English Literature
COWPER'S WORKS. Cowper's first volume of poems, containing "The Progress of
Error," "Truth," "Table Talk," etc., is interesting chiefly as showing how
the poet was bound by the classical rules of his age. These poems are
dreary, on the whole, but a certain gentleness, and especially a vein of
pure humor, occasionally rewards the reader. For Cowper was a humorist, and
only the constant shadow of insanity kept him from becoming famous in that
line alone.
_The Task_, written in blank verse, and published in 1785, is Cowper's
longest poem. Used as we are to the natural poetry of Wordsworth and
Tennyson, it is hard for us to appreciate the striking originality of this
work. Much of it is conventional and "wooden," to be sure, like much of
Wordsworth's poetry; but when, after reading the rimed essays and the
artificial couplets of Johnson's age, we turn suddenly to Cowper's
description of homely scenes, of woods and brooks, of plowmen and teamsters
and the letter carrier on his rounds, we realize that we are at the dawn of
a better day in poetry:
He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks:
News from all nations lumbering at his back.
True to his charge, the close-packed load behind,
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destined inn,
And, having dropped the expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,
Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
To him indifferent whether grief or joy.
Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,
Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks
Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,
Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains,
Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
His horse and him, unconscious of them all.
Cowper's most laborious work, the translation of Homer in blank verse, was
published in 1791. Its stately, Milton-like movement, and its better
rendering of the Greek, make this translation far superior to Pope's
artificial couplets. It is also better, in many respects, than Chapman's
more famous and more fanciful rendering; but for some reason it was not
successful, and has never received the recognition which it deserves.
Entirely different in spirit are the poet's numerous hymns, which were
published in the Olney Collection in 1779 and which are still used in our
churches. It is only necessary to mention a few first lines--"God moves in
a mysterious way," "Oh, for a closer walk with God," "Sometimes a light
surprises"--to show how his gentle and devout spirit has left its impress
upon thousands who now hardly know his name. With Cowper's charming
_Letters_, published in 1803, we reach the end of his important works, and
the student who enjoys reading letters will find that these rank among the
best of their kind. It is not, however, for his ambitious works that Cowper
is remembered, but rather for his minor poems, which have found their own
way into so many homes. Among these, the one that brings quickest response
from hearts that understand is his little poem, "On the Receipt of My
Mother's Picture." beginning with the striking line, "Oh, that those lips
had language." Another, called "Alexander Selkirk," beginning, "I am
monarch of all I survey," suggests how Selkirk's experiences as a castaway
(which gave Defoe his inspiration for _Robinson Crusoe_) affected the
poet's timid nature and imagination. Last and most famous of all is his
immortal "John Gilpin." Cowper was in a terrible fit of melancholy when
Lady Austen told him the story, which proved to be better than medicine,
for all night long chuckles and suppressed laughter were heard in the
poet's bedroom. Next morning at breakfast he recited the ballad that had
afforded its author so much delight in the making. The student should read
it, even if he reads nothing else by Cowper; and he will be lacking in
humor or appreciation if he is not ready to echo heartily the last stanza:
Now let us sing, Long live the King,
And Gilpin, long live he!
And when he next doth ride abroad
May I be there to see.
ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796)
After a century and more of Classicism, we noted with interest the work of
three men, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, whose poetry, like the chorus of
awakening birds, suggests the dawn of another day. Two other poets of the
same age suggest the sunrise. The first is the plowman Burns, who speaks
straight from the heart to the primitive emotions of the race; the second
is the mystic Blake, who only half understands his own thoughts, and whose
words stir a sensitive nature as music does, or the moon in midheaven,
rousing in the soul those vague desires and aspirations which ordinarily
sleep, and which can never be expressed because they have no names. Blake
lived his shy, mystic, spiritual life in the crowded city, and his message
is to the few who can understand. Burns lived his sad, toilsome, erring
life in the open air, with the sun and the rain, and his songs touch all
the world. The latter's poetry, so far as it has a philosophy, rests upon
two principles which the classic school never understood,--that common
people are at heart romantic and lovers of the ideal, and that simple human
emotions furnish the elements of true poetry. Largely because he follows
these two principles, Burns is probably the greatest song writer of the
world. His poetic creed may be summed up in one of his own stanzas:
Give me ae spark o' Nature's fire,
That's a' the learning I desire;
Then, though I trudge thro' dub an' mire
At pleugh or cart,
My Muse, though hamely in attire,
May touch the heart.
LIFE.[205] Burns's life is "a life of fragments," as Carlyle called it; and
the different fragments are as unlike as the noble "Cotter's Saturday
Night" and the rant and riot of "The Jolly Beggars." The details of this
sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten. We call attention
only to the facts which help us to understand the man and his poetry.
