'Only Two Loop-holes Then I might Behold'

I’ve been quietly lobbying for William Cowper’s verse for many years. Born in 1731, spanning the Augustan and Romantic eras, he’s among England’s “mad poets,” a periodic depressive, a deeply religious writer of hymns and an occasional unsuccessful suicide. He would seem to be an utterly benign, though self-tormenting fellow. 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.”

 

The OED credits Cowper with the phrase “loopholes of retreat,” later used by, among others, George Meredith in The Egotist, another book no one reads today: “Dim as the loophole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it gathered light.” Today we think of a loophole as a sort of escape clause, a way to avoid an obligation, especially in the legal sense. For Cowper, it's a way to view the world, an aperture. Among his other qualities, Cowper is the poet of spectatorship, of diffidence expressed as a willingness to observe the world, not plunge into its swelter. Cowper was a high-strung man, affectionate and loyal as a friend but plagued by madness. He hardly recognized civic affairs and remained blithely immune to politics. His passions were poetry and religion, not troublemaking. Later I would discover Cowper’s phrase in a bravura passage in William Hazlitt’s essay “On Living to One’s Self” (1821):

 

“What I mean by living to one’s-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it. It is such a life as a pure spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might take in the affairs of men: calm, contemplative, passive, distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamed of by them. 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.”

 

Advice Hazlitt applied to the world but not necessarily to himself. He was never a “silent spectator.” He had a streak of meddlesomeness and finished his career with a four-volume biography of Napoleon that no one reads today. I favor writers who at least try to write most impersonally when addressing personal matters. One of the attractions of blogging is the qualified anonymity it permits. Words matter, not our precious “personality.” Except for the bit about “pure spirit” – no one I know – Hazlitt describes a writer’s ideal of spectatorship

 

“Loop-holes” in Hazlitt suggests a means of observing the world. Even earlier, “loop-holes” shows up in a 1619 sonnet by Michael Drayton:

 

“There’s nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste,

That in my days I may not see thee old,

That where those two clear sparkling eyes are placed

Only two loop-holes then I might behold;

That lovely, arched, ivory, polished brow

Defaced with wrinkles that I might but see;

Thy dainty hair, so curl’d and crisped now,

Like grizzled moss upon some aged tree;

Thy cheek, now flush with roses, sunk and lean;

Thy lips with age as any wafer thin;

Thy pearly teeth out of thy head so clean,

That, when thou feed’st, thy nose shall touch thy chin.

    These lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee,

    Then would I make thee read but to despite thee.”

 

Drayton is a close contemporary of Shakespeare. Scholars have suggested his work might have been better known if he hadn’t been overshadowed by the author of King Lear. Both wrote sonnet cycles, a popular form at the time. Drayton’s sonnet ponders the effects of aging on his loved one, its inevitable ravages. Through the poet's own “loop-holes” he observes its sad workings. Born in 1563, Drayton died on this date, December 23, in 1631 at age sixty-eight.

[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 our still-young century.]