'We Perish’d, Each Alone'

William Cowper’s companion Mary Unwin died in 1796 and the poet’s crushing depression returned. Already he had survived suicide attempts and lockups in asylums. Despite his emotional fragility, Cowper was resilient. He revised his translation of Homer for a second edition and, in 1799, a year before his death, wrote one of his best poems, “The Castaway”: “He long survives, who lives an hour / In ocean, self-upheld . . .”

 

One of the privileges of writing about books is identifying good work too long ignored and unappreciated. The Irish writer Brian Lynch published his novel about Cowper, The Winner of Sorrow, in 2005, and Dalkey Archive brought it out in the U.S. in 2009. It’s among the finest novels of the young century. Lynch avoids the imitative fallacy. Cowper was often mad but the novel is admirably sane, and I’ve read it again.

 

Twenty pages from his novel’s final lines, Lynch includes all eleven stanzas of “The Castaway.” Cowper wrote the poem after reading an account of Commodore George Anson’s voyage around the world in 1741, during which a seaman was washed overboard and his shipmates were unable to rescue him. Cowper merges his fate with the doomed sailor’s. The poem concludes:

 

“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.”

 

It was not the first time Cowper had crafted a memorable metaphor for madness. In another poem he writes: “I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am / Buried above ground.” In life, he was often mad; never in poetry. In a 1970 review of complete editions of Emily Dickinson and Walter de la Mare, Philip Larkin writes: “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. The less a writer’s work approximates to this maxim, the less claim he has on the attention of his contemporaries and of posterity.”

 

[Larkin’s review is collected in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber, 1983).]