Felicity Nussbaum, in her critique of the poem, argues there is no single theme that unifies the poem, suggesting various ideas are repeated. Martha becomes the embodiment of eighteenth-century conduct book expectations for women: good humor, sense, social love, and a quiet, unassuming wit. Compared to other women who are imposters with assumed identities, she is presented as genuine. In contrast are the portraits of the women condemned by society for being fickle, inconsistent, excessive self-love, and ostentatious displays of wit. These attributes were condemned as a self-centered approach, as they could be seen as challenging men’s positions in an effort to outshine them. Wit was associated with immorality due to the prejudice against women learning, as when taken to extremes, it could make them violent, quarrelsome, and destructive of the social order. James Fordyce stated that women who sought knowledge looked for control and power. His solution was they should confine themselves to the domestic sphere.
Poetry at the beginning of the eighteenth century was less about emotion than cold reflection. It often took a moral or satirical firm. Cowper intended his poem to ramble, wander, and develop organically. He sought to give the impression of literature as a process created on the spot from the events described. Thus the three-legged stool is developed into a chair and then a sofa over time. His overarching principle is that of the Christian pilgrimage in a fallen world, and he sees his quest as a search for a poetic vision. Poetic language is that of an unfallen man, and his task is to use this corrupted language to express his thoughts and conform to God’s will.
Thomas E Blom in The Structure and Meaning of The Task details the poet’s journey through each book beginning with Lady Austen’s challenge to compose a poem with a sofa as its theme. In book one entitled The Sofa, repose signifies rest from some of the more serious topics of his earlier works, it can also signify physical rest lying on the sofa. However, those who recline and rest must give up country rambles where he refers to sights and bird sounds that enliven the spirit.
There is the rural idyll away from the sights and sounds of the village and town where he can indulge his dreams in tranquil security. Yet he exposes this fallacy by suggesting that far from crystal clear water, the ditch is dirty and overgrown. He likens the grove where he concludes his walk as Eden after the fall as man toils to earn his bread. He argues rest is self-imposed, away from nature and its natural scent, compared to the artificial inferior wonders of an artisan’s hand. He claims illness is caused by being constantly indoors, and nature restores a healthy hue. Cowper sees his task as writing serious poetry, and in this sense, his taskmaster is God.
Book two is entitled Time-Piece and looks at the immorality of man, beginning with slavery. The poet states he would rather be a slave than impose tyranny on someone else. He makes the point that if we have no slaves in our own country, then why should we impose this system abroad? This is a reference to the uprisings in Jamaica in August 1783. Cowper highlights man’s immorality by exposing the corruption of regulatory institutions such as schools, government, the church, and the military. He accuses the church of prostituting and shaming the noble office with his own vanity and starving his flock of the truth. He talks of a time when learning, virtue, piety, and truth were precious and linked with discipline. Learning grew, the mind was well informed, and the passions bought into subordination. However, when discipline is overlooked, the mind falls sick and dies. This produces scholars that know nothing, are blind to scrutiny, the tongue is not curtailed, and they pursue idle sports and vicious pleasures.
The title of book three is The Garden, and it is here that the poet finds self-discipline. He refers to plentiful fruits as compensation for his labor. If he had the choice, there was nothing which he could not possess in the garden—health, leisure, friendship, peace, and the means to improve. He recommends piety, truth, and virtue, which are best secured and promoted through nature. A man can dig, beg, rot, and perish content in honest rags compared to the sordid and sickening success of the commonwealth, where avarice, ambition, vanity, lust, and endless riots occur. London is painted as a hope for better things, a chance to win, to shine, to be amused, but also a place of poverty, begging, overcrowding, and vagrancy.
Book four is entitled The Winter Evening. It contrasts an evening at home in front of the fire and those of the theatergoers who must endure crowds and ranting actors. He considers himself king of the intimate delights of fireside, home, comfort, and undisturbed retirement. Winter prevents him from performing physical activity, but due to his earlier efforts, his mind is disciplined and he has a new way of perceiving reality. This spiritual renewal enables him to write positive poetry and give hope to other sinners. Cowper’s use of fancy makes him realise the loss of paradise, of which the natural world is only a dim reflection, and he cannot alleviate the sorrow of a fallen world.
