Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 3, December 2009
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"Whelm'd in Deeper Gulps": Bipolar Disorder and the Poetry of William Cowper
by
Baylor University
From the end of the eighteenth century to nearly the middle of the nineteenth, William Cowper became “the most popular poet of his generation and the best of English letter-writers” (Works 1:1). Indeed, he emerged as “the most widely read—at least, in England—of any English poet” (Nicholson 5). However, what is more remarkable than Cowper’s popularity is that when he composed his works, he did so while “whelm’d in” the deep “gulphs” of an often profoundly disabling mental illness, a condition that influenced and shaped the course of his life and literary accomplishments (Poems 3:216; line 66). According to Cowper himself, his mental illness became a motivation for his poetry and other works. In a letter, he acknowledged, “[D]ejection of spirits, which I suppose may have prevented many a man from becoming an author, made me one” (Letters 132). He believed that suffering with his illness drove him to authorship: “In such a situation of mind, encompassed by the midnight of absolute despair, and a thousand times filled with unspeakable horror, I first commenced an author. Distress drove me to it” (145). Even though Cowper began writing before his first episode of mental illness, he thought that his condition made him a more prolific writer than he would have become otherwise. Because Cowper believed that his mental illness made him write and became an important factor for his creative expression, critics should consider Cowper’s psychiatric condition when analyzing his poetry.
Often vaguely labeling him as crazy, psychotic, or insane, Cowper’s critics have pondered over Cowper and his literary works in light of biographical information. Morris Golden claims, “Cowper is one of those poets who force biographical examination upon the reader,” acknowledging that “biographical information is essential for [Cowper’s poetry’s] full effectiveness” (13). Similarly, Bill Hutchings notes that “Cowper transparently presents himself as the centre of his writing” (3). Indeed, many critics have taken a biographical approach to studying Cowper’s works but not yet in light of his particular disease. In the eighteenth century, knowing little about neurological disorders, physicians grouped Cowper’s disease with many others under the broad category of melancholia or insanity. Until recently, people often regarded insanity as stemming from a purely social or economic cause. Critics, therefore, have not fully understood Cowper’s poetry because they did not comprehend his mental illness. However, psychiatrists in the last few decades have contended that different mental illnesses exist due to biological realities, and because modern psychiatry has made vast advancements, today we have the awareness of Cowper’s probable, specific mental illness.
In recent years, several psychiatrists who have studied Cowper’s biographical information have posthumously diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. In 1987, German psychiatrists Joachim-Ernst Meyer and Ruth Meyer studied Cowper’s memoir, Adelphi, and concluded that his specific illness most likely was bipolar disorder. In more recent years, Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has written much about this mental illness synonymously termed manic depression or manic-depressive illness. In 1993, Jamison, using biographical and autobiographical work on Cowper’s life, confirmed in her book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, that Cowper’s mental illness was, indeed, manic-depressive illness (20).
Meyer, Meyer, and Jamison came to Cowper’s diagnosis largely due to the episodic nature of Cowper’s illness. Cowper’s biographers note five episodes of severe depression in his life, several of which induced him to attempt suicide, but between these episodes Cowper did not experience continual depression and often had seasons in which he felt completely normal. His letters during times of normalcy show a different man than the one depicted during his manic-depressive episodes. In stark contrast to Cowper’s frequently depressed and even suicidal letters, he also wrote cheery and optimistic letters which display his seemingly healthy mind. Just two years after his first three suicide attempts, Cowper wrote of his restoration “to perfect health, both of mind and body” (Letters 5). A few months later, he exclaimed, “[H]ow pleasant it is to feel the first approaches of health after a fever!” (6). He even felt confident that he would “continue to be, as…at present, really happy” (7). The next year, Cowper still remained contented and joyful; he wrote that his life was “consistent with the utmost cheerfulness” (17). These letters which describe seasons of stability and mental health differ greatly from Cowper’s more well-known letters of anguish. Toward the end of his life, Cowper explained these changes of mood, admitting that he was “occasionally much liable to dejection. But at intervals…no creature would suspect it” (149). In time, even Cowper understood that his mental illness came and went in cycles.
