Poem of the Day: ‘Lines Written During a Period of Insanity’

William Cowper (1731–1800) was a poet and a madman. Which is a less-common combination than one might suppose. Oh, sure, there’s Cowper’s contemporary, Christopher Smart (a fragment of whose “Jubilate Agno,” about his cat Jeoffry, was a Poem of the Day in the Sun last summer). 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 path back to sanity. For a while.Somehow, though, Cowper managed to be quite 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,” produced with John Newton (composer of “Amazing Grace”). Cowper’s campaign against slavery issued in such poems as “The Negro’s Complaint.” His wit in such poems as “To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut, on Which I Dined This Day” and “The Diverting History of John Gilpin.” His range 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 of the Day, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity.”His madness too shows up in the poem — with a suggestion of how poetry, an accurate and technically difficult poetic description of his fit of madness, can help. 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). Hell would be a kind of relief, Cowper suggests, but he is left alive and “in a fleshy tomb am / Buried above ground.”In a week of Classical Meters this past winter, the Sun offered two examples of the Sapphic stanza, a Greek and then Latin form occasionally attempted in English. 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.”Lines Written During a Period of Insanityby William CowperHatred and vengeance, my eternal portionScarce 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 JusticeSent quick and howling to the centre headlong;I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb am Buried above ground.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Lines Written During a Period of Insanity’

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