Chapter 1 - The Early Years

In this chapter we shall draw attention to particular occurrences in Cowper’s earlier days which had a lasting influence upon his life and writings.

(i)                Seasons of Darkness

William Cowper (pronounced ‘Cooper’, 1731-1800) lost his beloved mother when he was six years of age.  She was a brilliant woman and a daughter of the poet Donne.  A number of Cowper’s poems and letters reflect the lasting effects of this bereavement.

Five brothers and sisters died in their infancy and at the age of twenty-four his father was taken and then his stepmother.  His romance with his cousin, the delightful Theadora whom he loved intensely, was broken off in 1756 by her father and not long after this his closest friend was accidentally drowned.  To this point his life was one of profound disappointment and deep personal pain.

Coupled with these tragic events we find in Cowper an ever increasing proneness to melancholia and more frequent and worsening periods of depression.  In 1763 he was admitted to Dr Nathaniel Cotton’s ‘Collegio Insanorum’.  He was then thirty-two years of age.  The deeply troubled young man had sought to end his life when called upon to undergo a public examination in pursuing his legal studies.

Such was the dark cloud that settled upon him that in his anguish of mind he penned a poem of total forsakenness.  No words could portray a person in deeper despair.  It was entitled Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion.  Even when passing through the most severe affliction, Cowper retained the ability to write poetry which attained great heights of literary excellence.

In order to appreciate the transforming grace of God in the poet’s life and to understand in part the abject darkness of mind and spirit into which the light of the gospel was soon to shine so radiantly, the five verses are included below.

Ella tells us that most critics acclaim these tragic verses as Cowper’s ‘first really great poem’.  Ella continues, ‘This seems an ironic mockery as they portray the poet in the very depths of despair’.[1]

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,

Scarce can endure delay of execution –

Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my

Soul in a moment.

Damn’d below Judas; more abhorr’d than he was,

Who, for a few pence, sold his holy master.

Twice betray’d, 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 everhungry mouths all

Bolted against me.

Hard lot!  Encompass’d with a thousand dangers,

Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,

Fall’n, and if vanquish’d, 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 judgments, in a fleshly tomb, am

Buried above ground.[2]

No words can be more expressive of a soul convinced of his irrevocable dereliction.

Such information as this is essential if we are to engage in a meaningful consideration of his poems of grace.

Cowper was now both mentally and physically afflicted with wild and haunting thoughts … constant flame-like flashings in front of his eyes and great hammering pains in his head … he could only stagger around … (and he) began to believe that he had committed the unpardonable sin.[3]

In the first two lines of Hymn 19, Cowper recalls these disturbing times before he found contentment and peace in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Fierce passions discompose the mind,

As tempests vex the sea…

Both Ella and Murray furnish us with helpful, balanced and biblical analyses of Cowper’s prevailing depression and his few periods of insanity.[4] This is in marked contrast to Routley who speaks of Cowper’s insanity lasting for twenty years.[5] The truth of the matter is that ‘Cowper was mentally ill for a total of about four years in a relatively long life, yet many biographers wrote as if he had always been mad’.[6] Murray’s article on Cowper’s affliction and why it is that God permits such illness in his children is worthy of further study.

As one considers Ella’s careful research and his compelling conclusions we are introduced to a vastly different Cowper than has been generally understood.  Except for the relatively few years of severe mental anguish, the person who comes to view is basically a healthy, normal, humorous, level-headed, business-wise man with many charming graces.  His many letters which attain to great heights of literary excellence, bear special testimony to this.  Cowper engaged in sport, loved the countryside, his garden and his pet animals.  He engaged in social interaction with town and church folk and is far removed from the shy, timid, closeted, effeminate type that some authors have made him out to be.[7]

Ella removes the many misconceptions and distortions that for too long have governed people’s opinions of the poet.

(ii)     The Light of the Gospel

Cowper’s conscience had been alarmed on many occasions in his early years and whilst in Dr Cotton’s ‘College’ his sense of lostness coupled with his mental illness reached indescribable depths.  His own memoir of this period of his life is heart-rending to read.[8] However his close friends Martin Madan (his cousin) and Dr Cotton directed him to God’s word, and over a period of months ‘the cloud of horror … was every moment passing away’.[9]

In mid July 1764 Cowper read Romans 3:25, ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God’.  He received strength to believe.

The full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me.  I saw the sufficiency of the atonement he had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fulness and completeness of His justification.  In a moment I believed and received the gospel. Unless the Almighty arm had been under me I think I should have died with gratitude and joy … My heavenly Father in Christ Jesus was pleased to give me the full assurance of faith and out of a strong, stony, unbelieving heart, to raise up a child unto Abraham.[10]

His testimony is far better known in the following verses,

Hark, my soul! it is the LORD;

‘Tis thy Saviour, hear his word;

JESUS speaks, and speaks to thee;

‘Say, poor sinner, lov’st thou me?

