Table of contents
1. Cowper's Grave
I
It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart's decaying.
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying.
Yet let the grief and humbleness, as low as silence, languish.
Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish4
II
O poets, from a maniac’s tongue was poured the deathless singing!
O Christians, at your cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging!
O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling,
Groaned inly8while he taught you peace, and died while
ye were smiling!
III
And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory,
And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights
departed11,
He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted,
IV
He shall be strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation,
And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration.
ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken,
Named softly as the household name of one whom
God hath taken16
V
With quiet sadness and no gloom I learn to think upon him,—
With meekness that is gratefulness to God whose
heaven hath won him,
Who suffered once the madness-cloud to His own love to blind him,
But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find
him,
VI
And wrought within his shattered brain such quick poetic senses
As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences22.
The pulse of dew upon the grass, kept his within its number,
And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber24.
VII
Wild25 timid hares were drawn from woods to share his
home-caresses,
Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan26 tendernesses.
The very world, by God’s constraint, from
falsehood’s ways removing,
Its women and its men28 became,
beside him, true and loving.
VIII
And though, in blindness, he remained unconscious of that guiding,
And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing,
He testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy31 desolated,
—Nor man nor nature satisfy, whom only God
created.
IX
Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses
And drops upon his burning brow the coolness of her kisses,—
That turns his fevered eyes around—“My mother! where’s my mother?”—
As if such tender words and deeds could come from any other!—36
X
The fever gone, with leaps of heart he sees her bending o’er him,
Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore
him!—
Thus, woke the poet from the dream his life’s long fever gave him,
Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes40,
which closed in death to save him.
XI
Thus? oh, not thus! no type of earth can image
that awaking,
Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs42, round him
breaking,
Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted,
But felt those eyes alone, and knew,—“My Saviour! not deserted!”
XII
Deserted! Who hath dreamt that when the cross in darkness rested,
Upon the Victim’s46 hidden
face, no love was manifested?
What frantic hands outstretched have e’er the atoning drops
averted?
What tears have washed them from the soul, that one should be
deserted?48
XIII
Deserted! God could separate from His own essence rather;
And Adam's sins have
swept between the righteous Son and Father.
Yea, once, Immanuel’s51 orphaned
cry his universe hath shaken—
It went up single, echoless, “My God, I am
forsaken!”
XIV
It went up from the Holy’s lips amid his lost creation,
That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation!
That earth’s worst phrenzies, marring hope, should mar not hope’s
fruition,
And I, on Cowper’s grave, should see his rapture
in a vision.
2. Note on the text
In its tribute to the genius of poet William Cowpera1(1731-1800), this poem reflects the influence of poetical
“grandfathers,” major and minor, on EBB’s development—although it is her search
for poetical “grandmothers” that has more often been emphasizeda2. The poem also
enters into early Victorian debates concerning the extent to which Cowper’s
bouts of suicidal depression were caused by madness or by a religious mania
induced by the Calvinist doctrine of reprobation: the belief that an individual
might be eternally damned by Goda3. EBB had read at least
three biographies of Cowper as well as his letters; she considered Robert
Southey’s Lifea4 the “best
& fullest.” Her own view, as expressed in extended comments to her
friend Mary Mitford, was that “poor Cowper was mad, not in consequence of his
theological views but altogether apart from them.” Southey’s account of Cowper’s
life had a profound influence on her, lying upon her “heart like a weight of
lead for days & days” (BC 5:306-7), perhaps because of religious doubts
she herself had experienced. In her introspective, evangelical girlhood, she had
moments when she was “tortured” by the idea of having so “offended” God that she
“hardly hoped for pardon” and repeated “My God My God why hast thou forsaken
me”a5 (BC 1:352). Like the climax of The
Seraphim (ll. 931-32), “Cowper’s Grave” explores the implications of
the moment when Christ on the cross cries out to God that he is “forsaken.” With
its flowing mellifluous verse, the poem “pleased more persons . . . than all the
rest put together” among works in EBB’s 1838 collection, as measured by letters
she received from both strangers and friends (BC 4:267). It was also praised in
Blackwood’s as “affecting and beautiful,” and in The Quarterly Review as “the best and most finished of
Miss Barrett’s productions” (BC 4:382, 414). When first published in 1838, the
poem was cast in unnumbered eight-line stanzas with alternating lines of four
and three and a half metrical feet. EBB gave instructions to the printer
altering the poem to its present quatrain form in preparing the copy for her Poems (1850). She also made numerous revisions in the
text and punctuation, and deleted the epigraph from William Habingtona6 that prefaced
the 1838 text:
For a text with variants and more extended annotation, see The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, General Editor,
Sandra Donaldson (London: Pickering and Chatto).