These drastic episodes indicate that Cowper suffered with manic depression; the American Psychiatric Association emphasizes “that the diagnosis of bipolar disorder derives from the occurrence of individual episodes over time” (797). These individual “[m]ood episodes are discrete periods of altered feeling, thought, and behavior” (804). For a person with manic-depressive illness, “multiple episodes are the rule….The majority of individuals with bipolar disorder have four or more episodes in a lifetime” (811). Cowper’s biographers commonly note five major worsening episodes in Cowper’s life, the last six years of which comprising his deepest, longest depression from which he never recovered. His letters reveal that these episodes became progressively worse over time, though he still intermittently experienced periods of mental health and stability. Jamison emphasizes that people with manic depression experience seasons of normalcy but that, often, episodes become more severe as the disease progresses:
Manic-depressive illness…is recurrent by nature; left untreated, individuals with this disease can expect to experience many, and generally worsening, episodes of depression and mania….[M]ost individuals who have manic-depressive illness are normal most of the time, that is, they maintain their reason and their ability to function personally and professionally. (16)
In addition to the episodic nature of Cowper’s illness, Jamison also makes her diagnosis of Cowper based on his repeated suicide attempts, the onset of his symptoms in his early twenties, his hallucinations, and his family history (58, 60, 64).
Many artists creatively express their experiences, especially artists undergoing painful experiences. According to Stanley W. Jackson, people with mental illnesses in particular often resort to poetic devices for expression, wanting people to understand and sympathize with their pain. Sufferers use “the enhancement of a metaphorical expression to bridge the gap of understanding, to draw the reader at least vicariously into [their] troubling subjective world” (396). Because Cowper’s poetry often parallels his memoir’s and letters’ accounts of his life, one interesting and increasingly relevant way to appreciate Cowper’s poetry, specifically in its themes and devices, is to understand it as creative expressions of his experience with bipolar disorder. The poems here are not exhaustive in the themes and devices mentioned but are merely representative of much of Cowper’s poetry as a whole. But before looking specifically at Cowper’s poetry, the reader must know what Cowper was experiencing when he wrote in order to know what he was perhaps expressing. By definition, bipolar disorder involves episodic experiences of depression, mania, or a mix of both with intermittent seasons of normalcy in between episodes.
The most well-known characteristic of depression in bipolar disorder involves the sufferer’s mood as “bleak, pessimistic, and despairing. A deep sense of futility is frequently accompanied, if not preceded, by the belief that the ability to experience pleasure is permanently gone” (Jamison 18). The despondent sufferer feels that life is hollow and meaningless. The American Psychiatric Association states that major depressive episodes are “defined by discrete periods of depressed or blue mood or loss of interest or pleasure in life” (804). E. Fuller Torrey and Michael B. Knable list similar symptoms of depressive episodes, including mood that is “depressed, empty, hopeless, painful; unable to experience joy or pleasure” and thoughts “preoccupied by death and suicide, which become increasingly attractive” (20).
A depressive episode produces not only an extremely saddened mood but also fixations on death, feelings of guilt, low self-esteem, and impaired thinking. The diagnostic criteria for manic depression include “suicidal thinking, self-blame, inappropriate guilt,” and “recurrent thoughts of death” (Torrey and Knable 13). Along with guilt, a person in a depressive episode suffers with extremely low self-esteem: “preoccupied by shortcomings…feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, and self hatred” (20). Emotionally miserable, experiencing guilty feelings, and thinking poorly of himself or herself, the sufferer of a depressive episode also experiences an enervated thinking capacity:
The depressive, or melancholic, states are characterized by a morbidity and flatness of mood along with a slowing down of virtually all aspects of human thought, feeling, and behavior that are most personally meaningful….When energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, and the capacity to actively engage in the efforts and pleasures of life is fundamentally altered. (Jamison 18)
Depressive episodes, then, not only negatively impact the sufferer’s emotions but also his or her mind. An episode of depression often results in “impaired thinking, concentration, and memory”; thus, the depressed sufferer, in addition to all the horrific consequences of such an episode, loses his or her capability to think clearly (Torrey and Knable 20).
Episodes of mania have equally disturbing results. Like depression, mania also impairs thinking, but instead of slowing it down, mania speeds up thoughts. Commonly called “a flight of ideas,” a manic episode results in “accelerated thoughts and speech” (Torrey and Knable 24-25). Also interesting in light of examining an author with the illness, “excessive writing” frequently results from a manic episode (30). These mental effects of mania make it a less desirable condition than one might expect. The common assumption that mania necessarily results in happiness is erroneous, and though sometimes mania can cause extreme elation, it also can cause psychotic behavior. Mania, similar to schizophrenia, often produces “paranoid delusions” (19); thus, the sufferer must sometimes confront misconceptions and illusions while enduring a confused or hazy state of mind.