He returns to the bigger picture in book five entitled The Winter Morning Walk using the lessons he has learned. He considers man’s mortality and his need to erect monuments to his memory, such as the pyramids, the Bastille, and the tower of Babel. This thirst for property and ownership leads to war and the establishment of kings. Patriots have bled and died for their cause, and history records their names in brass and stone, but he states fairer wreaths are earned in defence of truth. Cowper states to walk with God is to be divinely free.
The final book is entitled A Winter Walk at Noon and is composed as a song of praise incorporating all the positive ideas of the previous four books. He feels his task is not to perform any specific social duty but to please God, and by writing his poem, he is conforming to the divine will. Cowper intended to show the poet's growth in awareness and knowledge as it happens.
The poetical works of William Cowper
The body of work produced by William Cowper is a testament to his ability to blend personal narrative with broader social and theological themes
Through his verse, William Cowper provides a poignant commentary on human nature and the Christian experience in the context of his time
William Cowper's literary contributions include a range of evocative and reflective poems that capture the essence of 18th-century English verse
Cowper's poetic oeuvre is distinguished by its deep moral reflections and its celebration of the natural world
The poetry of William Cowper explores themes of faith, nature, and personal morality, offering readers a window into his spiritual and philosophical insights
Another trick spring, another month of mothering the neighbor’s dumb magnolias from my window.
Another March spent warning, willing their velvet purses shut with only my mind, because I don’t speak
their language, and because they are not mine to mother. I have no trees, not even a houseplant,
of my own. The first thing I kept alive was a child. Talk about a high-stakes dry run. Today that child
is at school, and I am chiding the neighbor’s twin magnolias with my eyes—don’t open, remember, this spring
isn’t spring at all. But every year their pink tongues lap snow, lick the thin, cold air. These trees
have seen my son, head back, mouth open, doing just that. The sun is shining, its warmth
through glass a kind of lie, and I am practicing telepathy with trees who can’t hear me, again, . or they can, but I’m too late: a handful of soft gray clutches are unclasped on the lawn, empty.
Maggie Smith is the author of Weep Up (Tupelo Press, September 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison; Lamp of the Body; and three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2017, Paris Review, Ploughshares,Kenyon Review,Southern Review, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Smith is a freelance writer and editor.
“Keep Moving speaks to you like an encouraging friend reminding you that you can feel and survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new. Who doesn’t need a friend—and a book—like that?” —Glennon Doyle
“Every once in a long, long while a book comes along that challenges and changes everything. Keep Moving is exactly that book: an ingenious synthesis of poetry, proverbs, journaling, lyrical prose, belles-lettres, psalms, meditations, and aphorisms. It defies any tidy definition, and thus, practically defines a new genre that gives everyone—no matter what walk of life—the gift of pausing to reflect on what we didn’t know we already knew about ourselves because we never had words for it, until Maggie Smith. These pages give us a unique and poetic opportunity to recognize the joys within our failures, the peace within our terrors, the simplicity within our complex lives—and then some! It is sure to become a classic that will be read for decades to come.” —Richard Blanco
“In Keep Moving, poet Maggie Smith takes what William James called a ‘torn-to-pieces-hood’ and knits it into something new and surprising and fortifying. I’m so grateful for the clarity, compassion, and wit in these pages. This is a book that will change you, a book you will want to give to someone you love. I’ve never read anything quite like it.” —Lucy Kalanithi
I found my daughter at the table, cutting square clouds from a shirt box, gluing them in a neat white grid to scribbled-blue paper. A day had never looked so orderly. She colored the sun a quarter each yellow, orange, red, black. Later I caught her inspecting the scene for flaws, using a dollar-bin kaleidoscope as a jeweler’s eye. When she finished, she handed me the paper, called it her sky contraption. My daughter invented it herself, or as she says, guessed it up. And I—or my body in its genius—guessed her up, the girl whose sun is a quarter black, whose sky is a kind of spreadsheet, a cloud in each field, value undetermined. She autosums the clouds until the formula should fall apart, but it doesn’t.
Byron: A Life in Ten Letters review – dispatches from a lusty life
This article is more than 1 year old
Andrew Stauffer conveys the vigour and pace of the poet’s escapades with brio, but stumbles when he suggests Byron anticipated modern celebrity
Peter Conrad
Tue 26 Mar 2024
Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, but in Byron’s case the unstoppable overflow consisted of a more vital and potent bodily fluid. “Is it not life?” he asked about his comic epic Don Juan, the annals of a globe-trotting seducer; he added that his qualification for writing it was that he had “tooled” in a post chaise, a hackney coach, a gondola, against a wall, and both on and under a table. He claimed to do his rhyming, as he nonchalantly called it, “at night / When a Cunt is tied close to my inkstand”, and on receiving royalty cheques from his publisher he vowed that “what I get by my brains I will spend on my bollocks”.
