I am a kind of human snail, locked in and condemned by my own nature.
The antients believed that the moist track left by the snail as it crept was the
snail’s own essence, depleting its body little by little; the farther the snail
toiled, the smaller it became, until it finally rubbed itself out.
Cynthia Ozick1
The paradox of Cowper and home
Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall!
Though few now taste thee unimpair’d and pure,
Or tasting, long enjoy thee …
(The Task, III, 39–42)
Cowper has been described as ‘the poet of home life’, but in fact he never
tasted ‘pure’ domestic life, as the poem puts it, inasmuch as he remained
unmarried and preferred to avoid responsibility for the households in
which he lived.2 This is one of several apparent paradoxes about this
‘self-contradictory man’3 and one which is contained perfectly by
‘The Snail’, Cowper’s 1799 translation of Vincent Bourne’s ‘Limax’
and perhaps the best of his Bourne translations.4 The poem describes
a portable home, unified with its tenant, and is translated from a Latin
poem by one of Cowper’s schoolmasters; in its content and in its
intertextual links with other works, ‘The Snail’ describes Cowper’s need
to generate a personal homeliness during his time in Norfolk, and the
very act of producing the poem amounts to the creation of a protective
shell at this very vulnerable stage in Cowper’s own life. This essay will
briefly address the idea of home in Cowper’s life and work, in general
terms, before explicating some specific details of the poem; it will then
trace some lines of affiliation between speaker and subject and explore
the comforting and nostalgic implications of the very act of translation,
to show how this poem embodies Cowper’s relationship to the idea of
home.
57
The Task depicts various idealised versions of home, including the
‘low-roofed lodge’ which is called ‘the peasant’s nest’ (I, 227):
Oft have I wished the peaceful covert mine.
Here, I have said, at least I should possess
The poet’s treasure, silence, and indulge
The dreams of fancy, tranquil and secure.
(I, 233–6)
This recalls the summer house at Orchard Side, which Cowper describes
in a letter to Joseph Hill written in the same year in which The Task was
published:
I write in a nook that I call my Bouderie; It is a Summer house not much
bigger than a Sedan chair, the door of which opens into the garden which is
now crowded with pinks, roses, and honey-suckles, and the window into my
neighbour’s orchard […] Having lined it with garden-mats and furnished it
with a table and two chairs, here I write in summer-time […] secure from all
noise, and a refuge from all intrusion.5
Despite the garden-mat lining and the cuteness of the summer-house,
Cowper comically acknowledges the likely reality of the peasant’s nest
and the hyperbole of pastoral tropes, in a letter to Lady Hesketh the
following year:
You must always understand, my Dear, that when poets talk of Cottages,
hermitages, and such like matters, they mean a house with 6 sashes in front,
two comfortable parlours, a smart stair-case, and three bed-chambers of
convenient dimensions; in short, exactly such a house as this.6
Elsewhere in his letters and poetry, especially in ‘Tirocinium’ and
‘Retirement’, Cowper advocates passionately for the importance
of home life, an emphasis which has led to some exaggeration and
misrepresentation of his domesticity; for example, J. C. Bailey says that
Cowper ‘lived in a dull and obscure country village among old maids
and dissenting clergymen and knew nothing of the commanding minds
of his day’.7 This judgement is heavy-handed almost to the point of
falsehood, but does reflect the high importance given to the domesticity
of domestic bliss in Cowper’s work.
With all this in mind, let us remind ourselves that from an early age
Cowper did not have a home. After his mother’s death when he was six,
he lived at the miserable boarding school run by Dr Pittman, then with
58
Mrs Disney the oculist; after his years at Westminster, he lived with Mr
Chapman the solicitor and at the Inns of Court. Although there seems
to have been the opportunity for settled domestic life with Theadora in
1763, he found himself unable or unwilling to act, and a short time later
he had his most well-documented breakdown and left London, living
first at Dr Nathaniel Cotton’s and then as a bachelor in Huntingdon for
a time before moving in with the Unwins. Cowper’s life with Mary
Unwin was a long period of domestic stability, only brought to an end
by her death. Cowper spent his last days in Norfolk, and ‘The Snail’ was
written during this last displacement from his home.