Because of the oscillation between normalcy, mania, and depression, the sufferer must undergo vast shifts in his or her emotional and psychological state. With manic-depressive illness, a happy and clear-thinking person can suddenly experience either a depressive episode, leading to suicidal misery or a manic episode, leading to paranoid delusions. In addition to these extreme symptoms, sometimes “individuals with manic-depressive illness may be both manic and depressed at the same time,” and psychiatrists refer to this condition as a “mixed” episode (Torrey and Knable 38). Cowper creatively expresses many of these realities of manic depression, and a chronological look at selections of his poetry reveals his portrayal of these symptoms that worsen in intensity throughout his life.
Cowper’s poem “Mortals, Around Your Destin’d Heads” shows an early glimpse of his poetry depicting a depressive episode. He wrote this poem in the early 1750s, around the onset of the illness. Cowper describes this time period in his life in his memoir, Adelphi: “I was struck…with such a dejection of spirits as none but they who have felt the same can have the least conception of. Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horrors and rising in despair” (Letters and Prose 8). This clearly depressive episode in his prose also surfaces in his poetry. In “Mortals, Around Your Destin’d Heads,” the speaker focuses on the imminent end of life for all people. The first stanza portrays “the Shafts of Death” flying around mortals’ heads (Poems 1:26; 2). The poem darkly describes mortality and the inevitability of death:
In Vain we trifle with our fate,
Try ev’ry Art in Vain,
At best we but prolong the date,
And lengthen out our Pain. (1:26; 5-8)
Repeating the idea of vanity, the poem’s speaker laments life’s futility because of the inescapability of death. Though concerns over the meaning of life do make up a part of the general human experience, Cowper’s poetry continually repeats the themes of death and the futility of life.
Cowper sometimes uses metaphorical imagery to convey his desperation and his obsession with death. The poem’s fourth and fifth stanzas present a tragic metaphor about a seaman who escapes death just to die:
Thus the Wreck’d Mariner may strive
Some Desart Shore to gain,
Secure of Life, if he survive
The fury of the Main.
But there, to Famine doom’d a prey,
Finds the mistaken Wretch,
He but escaped the troubled Sea,
To perish on the Beach. (1:26-27; 13-20)
In these stanzas, the speaker portrays a miserable person who fights to live yet is obsessed by pending death; the mariner strives with the wild waters of the sea only to starve when he makes it to shore. The tragedy of a shipwrecked seaman is one that Cowper revisits during bouts of depression because, for him, the stranded person represents his acute sense of death’s nearness which makes his life miserable. Cowper presents a similar mariner even more tragically in “The Castaway” about forty years later during his last depressive episode.
Depressive episodes led Cowper from fixating on death to undergoing excessive, unnecessary guilt. Critics such as Robert Southey and David Cecil attribute his sensations of guilt to Christianity, but Cowper carried the intense burden of condemnation and paranoia before his conversion to evangelical Christianity. Therefore, Cowper’s weight of guilt can probably be more accurately attributed to his illness rather than to his faith. Even after Cowper’s conversion, his sense of guilt superseded that of Christians who believe in God’s forgiveness and grace, such as his close evangelical friend, John Newton, who constantly reassured Cowper of his soul’s salvation. But Cowper’s depressive episodes convinced him that both God and the world condemned him. Cowper recorded in Adelphi his unnatural memories of guilt while he lived in London during the 1750s, before his first suicide attempt and before his evangelical conversion:
[I felt] even in dreams, the commission of forgotten sins, and charging upon my conscience things of an indifferent nature as the most atrocious crimes. At length I thought every motion of my body a sin, and could not find out the posture in which I could sit or stand without offending. This was heaping one mountain upon another and by these means my guilt was made to appear to me of such an enormous size that I was once more tempted to destroy myself….[I]t would be an act of duty to rid the world of such a sinner.” (Letters and Prose 34)
His sense of guilt is so pronounced and unreasonable that his imperfect posture makes him want to end his life. Cowper poetically expresses this same acute sense of guilt in poetry such as “Anxious as Sad Offenders Are.” The poem shows similar guilt and obsession with death from a depressive episode. The second stanza describes a “poor Wretch” who grief from self-reproach and “Fears of Death assail” (Poems 1:27; 5, 8). This miserable person has long carried the heaviness of guilt:
For ah, I feel and long have felt
What grief the Sick-Man knows,
In secret sorrowing for the Guilt,
From whence those Griefs arose. (1:27; 13-16)
The poem shows grief stemming from guilt and resulting in the fear of death which parallels Cowper’s personal account of a depressive episode. These poems are well-known as typical of Cowper.