Burns was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, Scotland, in the bleak winter
of 1759. His father was an excellent type of the Scotch peasant of those
days,--a poor, honest, God-fearing man, who toiled from dawn till dark to
wrest a living for his family from the stubborn soil. His tall figure was
bent with unceasing labor; his hair was thin and gray, and in his eyes was
the careworn, hunted look of a peasant driven by poverty and unpaid rents
from one poor farm to another. The family often fasted of necessity, and
lived in solitude to avoid the temptation of spending their hard-earned
money. The children went barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and
shared the parents' toil and their anxiety over the rents. At thirteen
Bobby, the eldest, was doing a peasant's full day's labor; at sixteen he
was chief laborer on his father's farm; and he describes the life as "the
cheerless gloom of a hermit, and the unceasing moil of a galley slave." In
1784 the father, after a lifetime of toil, was saved from a debtor's prison
by consumption and death. To rescue something from the wreck of the home,
and to win a poor chance of bread for the family, the two older boys set up
a claim for arrears of wages that had never been paid. With the small sum
allowed them, they buried their father, took another farm, Mossgiel, in
Mauchline, and began again the long struggle with poverty.
Such, in outline, is Burns's own story of his early life, taken mostly from
his letters. There is another and more pleasing side to the picture, of
which we have glimpses in his poems and in his Common-place Book. Here we
see the boy at school; for like most Scotch peasants, the father gave his
boys the best education he possibly could. We see him following the plow,
not like a slave, but like a free man, crooning over an old Scotch song and
making a better one to match the melody. We see him stop the plow to listen
to what the wind is saying, or turn aside lest he disturb the birds at
their singing and nest making. At supper we see the family about the table,
happy notwithstanding their scant fare, each child with a spoon in one hand
and a book in the other. We hear Betty Davidson reciting, from her great
store, some heroic ballad that fired the young hearts to enthusiasm and
made them forget the day's toil. And in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" we
have a glimpse of Scotch peasant life that makes us almost reverence these
heroic men and women, who kept their faith and their self-respect in the
face of poverty, and whose hearts, under their rough exteriors, were tender
and true as steel.
A most unfortunate change in Burns's life began when he left the farm, at
seventeen, and went to Kirkoswald to study surveying. The town was the
haunt of smugglers, rough-living, hard-drinking men; and Burns speedily
found his way into those scenes of "riot and roaring dissipation" which
were his bane ever afterwards. For a little while he studied diligently,
but one day, while taking the altitude of the sun, he saw a pretty girl in
the neighboring garden, and love put trigonometry to flight. Soon he gave
up his work and wandered back to the farm and poverty again.
When twenty-seven years of age Burns first attracted literary attention,
and in the same moment sprang to the first place in Scottish letters. In
despair over his poverty and personal habits, he resolved to emigrate to
Jamaica, and gathered together a few of his early poems, hoping to sell
them for enough to pay the expenses of his journey. The result was the
famous Kilmarnock edition of Burns, published in 1786, for which he was
offered twenty pounds. It is said that he even bought his ticket, and on
the night before the ship sailed wrote his "Farewell to Scotland,"
beginning, "The gloomy night is gathering fast," which he intended to be
his last song on Scottish soil.
In the morning he changed his mind, led partly by some dim foreshadowing of
the result of his literary adventure; for the little book took all Scotland
by storm. Not only scholars and literary men, but "even plowboys and maid
servants," says a contemporary, eagerly spent their hard-earned shillings
for the new book. Instead of going to Jamaica, the young poet hurried to
Edinburgh to arrange for another edition of his work. His journey was a
constant ovation, and in the capital he was welcomed and feasted by the
best of Scottish society. This inexpected triumph lasted only one winter.
Burns's fondness for taverns and riotous living shocked his cultured
entertainers, and when he returned to Edinburgh next winter, after a
pleasure jaunt through the Highlands, he received scant attention. He left
the city in anger and disappointment, and went back to the soil where he
was more at home.
The last few years of Burns's life are a sad tragedy, and we pass over them
hurriedly. He bought the farm Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, and married the
faithful Jean Armour, in 1788, That he could write of her,
I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair;
I hear her in the tunefu' birds,
I hear her charm the air:
There's not a bonie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green;
There's not a bonie bird that sings,
But minds me o' my Jean,
is enough for us to remember. The next year he was appointed exciseman,
i.e. collector of liquor revenues, and the small salary, with the return
from his poems, would have been sufficient to keep his family in modest
comfort, had he but kept away from taverns. For a few years his life of
alternate toil and dissipation was occasionally illumined by his splendid