The poem
The Snail
To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall,
The snail sticks close, nor fears to fall,
As if he grew there, house and all,
Together.
Within that house secure he hides 5
When danger imminent betides
Of storm, or other harm besides
Of Weather.
Give but his horns the slightest touch,
His self-collecting pow’r is such, 10
He shrinks into his house with much
Displeasure.
Where’er he dwells, he dwells alone,
Except himself has chatells none,
Well satisfied to be his own 15
Whole treasure.
Thus hermit-like his life he leads,
Nor partner of his banquet needs,
And if he meet one, only feeds
The faster. 20
Who seeks him must be worse than blind,
(He and his house are so combined),
If, finding it, he fails to find
Its master.8
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I propose to tease out the resonances of some key phrases in the poem
in which Cowper is alluding to other English poets in his verbal choices
as translator; the use of allusion combines with Cowper’s thematic
exploration of home, such that the very act of writing the poem generates
an inward comfort and homeliness that cannot be taken from him.
‘house and all’
The phrase ‘house and all’ in line three briefly misleads the reader – for a
moment we understand this as an image of continuance or integration in
which the snail is a natural part of the house on whose wall he is affixed.
This reading is corrected by ‘that house’ in line five: the real home of the
snail is not the one to which he temporarily affixes himself, but rather
the one which surrounds and extends from his own body.
‘danger imminent’
With this phrase, we shift from a material to a spiritual register. The poetic
inversion certainly achieves a good deal more metrical smoothness than
‘imminent danger’, and is a Spenserian, rather than Miltonic, phrase.9
The phrase ‘imminent danger’ is common in evangelical literature, found,
for example, in Doddridge’s works and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,
and its presence here hints at a spiritual, even allegorical, reading of the
snail as soul.
‘Give but his horns the slightest touch, / […] shrinks’
With the third stanza, the language and allusions engineer a slightly
more surprising shift, from the spiritual to the erotic. The sympathetic
image and especially the use of ‘shrinks’ recalls this passage from
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis:
Or as the snail, whose tender horns being hit,
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smoth’red up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again … 10
These lines describe Venus reacting as she sees that Adonis has
been gored by a boar. This usage can be admitted into the sense set
up by Cowper’s poem through the function of eyes, which may gaze
attentively, as in ‘The Snail’, or with love, as in Venus and Adonis, but
60
do not come into direct contact with the objects of their curiosity or
desire. Venus shows a pronounced preference for not-seeing when the
object of her desire is injured, made more hurtful because touching has
been refused by Adonis and because he has been touched and penetrated
by the boar – her love rival, for Adonis declined her company in favour
of hunting. The almost playful layering in Venus and Adonis is inverted
in ‘The Snail’: we witness the implicit meeting of the eyes of the snail,
inquisitively extended on stalks, and the eyes of the poet, generously
taking in the detail of the creature.
The flaccid withdrawal of the snail’s horns matches the softness of
Venus’s desires, which are based on looking. Adonis has snubbed these
desires, choosing to hunt rather than see Venus. The hard and violently
penetrative tusk is the culmination of this rivalry between Venus and
the boar, and the sudden inversion of Adonis’s desire to pursue by his
quarry’s refusal to flee brings his preference for action to its terminal
point, after which Venus can never have him. This is a characteristically
complex overlaying of power, gaze, and rejection, and the quietly
reported sexual narrative is almost lost in the sensitively drawn image
of these lines. The poem does not show us the mortal thrust, instead
describing the reaction of Venus when she looks once again at Adonis.