However, Cowper not only portrayed depression in his poetry but also described seasons of mania which impaired his thinking. When he wrote autobiographically in letters, Cowper confessed his frequent struggles with confusion: “Chaos himself…is not surrounded with more confusion, nor has a mind more completely in a hubbub, than I experience at the present moment” (Letters 277). Cowper lamented over frequent “troubles of mind” (248). When his illness would subside, he felt he had recovered “that elasticity of mind which is able to resist the pressure” (249). During his manic episodes which compromised his ability to think clearly, Cowper attempted to express his frustrations with his illness through poetry.
In “An Epistle to Robert Lloyd, Esqr.” (1754), Cowper acknowledges that he composes poetry to distract his mind from his illness, and he provides apt metaphoric imagery as he illustrates his impaired thinking capacity. Though the tone of “An Epistle to Robert Lloyd, Esqr.” is light, Cowper interjects his constant awareness of his mind’s infirmity during the episode:
Not that I mean, while thus I knit
My thread-bare sentiments together,
To shew my genius, or my wit,
When God and you know, I have neither;
Or such, as might be better shewn
By letting Poetry alone.
‘Tis not either of these views,
That I presume to address the Muse;
But to divert a fierce banditti,
(Sworn foes to every thing that’s witty!) (Poems 1:4-14)
He compares writing during one of these manic episodes to knitting together his thoughts which are falling apart. He admits that he does not write to show his brilliance and creativity but composes poetry to redirect his thoughts. These lines almost comically portray his thinking process; the thoughts he experiences are like bandits that raid his mind and steal his reason. These thieves bring with them darkness and gloom:
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. (1:55; 15-20)
The poem expresses how a manic-depressive sufferer feels about his own mind, like a man who has been robbed of his normal thinking capacity by thieves that leave only melancholy behind. In addition to Cowper showing manic disturbances in his thinking, Cowper also alludes to depressed feelings; thus, he portrays a mixed episode in this poem, showing the combination of gloomy feelings with wild, scattered thoughts.
Cowper poetically renders his scattered state of mind by his use of dashes in the middle of the poem:
First, for a thought—since all agree—
A thought—I have it—let me see—
‘Tis gone again—Plague on’t! I thought
I had it—but I have it not. (Poems 1:55; 35-38)
Here, he represents his thought process, showing his forgetfulness as if he is unable to hold onto his thoughts. Cowper then resorts to a poetic comparison to represent his fleeting reason:
The Virtuoso thus, at noon
Broiling beneath a July sun,
The gilded Butterfly pursues,
O’er hedge and ditch, thro’ gaps and mews;
And after many a vain essay
To captivate the tempting prey,
Gives him at length the lucky pat,
And has him safe, beneath his hat:
Then lifts it gently from the ground;
But ah! ‘tis lost, as soon as found;
Culprit his liberty regains;
Flits out of sight, and mocks his pains.
The sense was dark; ‘twas therefore fit
With simile t’illustrate it; (1:56; 49-62)
Just when he thinks he has captured his thoughts, they escape. Like the man attempting to catch a butterfly, Cowper strives to obtain and hold onto his reasoning capacity and his grip of reality. Instead, his mind flits and floats away like the butterfly, an appropriate analogy for struggling with mania.
Cowper continually felt inclined to try to express his frustration that he could not contain his wild thoughts. He likens his thoughts to grains of sand which can never be completely grasped or retained: “My thoughts are like loose dry sand, which the closer it is grasped slips the sooner away. Mr. Johnson reads to me, but I lose every other sentence through the inevitable wanderings of my mind, and experience as I have these two years, the same shattered mode of thinking on every subject and on all occasions” (Letters 310-311). Though Cowper sometimes describes these manic episodes by expressing the impairment of his thinking capacity, he also often expresses both diminished thinking and gloominess; this dual representation could either represent the entirety of his experience, oscillating between the two extremes, or could describe mixed episodes.
