THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

a walk outdoors and in an evening’s fireside assimilation of the day’s thoughts and sensations. The arrival of the post
and the daily newspaper described at the opening of Book IV (‘The Winter Evening’) allows for the secure
consideration of a larger world-view examined at ‘a safe distance’.
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in.
As so often in Cowper’s work, a determined act of withdrawal from the world ushers in sober contemplation and
peace of mind. The choice of blank verse, prompted, as was the poem’s first title (‘The Sofa’) by Cowper’s friend
Lady Austen, also permits a general ease of telling and an echo of comfortable, refined, but relaxed, rhythms of
speech. The work as a whole, he asserts, had one major tendency: ‘to discountenance the modern enthusiasm after a
London life, and to recommend rural ease and leisure, as friendly to the cause of piety and virtue.’ Sophistication,
urbane politicking, and noisy declaration are rejected in favour of a therapeutic absorption in the pleasures of stillness.
For Cowper, ‘the cause of piety and virtue’ demanded a response both to God and to humankind. His evangelical
strictures on the wickedness of the world can be both political and intensely private, and his distinctive sensitivity to
nature suggests an almost Franciscan awareness of a co-operative unity in creation. He recognizes in the fourth book
of The Task that there is ‘a soul in all things, and that soul is God’ and that nature itself can be a name for an effect
‘whose cause is God’. When he addresses his pet hare (‘Epitaph on a Hare’) or when he complains of the casual
cruelty of a ‘gentle swain’ who has allowed a goldfinch to starve in its cage, he is essentially in the same frame of
mind as when in The Task he views hunting as an unhappy consequence of the loss of Eden or when, seated on a
felled tree, he contemplates the frailty of life (‘The Poplar Field’). Cowper’s shorter religious lyrics, included in the
collection known as the Olney Hymns (1779), suggest a similarly delicate, if often tense, sensibility, one urged to
express a public sentiment but constitutionally inclined to the form of the interior monologue. The Olney Hymns
enjoyed a considerable popularity, passing through some twenty editions between 1779 and 1831. Their success with
readers and singers alike is testimony both to the strength of evangelical piety in the period and to Cowper’s
particular evocation of an intimacy in responding to divine grace, a factor evident in the celebrated
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quatrain songs ‘O for a closer walk with God’ and ‘Hark, my soul, it is the Lord’. His rarer assertions of
congregational unity (such as ‘Jesus, where’er thy people meet’), or of professions of public faith (‘God moves in a
mysterious way’), stand as more affirmatively communal statements.
Cowper’s steady popularity contrasts strikingly with the obscurity in which William Blake worked, his most
circulated works amongst his contemporaries being the Songs of Innocence and of Experience of which only some
twenty-two copies of the first collection and twenty-seven of the combined volume were printed. Blake (1757-1827)
died, according to one of his friends, singing ‘Hallelujahs and songs of joy and triumph’, impromptu songs which his
wife described as being ‘truly sublime in music and in verse’ and performed with ‘extatic energy’. If Blake’s lyric
verse can and ought to be seen as derived from a hymnological tradition in English verse, it has, perhaps fortunately,
had only a limited impact on the subsequent compilers of congregational hymn-books. ‘The Divine Image’ has been
awkwardly appropriated to certain hymnals, and ‘Jerusalem’ (the inductive preface to the poem Milton) has, in Sir
Hubert Parry’s setting, become celebrated as both a religious and a political rallying-call, but the very subtlety and
elusive ambiguity of most of Blake’s lyrics have generally denied them repetitive melodic musical settings and over
exposure in narrow or sectarian contexts.
Blake, born into a Dissenting tradition (a tradition that sometimes encouraged extempore hymn-singing),
remained a religious, political, and artistic radical throughout his life. From his childhood, when he claimed to have
seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree, he insisted that he had been granted visions by God and that he could
translate and interpret those visions as designs which interfused picture and word. Although the inspiration was
visionary, the process by which these designs reached an audience was laborious. Blake, who had been trained as an
engraver, would transfer the written text of a poem to an etched copper plate, accompanying it with appropriate
illustration or decoration; when printed, the page was elaborately hand-coloured or, in some cases, actually printed in
colour by a method of his own invention. Blake’s works, if studied in their original configurations, interrelate image
and text. The text does not simply follow a picture, nor does a picture solely represent a text; both demand
interpretative or speculative readings. Together they form a total text in which different signs prove to be cooperative,
manifold, even contradictory.