ABSTRACT
In William Cowper's case that reality, following his dream of24 January 1773, imposed a silence that lasted for over a year, and was scarcely broken until 1779. The first poetry, dated 8 February 1774, is in Latin - the language most favoured by Samuel Johnson in his prayers composed against depression, and the language of the doom pronounced on Cowper himself - and comprises two four-line verses written into a copy of a book by John Gill, An Exposition of the Book of Solomon's Song, Commonly Called Canticles. By a poignant irony, the copy had been presented by Cowper to John Newton, and inscribed 'to his dear Friend and Brother in Christ'. The first verse is 'Tales Et Nostri Viguissent, Jesus, Amores' ('Such also, 0 Jesus, would our loves have flourished'), and the second 'Caesa Est Nostra Columba, Et Nostro Crimine, Cujus' ('My dove is slain, and by my own crime'). Both are to do with the book itself, but equally both have marked personal aptness. In particular, the final word of the second, 'monstrum' (from the phrase 'so accursed a wretch'), carries the meaning of 'something against the course of nature'.2 If this is a reminder of Hannah Allen's 'monster of creation', it is also quite literally
To write in Latin is to lend to one's words a permanence and validity that is not automatically imparted by English. The starkness of the sentiments finds an apt expression in the language of epitaphs and inscriptions. Cowper gradually turned again to poetry after the crisis of 1773 as he turned to gardening, carpentry, drawing and keeping pets: anything that could possibly act as a distraction from his terrible despair. True despair not only finds no expression through groves and graveyards. Its tendency is to remain wholly unexpressed. Its medium is silence, not creativity. The forms of language bespeak a self-containment that is wholly alien to the depressive personality, and poetry asserts an integrity absent from the introverted existence of the melancholiac. In writing poetry, Cowper was returning to a mode of expression that obliged him to look out into the world that was not part of the circle of his damnation and to address a variety of subjects that were not implicated in the awful knowledge.