Cowper penned “Written in a Fit of Illness” in 1755, depicting simultaneous mania and depression. The poem opens in “sad hours,” identifying the speaker as “a prey to ceaseless pain,” typical of an episode of depression (Poems 1:43; 1-2). Yet, this aggrieved speaker tells of his “feverish pulses leap[ing] in ev’ry vein” and “wild…wand’ring thoughts,” a description of mania (Poems 1:43; 2, 5). The poem’s representation of mania mirrors Cowper’s admitted struggle with his reasoning ability during his illness. In addition to wild thoughts, the speaker alludes to feelings of oppression and death: “The force of some resistless weight / Bears me straight down from that pernicious height; (Poems 1:43; 21-22). Then the “gulphs yawn ready to receive my fall” (1:43; 26). Interestingly, the most common metaphors that people with melancholia have used throughout literary history include “being in a state of darkness and being weighed down” (Jackson 396). Cowper indeed uses both of these metaphors in his poetry; the image in this poem is of a person who expects death, being pulled down from a high precipice by heaviness. As if the speaker knows that the episodes do not last forever, the poem closes with the speaker waiting for it to pass:
Alone I’ll grieve, till, gloomy sorrow past,
Health, like the cheerful day-spring, comes at last—
Comes fraught with bliss to banish ev’ry pain, (Poems 1:44; 34-36)
The poem shows a distraught mind that is haunted by scattered and morbid thoughts; in the midst of the mixed episode, the speaker waits for this psychological state to subside.
After recovering from his first attempts at suicide, Cowper wrote “A Song of Mercy and Judgment” in the mid 1760s, just after his conversion to evangelical Christianity, a time of mental health and normalcy. In the poem, he recalls his fluctuating feelings between episodes, and he depicts this oscillation through images of light and darkness. He describes his previous struggle as “[w]aves of deep Affliction,” (Poems 1:135; 7) “[t]errors [he] sustain’d” (1:135; 22), and reduction “to moping Madness” (1:136; 33), but the speaker exalts in a grace that has brought him through these sufferings. Seven of the thirteen stanzas end with the refrain, “Grace divine how sweet the Sound / Sweet the grace which I have found” (1:135-36). Because his conversion to evangelical Christianity coincided with the longest period in his adult life of consistent mental health, Cowper attributed his regaining of mental health to grace. The reader readily recalls John Newton’s sweet-sounding amazing grace, and, indeed, Newton probably influenced Cowper because of their close friendship. However, for Cowper, this grace meant something more tangible than spiritual deliverance due to his conversion coinciding with his restoration to mental health. We may not be able to know whether Cowper’s faith actually made this extended period of mental health possible or whether the temporary remission only coincidentally occurred with his conversion, but Cowper himself believed his faith to have delivered him, at least temporarily, from his illness.
However, as is typical of bipolar disorder, stanza three of “A Song of Mercy and Judgment” portrays Cowper’s oscillatory experience:
From the cheerful Beams of Morning
Sad I turn’d mine Eyes away:
And the Shades of Night returning
Fill’d my Soul with new Dismay. (1:135; 13-16)
The speaker does not continually tell of peace but returns again to misery. Cowper describes his feelings of morning changing to evening, happiness to despair, and light to dark. He goes on to portray fear, sadness, self-loathing, and a loss of reason in stanza six:
Fear of Thee with gloomy Sadness,
Overwhelm’d thy guilty Worm,
‘Till reduced to moping Madness,
Reason sunk beneath the Storm. (1:136; 31-35)
Here, the speaker describes his previous fear of God and his bearing of guilt and sadness. Then the imagery of the storm reveals the tempestuous nature of his thoughts, to the point that he loses his reason. Cowper similarly describes his account of his second major mental breakdown, resulting in suicide attempts, in Adelphi: “But behold the storm was gathering all the while, and the fury of it was not the less violent for this little gleam of sunshine in the beginning” (Letters and Prose 15). He had called his first suicidal breakdown “the storm of sixty-three” (Letters 23). Cowper often uses the metaphor of the storm to describe his episodes, as he could see them coming, experience them, and then rejoice in the calm afterward. In this poem, Cowper illustrates how his ability to think clearly was destroyed by the storm of his illness, and the imagery describes his experience of mental anguish which increased with each recurrence of the illness.