When not drinking, gambling and having sex, Byron also tossed off 3,000 letters, which race to keep up with the flux of his sensations as he reels through adulterous intrigues, literary squabbles and political conspiracies. Here, even more than in Don Juan, he writes while living in an unfinished present tense. Postscripts and interruptions, as Andrew Stauffer says, give his correspondence a “risky immediacy”, with “rapid-fire, time-stamped updates”; punctuation increases the tempo in a blitz of breathless dashes.
Stauffer’s brisk new biography develops as a commentary on 10 of these letters, chosen to mark the stages of Byron’s hurtling progress to an early death. After drinking, gambling and whoring at Cambridge – where, as an aristocrat, he obtained a degree without needing to sit for exams – he graduates to the dizzy social carousel of London. Harassed by creditors and in retreat from sexual scandals, he soon flees abroad. In Greece, he romps in a monastery dorm with some uncelibate male novices whom he calls “sylphs”. In Italy, he enters into a dangerous liaison with a countess whose husband, he fears, intends to slice his gizzard open with a stiletto. At last, joining the Greek campaign for independence from the Ottoman empire, the libertine reinvents himself as a man of action, only to be found unfit for battle; he dies of a fever in swampy Messolonghi at the age of 36.
As Stauffer writes, Byron’s private letters were “semi-public productions”, meant to be shared around. They also functioned as a substitute for genuine intimacy: courting his future wife, Annabella Milbanke, he seems happier sending her extravagant love notes than when they’re actually together. He is always performing for an invisible audience, experimenting with alternative versions of himself that he often borrows from characters in Shakespearean drama. A complaint about his strained nerves splices together a gruff, stoical shrug by Macbeth and one of Lear’s doddering laments; in a Greek crypt, he climbs into an open sarcophagus and declaims Hamlet’s meditation on the skull of Yorick. He arranges appropriate costumes for each of his impersonations. On his travels through the eastern Mediterranean, he acquires Albanian robes and brandishes a sabre, and in Italy he festoons himself with showy bling that startles English visitors. To go soldiering in Greece, he designs a scarlet and gold uniform and a cavalry helmet, which he never wears.
Byron’s role-playing persuades Stauffer that he anticipated “the theatrically confessional style of modern celebrity”, offering glimpses of a private self that may be just another Instagram pose. This notion prompts some crass anachronisms. Stauffer wonders if Byron’s Venetian orgies made him “a sex tourist”, although what truly fascinated him was the city’s illusory enchantments and its elegiac decline. Then as Byron rallies support for Greek liberation, Stauffer calls him an “influencer”, which is even more unjust. Influencers profit from commercial endorsements; Byron used his personal fortune to subsidise the insurgent patriots and had to watch as his funds were misappropriated or squandered.
Stauffer more justifiably deplores Byron’s sadistic treatment of women, whom he classified as “She-things”. When Annabella announced her pregnancy, he said he wished that their child would be stillborn; during the delivery he “sat in the drawing room below throwing empty soda bottles loudly against the ceiling”. Despite such deranged conduct, Stauffer believes that Byron longed to be saved from his “schizoid multiplicity”. But none of his lovers managed to calm his frenzy, and far from redeeming himself by enlisting in the Greek war, his involvement there ended in a gruesome fiasco.
Revising Wordsworth’s maxim about powerful feelings, Byron defined poetry as the lava of imagination, whose overflow prevented an eruption. When he fell ill at Messolonghi, another liquid spurted from him, this time fatally. His doctors, after administering a battery of emetics and purgatives, used leeches and lancets to siphon off two litres of blood, effectively killing him. For Byron this agony counted as a consummation: “Come, you damned set of butchers,” he said to the quacks, angrily challenging them to do their worst. So much for Stauffer’s theory that the laughter in his letters served as therapy, preserving a “comic worldview that is crucial for our sanity”. The rest of us may benefit from the medicine of self-mockery, but Byron was a tragic comedian, incorrigibly intent on self-destruction.
Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer is published by Cambridge University Press (£25).
