'A Soft Murmur on the Uninjured Ear'

“So long as a poet has left six lines which can be quoted by the orator in search of floral adornment, his memory is sufficiently honoured, and [William] Cowper, of course, has done far more than that.”

The author, Vivian Carter, deserves a hearty posthumous “thank you” for coining “floral adornment.” The year was 1906 and the practice of using tasty bites of poetry to lend savor to speeches, sermons and eulogies was already well established. As we all know, the ability to quote poetry certifies a speaker’s sophistication. The occasion, April 25 of that year, was the 106^th anniversary of Cowper’s death. Carter is writing in The Bystander (1903-40), a British tabloid magazine with a wonderfully inclusive subtitle: An Illustrated Weekly, Devoted to Travel, Literature, Art, the Drama, Progress, Locomotion. She (he? remember Vivian Stanshall? Jay Vivian Chambers?) continues:

“[H]e is one of the immortals, even had he not also given to the world a mass of very pleasant domestic verse, tender in sentiment and skillful in phrase.”

The vocabulary is a little creaky but the judgment is correct. I’ve been quietly lobbying for Cowper’s verse for years. Take this excerpt from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of his long poem The Task (1785):    

“’T is pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,

To peep at such a world; to see the stir   

Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;        

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates,          

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.”

Cowper was one of literature’s gregarious solitaires. He observed social distancing long before it became fashionable. A few years later, Hazlitt used the same phrase – “loop-holes of retreat” – in his essay “On Living to One’s Self”: “He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.”

After all, mingling in the fray can make you sick.