Today’s Poem: Lines Written During a Period of Insanity

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter

Emile Wauters, Hugo van der Goes in the Rouge-Cloître Abbey, 1872 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Lines Written During a Period of Insanity

by William Cowper

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

Damned 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.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
   Worse than Abiram’s.

Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb am
   Buried above ground.
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William Cowper (1731–1800) was a poet and a madman.

That’s a less-common combination than one might suppose. Oh, there’s Cowper’s contemporary, Christopher Smart (a fragment of whose “Jubilate Agno,” about his cat Jeoffry, we looked at last fall). And the 20th century’s Robert Lowell, and a handful of others. But often enough, it’s the madness that comes first — a tendency toward insanity, writ deep down in the person, with poetry a therapeutic latch on sanity. For a while.

Cowper (typically pronounced “KOO-per,” not “COW-per”) managed to be popular in his time: a kind of proto-Romantic whose verses on country scenes and the ordinary lives of ordinary people anticipated the turn that Wordsworth would complete. His fervent evangelical Christianity found expression in the 1779 Olney Hymns, written with John Newton (composer of “Amazing Grace”), and among his best-known hymns are “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” “O, for a Closer Walk with God,” “There is a Fountain Filled With Blood” (a personal favorite), and “Hark! My Soul, It Is the Lord.”

William Cowper in Lemuel Francis Abbott’s 1792 portrait (Wikimedia Commons)

Cowper’s story retained its poignancy for some while. “Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning would write in her 1838 poem “Cowper’s Grave.” Cowper’s campaign against slavery issued in such poems as “The Negro’s Complaint.” He showed his wit in “To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut, on Which I Dined This Day” and the longer “Diverting History of John Gilpin.” And his range appeared in “The Task,” a long 1785 blank-verse poem: an assignment from a friend, to force himself to write about a sofa as a way of breaking out of melancholy. Even his classical learning appeared in his translations from Homer and Today’s Poem, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity.”

His madness too shows up in the poem — with a suggestion of how poetry, giving an accurate and technically difficult description of his fit of madness, can help ease that madness. Cowper describes his condition as worse than that of Abiram (who is swallowed alive by the earth in Numbers 26:9–11, as a sign of eternal torment). Even Hell would be a kind of relief, Cowper suggests, but he is left alive and “in a fleshy tomb am / Buried above ground.”

We’ve noted several times the importation of classical meters into English, including the Sapphic stanza, a Greek and then Latin form. In “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” Cowper uses the long-syllable quantities of the three initial hexameter lines in each stanza to capture something of the slow oppressiveness of his mad sense of damnation, with the shortened last line expressing the sudden cutting off of grace, relief, and mercy: “Hatred and vengeance . . . / Wait with impatient readiness to seize my / Soul in a moment.” And it all builds to the horrifying description of life as being “buried above ground.”

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