ABSTRACT
October 1796, he accommodated them in his own vicarage at East Dereham. They made frequent visits to the coast, but the sea failed to enliven the dejected poet. Once, on a cliff-top walk, he saw 'a solitary pillar of rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high water-mark' and 'found it an emblem of myself. Torn from my natural connexions, I stand alone and expect the storm that shall displace me' (Letters IV, 450: 27 August 1795). In December 1796 Mary Unwin died, but Cowper was so fixed in a state of apathetic despair that he was outwardly unmoved; he never spoke of her or gave any appearance of thinking about her afterwards.