This positioning of the narrative view and its emphasis on the act of
looking reflects the voyeuristic position of the reader, bringing them
into a closer identification with Venus in her misery and heightening
the emotional pitch. The passage suggests other ramifications, but the
effect of the lines proceeds from the perceptive and caring vision of the
snail rather than the latent tale of fraught longing evoked by the snail in
Venus and Adonis – and part of this effect is the memorably evocative
shrinking that we find in Cowper’s poem.11
Shakespeare’s shrinking snail also exerts an indirect influence on
Cowper, mediated by Erasmus Darwin. Cowper wrote his admiring
verses ‘Lines Addressed to Dr. Darwin, Author of the Botanic Garden’
in 1792, having in 1789 reviewed for The Analytical Review ‘The Loves
of Plants’, the second part of Erasmus Darwin’s long poem The Botanic
Garden.12 In the review, Cowper speaks highly of the poem in general
and particularly admires the following passage: ‘Now with young
wonder touch the sliding snail, / Admire his eye-tip’d horns, and painted
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mail’ (ll. 147-8). He notes that ‘There is a beauty in that expression, the
eye-tip’d horns of the snail, which an ordinary writer would not have
attained in half a dozen laboured couplets’.13 Although horns is not being
set to unusual use here, and there is a great deal of poetic precedent for
Cowper’s use of the word, the praise given to Darwin’s lines in this review
marks them as an influence, and earlier in the same poem Darwin uses the
same image – ‘Slide here, ye horned snails, with varnish’d shells’ (l. 29).14
Both Cowper and Darwin shared a curiosity about the natural world,
but their approaches could hardly be more different: Cowper’s nature
descriptions are organised by the principle of association, Darwin’s
by taxonomic rigour; Cowper writes empathetically of the snail, and
perhaps would not have included its response to touch except for the
literary precedent, whereas Darwin’s speaker performs the touching
himself and describes his keenness to do it.15
‘feeds / The faster’
Like Darwin, Cowper was not only a keen observer of the natural world
but an avid gardener, and as such we can be sure that he knew about
the potential for snails to damage or destroy his handiwork. Snails are
warded off in the early Latin poem ‘Horti Ad Floram Dedicato. 1753’. In
‘The Snail’, the creature’s dinner is essentially antisocial, as he prefers
no company, seeks to deprive any guests of a meal, and plunders the
agronomic efforts of others. However, the poem’s empathetic rendering
relates partly to a sense of shared identity between snail and poet. As
such, there is tension between Cowper’s recognition of the snail’s greedy
dependence and his own parasitic lifestyle. This may be fully resolved
by reading the poet as a gardener and the snail as a pest, which permits
some liberality of feeling about the snail so long as it does not intrude or
aggress – we see this in The Task:
I would not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polish’d manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step may crush the snail
That crawls at evening in the public path:
But he that has humanity, forewarn’d,
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Will tread aside, and let the reptile live.
The creeping vermin, loathesome to the sight,
And charged perhaps with venom, that intrudes,
A visitor unwelcome, into scenes
Sacred to neatness and repose, the alcove,
The chamber, or refectory, may die:
A necessary act incurs no blame.
[…]
The sum is this: if man’s convenience, health,
Or safety interfere, his rights and claims
Are paramount, and must extinguish theirs.
(VI, 560-73; 581-3)
This passage relates closely to an observation Cowper makes in a
letter to Unwin, written during the period at which he is working on The
Task, in which he confides that ‘I allow the life of an animal to be fairly
taken away, when it interferes either with the Interest or convenience
of Man. Consequently Snails and all reptiles that spoil our crops either
of fruit or grain may be destroyed if we can catch them’.16 In both of
these passages the snail is an absolute inferior to mankind, subject to
destruction by man, and generously allowed to live only so long as
it does not intrude – even in the first excerpt there is no engagement
with or description of the snail, only a broad censure of unnecessary
killing. ‘The Snail’ is a rather different case. The subject is brought into
such sustained and sympathetic focus that to ‘extinguish’ takes on the
character of murder.