I will invite thee, from thy envious hearse
To rise, and ’bout the world thy beams to spread,
That we may see there’s brightness in the dead.
Notes
4.
The real or fictitious visit to a
poet’s grave is a conventional device in nineteenth-century memorial
poetry, as “The Grave of a Poetess” in Felicia
Hemans’s Records of Woman (1828)
and “Haworth Churchyard” (1855), Matthew Arnold’s
memorial to the Brontë sisters, indicates. In 1850
EBB altered the punctuation of this stanza to four full stops,
syntactically bringing the reader to a stop in this evocation of the
grave.
↵11.
departed Cowper experienced his final breakdown in 1796, after
the death of the woman who had cared for him, Mary Unwin.
↵16.
household name nickname, like
EBB’s own “pet-name” within her family, “Ba,” the subject of the last
poem in her 1838 collection (“Cowper’s Grave” is the third from last).
↵22.
influences
here used in the older (and primary) astrological sense of emanations
from the stars affecting the characters and destinies of human beings.
↵24.
The pulse . . .
number, the dew’s rhythmical recurrence or pulse helped to
regulate the beat of his pulse.
↵28.
Its women and its men this reversal of the
conventional word order “men and women” may have been prompted by the
meter. EBB does, however, in writing of religious believers sometimes
make a point of including both genders; see, for example, her exchange
with William Merry on doctrinal questions (BC 8:149)
↵36.
Like . . .
other!— cf. the very similar images of divine love figured
through maternal kisses in Stanza 5 of EBB’s “A Child’s Thought of God”
(1850).
↵48.
See H. Buxton Forman’s
transcription of a ms fragment that contains two variants on ll. 45-48,
although Forman does not connect these to “Cowper’s Grave” (HUPS
2:195).
↵51.
Immanuel’s Christ’s; Immanuel or Emmanuel
(Hebrew for “God with us) is the name of the child foretold in Isaiah
7:14 and thus applied to Christ in the New Testament.
↵a1.
Cowper Author of descriptive,
religious, and political verse, satires, sonnets, and a translation of
Homer. Cowper’s works include the influential collection of Nonconformist
verse, the Olney Hymns (1779), and The Task (1789). In “The Book of the Poets,” her
wide-ranging survey of the history of English poetry (published in the Athenæum, 1842), EBB describes Cowper as a writer in
whom the spirit of the “fifth” era of poetry (i.e., the Romantic era) was
“alive”; with his more natural style, he broke away from the “serf bondage”
of the “Dryden dynasty,” participating in the revolution that culminated in
the works of William Wordsworth and others (CW
6:298).
↵a2.
“I look everywhere for Grandmothers & see
none” (BC 10:14), she commented in an often cited exchange with H.F. Chorley
(1808-72), literary critic for the Athenæum (see BC
10:3-4, 13-15). In the same passage, however, she also speaks of her
“reverent love” for her poetical “grandfathers.”
↵a3.
Cowper
suffered from attacks of madness in which he was overcome by despair and the
conviction that he was cast out by God into eternal damnation, leading him
to attempt suicide on at least two occasions.
↵a4.
Life
The Works of William Cowper, Esq., … With a Life of the
Author written by Robert Southey (1774-1843), prolific author of
both verse and prose, who became Poet Laureate in 1813.
↵Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Date: March 10th, 2009
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