William Cowper’s ‘Diverting History of John Gilpin’

Posted in English Literature, Historical articles, Literature on Saturday, 6 August 2011

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William Cowper (1731 – 1800) was a poet and hymnodist whose life was scarred by  periods of insanity the power of which was only weakened and ultimately loosened by his singular application, and during one such collapse in the writing of his famous comic poem about John Gilpin.

John Gilpin, picture, image, illustration

John Gilpin’s famous ride, by James E McConnell

Born in the Rectory at Berkhamsted. he was educated at Westminster School and then articled to a solicitor in Holborn and  intending to become a lawyer. At this time he fell in love with a cousin to whom he addressed several ardent poems; but her father forbade their courtship and marriage on the grounds of such close kinship being improper, and this broke Cowper’s heart.  He took a clerkship in the House of Lords during which time and under considerable strain he suffered his first bout of insanity. Leaving Westminster for the country was wise, and eventually he settled at Olney, lodging with a retired rector and his wife called Morley and Mary Unwin., It was this man who asked Cowper to contribute to a hymnal he was preparing, thus prompting the beautiful and memorable Olney Hymns (1779), several of which endure in Anglican worship to this day. After Unwin’s death Cowper stayed on as a devoted friend to Mary. His mental health suffered another severe decline, and somehow he was able to settle to writing John Gilpin (1782) after a serious of deranged imaginings quite debilitated him. At this time he met a rich widow who commissioned him to write a poem on the trivial subject of a sofa, the challenge of which led to Cowper’s most ambitious and wonderfully inventive and digressive work, The Task (1785). This frail man also wrote one of the finest of all English narrative poems, The Castaway, an intensely moving account of a man lost at sea, composed with a beautifully judged metrical and rhyme scheme which leaves the reader all too aware of the personal significance this subject had for its troubled poet. His translations of Homer and their revision kept him occupied until the end, which came after he had retired to Norfolk following Mary Unwin’s death. Wordsworth and Coleridge held Cowper in high regard, and certainly he shifted the emphasis in eighteenth-century nature poetry from classical ideal to actual rural scenes peopled with real folk whom he observed first hand. He is memorialised in a stained glass window at Westminster Abbey, a perfect honour for the man whose hymns gave us so many of our most familiar idioms, chief among them “God moves in a mysterious way/ His wonders to perform”.

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