The purple patches of "Charity" are a picture of Captain Cook's treatment of the savages he met, contrasted with the Spaniards' treatment of the Peruvians, an eloquent denunciation of slavery, an attack upon philosophy, speculation, and teaching, that are not religious, a satirical portrait of Flavia the alms-giver, ("Her superfluity the poor supplies, But if she touch a character, it dies.") and one of the squire, who finds amongst his guineas his smallest gold coin for charity, to gratify "fame and selfcomplacence". Perhaps the most vigorous part of it is a diatribe against the satire popular in his day; "When Scandal has new-minted an old lie, 66 A thousand names are tossed into the crowd; But the didactic overshadows these. He was still held by the idea of versifying Newton's sermons on abstract themes, such favourites still with the religious section of the new audience. IO. Whilst waiting for the publishing season he wrote two other poems to please himself and to fill up the book. Their themes were Conversation and Retirement; and here he struck upon his true poetical career, the Addisonian essay turned into verse and tinged with genuine poetry. He could not long be kept off his mission as monitor not poet"; but didactic and religious passages were in these only episodic and not the main current. They were the longest poems in the volume, but the most entertaining and most felicitous in expression. The first half of Conversation contained more vigorous satire and flashes of epigram than` any poem in English since Pope. It draws the portraits of the various types of conversationalists with the broad power and minute insight of Hogarth. It begins with a vigorous onslaught on conventional talk, on prurience, and on swearing; then enters on its portrait-gallery; Sir Soph, the universally contradictory man, ("Preserve me from the thing I dread and hate, A duel in the form of a debate"; "For opposition gives opinion strength"; Dubius, who "Would not with a peremptory tone Assert the nose upon his face his own ", the positive men, "Where others toil with philosophic force, Their nimble nonsense takes a shorter course ; the tedious story-teller and the lying story-teller; the smokers, 'The dozen sages drop the drowsy strain, Then pause and puff, and speak and pause again"; the emphatic speaker, 66 "dearly loves to oppose, In contact inconvenient, nose to nose"; the "fine puss-gentleman that's all perfume"; the "grave coxcomb”, an oracle within an empty cask a fool with judges, amongst fools a judge "; the discoursers on their own health, "They thought they would have died they were so bad, the fretful and capricious, "His only pleasure is to be displeased "; the bashful man; the "reeking, roaring hero of the chase who falls in companionship from horse to groom, from groom to the club, "the school of coarse good fellowship and noise", "till none but beasts acknowledge him a man". The latter half of the poem falls back into the sermonising vein and closes with a defence of his digressive style and his didactic. II. In Retirement he is getting more out of the range of the dead satirist Churchill and the living preacher Newton. He approaches nearer to the secluded yet secular part of the new audience and sings, the attractions of peace and solitude with nature. He paints the weary routine of business, 'that oar, Which thousands, once fast-chained to, quit no more", and the desire its slavery generates to seek some sequestered spot", and "having lived a trifler, die a man ". With all his love of meditative and religious retirement, he would not approve a superstitious and monastic course ". Even the worldly seek seclusion. Some and love "Hate the tumult half the world enjoys ", "the fall of waters and the song of birds ", these are the "bards" that "seek success in rhyme ". The "Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed". The 66 is full of such idleness. age Luxury gives the mind a childish cast"; and " thinking heads" become rare, till authors hear 66 at length one general cry, Tickle and entertain us or we die ". This loud demand for amusement "makes fancy lame and novels " offer nothing new". The best of the poem consists in the pictures of nature "Fast by the banks of the slow-winding Ouse". He is becoming more and more the nature-poet, and less and less a mere satirist and preacher. 12. The minor poems published along with these were significant only as showing the lyrical current of the age; the best were the lines beginning "I am monarch of all I survey", and Boadicea. A few of them were in the form of fables, and dealt with the moral in the humorous and allegorical style of Gay. 13. In March 1782 the volume was published, and was received coldly, even by his old school-fellows Lord Chancellor Thurlow and Colman the dramatist, to whom he sent copies. Cowper bade farewell to the latter for his heartlessness in "Valediction". He soon recovered from the disappointment; for he had made another new friend, Lady Austen, who got him to write some shorter pieces like John Gilpin. And it was at her suggestion that he began in the summer of 1783 The Task, his greatest poem. She asked him to write in blank verse and gave him as subject the "Sofa" on which he sat. The liberation from the heroic couplet seemed to set free at the same time all his powers of thought and melody, his love of nature, his simpler unsermonising views of life and all the new thoughts and emotions that belonged to the new time. He diverged from his original theme into every topic that his rambles in the neighbourhoed could suggest, and so much pleasure did he take in this new (( Task set him, that the long poem (over five thousand lines) appeared in June 1785. He had found both the right medium-blank verse-and the right atmosphere that of nature-to work in. It is the only blank verse poem between Paradise Lost and the Excursion that can be called a classic. It raised him at once into all but the front rank of English poets. 14. The Sofa, or Book I. begins in his old halfhumorous style with the evolution of seats; then, in descanting on the woes of gout and praying that he may never feel them, he diverges into the joys of rambling in youth; this brings him to his own walks by the "slowwinding Ouse" with his "dear companion ", "Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive Fast locked in mine." He paints the ploughman at his work in the distance, and every feature of the scene; he tells of the sounds of nature, of the cottage on the hill, that he had called the "Peasant's Nest," of the splendid grounds of his friend Mr. Throckmorton, the fleecy tenants streaming out from the sheepfold, the various tints of the trees, and the grove; he descants on the rotation of nature, on her superiority to art, ("The love of nature and the scenes she draws on the repulsive sights of London society, and the beauty of the sea-girt rock and the common; he paints crazy Kate, the gipsy camp, and the savage of the South seas who had visited England; he mourns over the luxury of London and her vices ("God made the country, man made the town"), and this wail passes into a description of the beauty of rustic scenes; ("At eve, The moonbeam sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves is all the light they wish"). 15. The contrast suggests the theme of the second book, the degeneracy of his time. He calls it The Time-piece, perhaps because it tells the hour the world has reached, the hour of midnight of the race of man. It is instinct with the eloquence of indignation. He cannot restrain his anger over the effeminacy and futile worship of fashion that make the aristocracy, the clergy, the universities so incapable of their true duties. It is another jeremiad like Expostulation, but how different! In the heroic couplet he is ever falling into the sing-song and the abstract didacticism of eighteenth century poetry and preaching; here a living passion seems to inspire every word; he is a true prophet come to tell England of her sins and make her repent; he often rises to sublimity that is almost Miltonic. He still longs for solitude "a lodge in some vast wilderness", his ear is so pained" with report of " wrong and outrage with which earth is filled". Like Burns he longs for the brotherhood of man, yet finds it "severed as the flax at the touch of fire". Slavery still blots the earth; and yet slaves "touch our country and their shackles fall". He has strongly in him the new philanthropy and love of freedom. But tempests, earthquakes, meteors, plagues, famine "preach the general doom"; he paints with great power the ruin spread by an earthquake in Sicily. Yet he thinks England, which with all her faults he loves still, more guilty than that chastised island. For soldiers and patriot orators she now has "effeminates" |