'Flow, Like Waters After Summer Show’rs'

“As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation; one says, ‘It is very fine weather,’ and the other says, ‘Yes;’—one blows his nose, and the other rubs his eye-brows; (by the way, this is very much in Homer’s manner;) such seems to be the case between you and me.” 

All of us recognize that uncomfortable moment when conversation flags and two brains feel empty. This is not the same as an imbalance between speakers, one of whom is a bore. The job of the other then becomes sneaking away while trying to minimize discourtesy. We excuse the silence when friends talk, knowing it will resume.

 

William Cowper is writing a letter on July 27, 1780 to his friend the Rev. William Unwin. They met when Unwin was an undergraduate in theology at Cambridge and Cowper lodged with Unwin’s parents at nearby Huntingdon. When the father died in 1767, the widow, her daughter and Cowper moved to Olney at the invitation of the Rev. John Newton, the evangelical preacher. Cowper had already attempted suicide three times and been confined to an asylum. His mental state was never secure and without friends he likely would have succeeded in eventually taking his life.

 

Cowper conceived of conversation as a form of fellowship. He would agree with Hazlitt: “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.” Today, it’s too often reduced to mummery, a recitation of mutually approved opinions, a tiresome ritual. There’s no surprises and nothing is learned. Real conversation is less like a sermon than a Lester Young improvisation. Cowper writes in his poem “Conversation” (1781):   

 

“ . . . souls that carry on a blest exchange

Of joys they meet with in their heav’nly range,

And with a fearless confidence make known

The sorrows sympathy esteems its own,

Daily derive encreasing light and force

From such communion in their pleasant course,

Feel less the journey’s roughness and its length,

Meet their opposers with united strength,

And one in heart, in int’rest and design,

Gird up each other to the race divine.

But Conversation, chuse what theme we may,

And chiefly when religion leads the way,

Should flow, like waters after summer show’rs,

Not as if raised by mere mechanic powers.”