I deliver’d thee when bound,

And, when wounded, heal’d thy wound;

Sought thee wand’ring, set thee right,

Turn’d thy darkness into light.      (Hymn 18)

Here is Cowper’s testimony expressed in his own unique way.  The light of the glorious gospel had dispelled the oppressive gloom that had enshrouded him.  He would soon be recovered to spend the remainder of his days as a servant and ambassador of Jesus Christ.  Though his way would be ‘thorny’ and ‘tempest tossed’ and though his mind would once again be assaulted and severely tormented, he would extol the saving power of the Lord Jesus in a manner that would touch the hearts of countless thousands.

One of the poet’s biographers who was not sympathetic to 18^th Century evangelicalism has written of Cowper’s conversion experience in the following words, ‘The fears and pains of his troubled thirty years had fallen off him like rags.  Sin and sorrow and disillusion, madness itself, were nothing, and less than nothing in the transcendent glory of his spiritual reconciliation.’[11]

(iii)          Arrival at Olney - 1767

In the providence of God, Cowper’s path was to lead him into close contact with the godly Unwin family who took him into their care.  Mary Unwin’s untiring support of him both physically and spiritually would prove to be a great source of strength and comfort in the years ahead.  His deeply touching poem To Mary (Mrs Unwin) written in 1793, seven years prior to his death, ranks amongst the most moving expressions of devotion, gratitude and love found in English verse.  In the second verse Cowper acknowledges how she had so selflessly sustained him in his affliction.

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,

I see thee daily weaker grow,

‘Twas my distress that brought thee low,

My Mary![12]

When Rev. William Unwin was tragically killed in a horse riding accident, the Church of England curate in the nearby parish of Olney, John Newton, came to their home to offer his sympathy and assistance.  His visit in a time of overwhelming need was the commencement of a friendship that was to last throughout the remaining thirty-three years of Cowper’s life.

Soon after, in 1767, the widowed Mary Unwin and William Cowper shifted to Olney to live in close proximity to Newton.  His pastoral care of Cowper during another dark and distressing bout of mental illness in 1773-74 was exemplary.  Newton’s ‘shepherd’s heart’ knew no boundaries.  He opened his own home to Cowper and tenderly cared for him.

(iv)    A Further Period of Darkness – 1773-74

It was while Cowper was writing his Olney Hymns that he was once again overtaken by his affliction.  In a state of derangement and utter despair he dreamt that God had said to him, ‘“Actum est de te, periisti” which Cowper understood to mean, “It is all over with thee, thou hast perished”’.[13] This dream was to recur throughout the rest of his days and it is sadly true that whenever he was in a state of depression Cowper was convinced that the Lord had cast him out.  These thoughts which continually disturbed his fragile mind were to find their expression in subsequent letters and poems.[14]

In the final verse of possibly his last poem The Castaway written in 1799 we read,

No voice divine the storm allay’d,

No light propitious shone;

When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,

We perish’d, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.[15]

It is one of the many tragic experiences in Cowper’s life that he spent his latter years bereft of that assurance so needful for a believer’s inner comfort.  Though trusting in the saving grace of God in Christ, his mind was repeatedly tortured by the cruel hallucinatory dream.  He could not blot it out.  He was The Castaway.

It is in Cowper’s mental condition, which in his later years alternated between assurance and despair, that we discover the fundamental reason for his fears and distresses.  Though believing that the Christian was eternally secure, he remained convinced that he was the exception.  This conflict of mind exacerbated his distress.  He was a godly man, yet greatly afflicted.  The grace of the gospel had entered his soul, but in the darker periods his depressed mind would not permit him to think that he would inherit the glory about which he wrote and which he himself had as his inheritance.  There were no more Olney Hymns from his pen after 1773-74.

In Cowper it is evident that true faith in Christ is not always an assured faith.  And though the assurance of faith is necessary for a Christian’s well-being, there are some whose struggles of mind and soul are such that they are akin to the person of whom Isaiah writes in the 50^th chapter verse 10, ‘Who among you fears the LORD? Who obeys the voice of his Servant? Who walks in dark and has no light? Let him trust in the name of the LORD and rely upon his God.’

In 1773 Cowper entered that ‘darkness’, after which ‘his life was to become a permanent interchange of silver linings and clouds’.[16] Yet it must be noted that in some of the Olney Hymns prior to this second major breakdown there are a number of expressions indicating that the poet even in those ‘happier days’, had seasons of doubt.  This we shall see in more detail in chapters three and five.