, though, and I still associate the stained-glass window of the man with a towel round his head reading to his pets with the organ-music boredom of Sunday mornings (in a future post, I may write about what I now know to be a lovely poem, Cowper’s “Epitaph on a Hare”). In short, if I couldn’t load William Cowper as a game on my ZX Spectrum, I wasn’t interested.

Cowper window, St Nicholas Church, East Dereham

The fact that I never knew about “The Castaway” — one of the great poems of its age — until I left town, though, also reflects the relentlessly cheerful way that Cowper was remembered in the nineteenth century. Most English speakers know at least a line of Cowper: “Monarch of all I survey”, for example, or “God moves in a mysterious way”, the first line of his most famous hymn, “Light Shining Out of Darkness” (1774). Cowper also gave us, in his long poem The Task (1785), “Variety’s the very spice of life”, while, to an older generation, “the cup that cheers but not inebriates” (also from The Task) may be familiar as a tongue-in-cheek way to describe a mug of tea.

All these phrases were taken up as inspirational quotations by the Victorians. It took a modernist novel to introduce me to the bleak final lines of “The Castaway”:

We perish’d, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.

In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), one of the main characters, Mr. Ramsay, quotes these words self-pityingly, just as Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, had done, while “crushing a dying mackerel” with his foot in a fishing boat. As Woolf wrote in her diary, this memory was both the starting-point and “centre of the novel”: a symbolic comment on the emotional life of her parents’ generation, for whom the stiff upper lip was a flood defence, holding back dangerous feelings that literature let trickle through.

What is the dangerous feeling behind “The Castaway”, though? Arguably, it was unique to Cowper. In his early thirties, after studying law, he was due to be examined in the House of Lords in order to get the job of Clerk of the Journals. The stress of this, though, brought on a “nervous fever” which led him to attempt suicide, and left him with the belief that he was damned. As he recovered from this depression, he converted to Evangelical Christianity, and came to believe in Calvinist predestination, which states that some people (“the elect”) will be saved and others damned, no matter what they do.

Over the next decade, as he wrote his hymns, Cowper saw himself as one of the elect. But in 1773 he had another mental breakdown and attempted suicide again, after a dream in which he believed God had told him to sacrifice himself. This time, however, he was left with an even more excruciating sense of damnation: in his failure to die, Cowper thought, he had sinned, and was thus the only elect person ever who had managed to throw his salvation away.

For all the often cheerful and comic verse that he wrote in later life — often at the encouragement of his friends — this was the fundamental feeling that haunted Cowper: he was “buried above ground”, living but dead. As he wrote in the extremely unfunny poem about his breakdown, “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion”:

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;

Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all

                           Bolted against me.

(The poem is written in the sapphic stanza, which cuts against the iambic grain of English with its fixed pattern of falling stresses. Here, the final short “adonic” line is a dactyl (/xx) plus a trochee (/x) (“Bolted a/gainst me”), which creates an enjambment as abrupt and shocking as a bone snapping.)