Symptomatic of bipolar disorder, Cowper often felt extremely paranoid in mania and also frequently belittled himself in depression. Before his first suicide attempt, when he had been called to appear at the Bar of the House of Lords, Cowper panicked over exposing himself “to a public rejection for insufficiency” (Letters and Prose 17). Afraid of and embarrassed by his imperfections, Cowper even read the newspaper as a personal attack which led him to suicidal thoughts: “I cannot now recollect the purport of [a letter in the newspaper], but before I had finished it, it appeared demonstrably true to me that it was a libel or satire upon me. The author seemed to be acquainted with my purpose of self-murder and to have written that letter to secure and hasten the execution of it” (19-20). He recorded his extreme sensitivity in Adelphi, that he “never went into the street” without thinking that “the people stared and laughed at [him] and held [him] in contempt” (27). He grieved that his “resolution to be a great man” was less than “half as strong as it [was] to despise the shame of being a little one” (Letters 2). He claimed to have “more weakness than the greatest of all fools” (3), and he admitted that “self-loathing and abhorrence ran through all [his] insanity” (Letters and Prose 33-34). His sensitivity and self-abasement became even worse when combined with further hallucinations. Less than a decade after his season of mental peace, Cowper experienced a manic episode causing an excruciating hallucination in 1773. He believed that God spoke to him and condemned him as a hopeless reprobate. Feeling forever damned, Cowper attempted suicide again, and his episodes worsened.
Cowper’s experience of another depressive episode coupled with his alarming hallucination led him to produce poetry with more severe and pronounced themes of guilt, misery, and death. In a letter written during this episode, he felt himself “to be scrambling always in the dark, among rocks and precipices, without a guide, but with an enemy ever at [his] heels prepared to push [him] headlong” (Letters 283). Also, during this time, Cowper penned “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion,” replete with the themes of self-loathing and death. As the title of the poem implies, the speaker believes he forever deserves wrath and condemnation. The speaker portrays himself as traditionally one of the greatest of sinners, the one who betrayed Christ, claiming that he is “more abhorr’d than” Judas (Poems 1:210; 5). In self-hatred and fear, the speaker laments Hell keeping “her everhungry mouths all / Bolted against [him]” (1:210; 11-12). The poem concludes with an acute picture of depression aggravated by a manic hallucination; the speaker, “fed with judgments, in a fleshly tomb,” is “[b]uried above ground” (1:210; 5, 19-20). Cowper describes this episode as a living death; his body becomes like a tomb, and his illness makes him feel like a person who is buried alive.
Looking through the lens of bipolar disorder, we not only see these troubling effects of Cowper’s illness but also the respites from it that he praised in his poetry. We have already seen Cowper’s praise of Christianity, and, in a similar way, Cowper extolled rural living as helpful for coping with his illness. Cowper wrote “Retirement” in 1781 as he reflected back upon his episodes and noted the time of happiness and serenity that he experienced after his 1763 recovery when he converted and subsequently moved to the country. The poem shows his affinity for the rural life in which he enjoyed a period of mental health. In “Retirement,” the poem’s speaker asserts his desire to get away from the city:
The statesman, lawyer, merchant, man of trade,
Pants for the refuge of some rural shade,
Where all his long anxieties forgot
Amid the charms of a sequester’d spot. (Poems 1:378; 5-8)
When Cowper lived in London, he served as a lawyer and London solicitor. The stress of appearing at the Bar of the House of Lords launched Cowper into his second depression and first suicide attempt, making Cowper dislike city life and praise retreating to the countryside. Therefore, the speaker in “Retirement” praises living in nature and observing God’s creation as higher and greater than living in the city with its greed and temptations, to “feed and fan the fatal fires / Of pride, ambition or impure desires” (1:380-81; 109-10). The poem allowed Cowper to both attack the city life that he thought caused or aggravated his illness as well as to reflect upon his own experience of mental health immediately after retiring to the country.
