'But to Divert a Fierce Banditti'

The English poet William Cowper (1731-1800) suffered his first attack of mental illness – today we would likely call it profound depression – at age thirty-two. Before then, while studying law in the Temple, Cowper dined every Thursday with friends at the Nonsense Club. He and a fellow clerk, Edward Thurlow – the future Lord Chancellor – spent their time “constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle,” he wrote in a letter to his cousin Lady Hesketh. He published a series of light, occasionally whimsical essays, and then in 1763, made his first suicide attempt and was confined to St. Alban’s madhouse. He suffered three additional such attacks. In “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” Cowper would write: “I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb am / Buried above ground.”

 

An old friend has been diagnosed with depression and was recently hospitalized following a suicide attempt. I’m not naïve but I was surprised. He’s a reliably funny guy, smart, thoughtful and talented. His illness appeared in middle age and is not associated with drugs, alcohol or some life trauma. By his account, it came on quickly and powerfully, like an ambush.

 

Cowper tended to blame himself for his illness, treating it moralistically as a judgment from God. My friend has the advantage of pharmaceutical treatment for his condition, therapy and support from family and friends. Poor Cowper had little of that. Consider these lines from “An Epistle to Robert Lloyd, Esq.”

 

“But to divert a fierce banditti

(Sworn foes to ev’ry thing that’s witty),

That, with a black infernal train,

Make cruel inroads in my brain,

And daily threaten to drive thence

My little garrison of sense:

The fierce banditti, which I mean,

Are gloomy thoughts led on by Spleen.”