“Retirement” also recalls his physician’s recommendation to go to the country. The speaker praises Dr. Heberden, the physician that Cowper visited early on in his illness. Heberden, primarily remembered for his innovations in rheumatology, also advised patients with melancholia. He “relied mainly on the recuperative powers of nature, and…he helped the process along by sending the patient away from the scene of his breakdown, to benefit by a change of surroundings in the country” (Heberden 309). The speaker of “Retirement” praises Heberden in his prescription of retreating from the city:
Virtuous and faithful HEBERDEN! Whose skill
Attempts no task it cannot well fulfill,
Gives melancholy up to nature’s care,
And sends the patient into purer air. (Poems 1:385; 279-282)
Though the rural life did not cure Cowper’s illness forever, he seemed to believe that living away from the busy city life helped his illness subside, at least for several years. Perhaps similar to the effects of his faith, we cannot know for sure if his move out of the city really helped lessen the development of his illness or if the move just serendipitously coincided with the illness’s temporary remission. However, Cowper wrote the poem “Retirement” well after his move to the countryside, so he still commended life in the country in spite of recurrent experiences of suicidal episodes.
Another coping mechanism that Cowper mentions in “Retirement” is busyness. Denouncing idleness, Cowper expresses the need to occupy himself, given that his mind often races to delusional and despairing thoughts. In the final years of Cowper’s life, he expressed his need to “escape the worst of all evils…an idle life” (Letters 198). He thought that keeping busy helped him to survive his episodes and that remaining idle worsened them; therefore, idleness became a pervasive theme in his poetry. “Retirement” also shows Cowper’s difficulty with thinking clearly even after his move and his season of mental health. He bemoans idleness, largely because for him inactivity led to or worsened his mental instability. The speaker closes the poem “Retirement” with a discourse on the challenge of idleness in retirement:
’Tis easy to resign a toilsome place,
But not to manage leisure with a grace,
Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distress’d. (1:393; 621-24)
The speaker then warns the retired person: “For solitude, however some may rave, / Seeming a sanctuary, proves a grave,” showing that in his case, an unoccupied mind leads to an unhealthy psyche (1:396; 735-36). Cowper again alludes to the capacity of bipolar disorder to make a person—in this case, a person with an idle mind—feel like he or she is dead while still living. Cowper’s manic depression caused him to love and extol the virtues of quiet country life, but his illness also forced him to constantly find ways to keep busy, thus leading to his interest in taking care of animals, writing hymns, and gardening.
In 1785, Cowper composed one of his greatest long works, The Task, in which he again praises the rural life. As in “Retirement,” the speaker ruminates upon country versus city life. In Book I “The Sofa,” the speaker censures London, calling it “opulent” and “enlarged” and comparing it to the hedonistic city of Babylon (Poems 2:135; 721-22). The speaker contends that cities promote vice; the ending lines of “The Sofa” contain one of Cowper’s most famous lines which summarize his glorification of the rural life: “God made the country, and man made the town” (2:136; 749). In Book III “The Garden,” the speaker goes into further detail, describing a love for the country and a belief in its superiority to the city. The speaker describes himself as a person who is “enamour’d of sequester’d scenes, / And charm’d with rural beauty” (2:163; 27-28). Cowper, as a pre-Romantic, was not the only person in the eighteenth century to glorify the rural life; however, his reasons for doing so surely related to his bipolar episodes because he believed that the country provided him a lengthy respite from despair and impaired thinking.
The Task also sporadically provides autobiographical accounts of Cowper’s struggle in the midst of manic-depressive episodes. Critics often point out autobiography in “The Garden”; in fact, David Cecil entitled his biography of Cowper The Stricken Deer. The speaker in “The Garden” describes himself as such:
I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charged when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades. (2:165; 108-11)
Cowper associated himself in his illness with a hunted animal. In this passage, he depicts himself as slowly dying when he left the city to retreat to the country. This description aligns closely to Cowper’s abandonment of London after his suicidal breakdown, again showing that Cowper glorified the rural life because he experienced his greatest period of mental health in his adult life when he moved to Huntington and Olney. In “The Garden,” the speaker praises withdrawing from society to strengthen the mind:
Oh blest seclusion from a jarring world
Which he thus occupied, enjoys! Retreat
Cannot indeed to guilty man restore
Lost innocence, or cancel follies past,
But it has peace, and much secures the mind
From all assaults of evil. (2:180; 675-681)
Cowper upbraids the city as a place where bipolar disorder attacked him, forcing him into the country, which provided a temporary place of healing for him. Though the rural life did not cure him of all his feelings of guilt, it brought him more peace of mind than the busy, troubling world of the city.
Even though Cowper’s poetry praised the refuge that living in the country temporarily brought him, near the end of Cowper’s life, his letters and poetry became evermore dark and dismal during the plague of his most severe episodes. In Cowper’s last letter, he feared “a storm [that] was at hand which in one terrible moment would darken, and in another still more terrible blot out,” presumably in death (Letters 316). In addition to comparing this episode to a storm, he also likens it to a “thick, dark fog,” (164) a “cloud” that sometimes passes away and sometimes “the skirts of it ...still hang over [him]” (171). These images of dark, hazy confusion illustrate Cowper’s mental condition. Indeed, for a person with manic depression, the “physical and psychological worlds are experienced as shades of grays and blacks, as having lost their color and vibrancy” (Jamison 18).
Cowper metaphorically presents this kind of color imagery in one of his last and most famous poems, “The Castaway,” in 1799, during the greatest intensity of his illness. “The Castaway” provides a rich, metaphoric description of the mental anguish Cowper suffered during a severe depressive episode. In this poem, he represents elements of depression in his metaphors of night, storm, sea and drowning. Cowper admitted in a letter that he “disliked much to be in great waters, unless in the finest weather” (Letters 127). Appropriately then, Cowper uses the rough sea to depict his struggle with a depressive episode. As Conrad Brunstrom notes, Cowper found “maritime imagery…most personally threatening” (140). The poem depicts a doomed mariner who fights death in the midst of a dark storm:
Obscurest night involved the sky,
Th’ Atlantic billows roar’d,
When such a destin’d wretch as I
Wash’d headlong from on board
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home forever left. (Poems 3:214; 1-5)
Unlike the mariner in “Mortals, Around Your Destin’d Heads” who escapes to the beach to die, this mariner slowly drowns. The castaway struggles for some time as Cowper did in attempting suicide but never succeeding and also in enduring long episodes of mental instability. The poem shows “sailors on shipboard” that “pity the castaway, not because he is doomed but because he remains conscious throughout while his inevitable oblivion is cruelly deferred” (Brunstrom 164). A person struggling with death yet not dying serves as a strikingly appropriate metaphor for depression. In the water, the mariner fights “with Death a lasting strife / Supported by despair of life” (Poems 3:214; 17-18). The poem suggests a long, exhausting struggle with death and despair:
He long survives who lives an hour
In ocean, self-upheld,
And so long he with unspent pow’r
His destiny repell’d, (3:215; 37-40)
Fighting with death avails not for the castaway, and the speaker compares himself to him, likening Cowper’s mental and emotional struggle to drowning. The speaker then closes the poem with famous lines, comparing himself to the castaway: “But I, beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he” (3:216; 65-66). These lines convey the height of Cowper’s psychological struggle, a worse battle than the one fought by the desperate mariner. This aggravated season of depression that Cowper was experiencing during the time he wrote this poem eventually took away his capacity to write at all.
Cowper’s poetry is largely his expression of his difficult experiences in suffering with bipolar disorder. Writing poetry became for Cowper both a coping mechanism and a desperate attempt to be understood during a century in which no one knew how to diagnose or treat such a mental illness. Poetry became the place where he could illustrate his differing states of consciousness through metaphors and images, so in some poems he portrays his thoughts going wild and scattering in mania; in others, he laments in self-loathing, guilt, despair, and death in depression. That Cowper wrote in an era prior “to the availability and widespread use of lithium” as treatment for manic-depression, a time in which “at least one person in five with manic-depressive illness committed suicide” (Jamison 16), should lead his readers also to appreciate his human struggle and his depiction of it in his letters and poetry. Additionally, considering Cowper’s illness when looking at his poetry allows the reader not only to appreciate his struggle but also to better understand his foci on Christianity and the rural life, his two sources of comfort during a season of normalcy between bipolar episodes. This lens for explication should be useful to twenty-first century readers who have a greater understanding of mental illness, and seeing Cowper’s poetic attempt to portray the effects of this illness should aid should elevate readers’ appreciation for the poet who so poignantly expressed his suffering.
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