Before further discussion of the murder of snails, we should note
Cowper’s use of the word ‘vermin’ to describe snails in The Task. We see
the same use in a 1790 letter to Clotworthy Rowley, in which Cowper
describes booksellers as ‘the most dilatory of mankind’, asks if Rowley
is ‘possessed of any secret that will make a snail gallop’, and calls them
‘tedious vermin’ – referring to their slowness, rather than any other snaillike
qualities.17 In specific relation to the idea of home, vermin, though
not specifically snails, are imagined in Cowper’s description, in a 1786
letter to Newton, of the ‘forlorn and woeful spectacle’ of Orchard Side
‘deserted of its inhabitants’, which has become ‘the habitation of vermin
and the image of desolation.’18
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Cowper’s sense of the unimportance of a snail’s death is also suggested
by his remarks on William Lawrence Brown’s An Essay on Sensibility
(published in The Analytical Review):
In page 142 we find a foe quash’d. We thought the term confined to the
bar, where long usage has made it almost tolerable, and in poetry we did
not expect it. Let indictments be quash’d; and we have no objection to the
quashing of snails, slugs, and rotten eggs, but for Sensibility’s sake let us not
quash our enemies.19
In this ‘quashing of snails’ we may hear an echo of Gay’s ‘The Butterfly
and the Snail’, where the reader is exhorted to ‘crush then the slow,
the pilfering race’.20 The suggestion of foes being quashed or crushed,
snail-like, seems especially abhorrent to Cowper in this poem, partly for
the lack of euphony but also because, as a fate which Cowper himself
visited upon the pests in his garden, it is a peculiarly undignified way to
describe the destruction of a human enemy.
‘hermit-like’
The image of the hermit is a standard figure in the Spenserian verse of
the eighteenth century; but instead of being ascetically uninterested in
his cell or even nomadic, Cowper’s snail is a hermit who is identified by
and identical with his home. The possibility of company or friendship is
fraught in the poem, and even the ‘harm besides / Of weather’ in lines
7–8 may include the arrival of a partner – which is seen as negative
if not outright threatening in lines 18–20. This leads the snail to his
‘hermit-like’ existence, and yet there is sad resignation when compared
with the desire for companionship elsewhere in Cowper’s writing:
I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrew’d–
How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude!
But grant me still a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper, solitude is sweet.
‘Retirement’, ll. 739–42
This hermitude of the snail recalls the ‘hermitage’ in the letter to Lady
Hesketh quoted earlier in this paper, in which Cowper poked fun at the
surprisingly material comforts of most ‘hermitages’. However, the idea
of ‘chatells none’ is one of the conditions of hermitude in the poem, and
64
often in his letters Cowper (albeit disingenuously) represents himself as
having few possessions.
‘he / […] Its master’
The sexing of the snail in this poem aligns with the overwhelmingly
masculine snails found in Shakespeare, the Bible, and in literature more
broadly; and ‘limax’ is a masculine noun. However, there is a poem
by John Bunyan called ‘Upon A Snail’, in which the snail is female.
Bunyan wrote the poem for the instruction of children, but Cowper
might have known it. It was first published 1686 in a book of rhymes
for children, republished in 1724 under the title Divine Emblems for
Children. Bunyan’s poem focuses solely on the persistence and success
of the snail, with the strength of his image relying on the snail’s surprising
success in the face of her apparent resourcelessness; he does not evoke
the vulnerability of the snail, and uses no images which might evoke the
material characteristics of a snail (eyes on stalks, shell, trail, sliminess,
softness). The second half of the six-stanza poem offers a ‘comparison’
between the snail – slow but sure – and the steadfast Christian soul. It’s
difficult to know what to make of Cowper’s sexing of his snail; perhaps
it’s a gesture of masculine self-reliance?
The homeliness of translation
Cowper found employment necessary to his stability and wellbeing,
and after completion of The Task he sought this in translation. The
choice of texts to translate is revealing in its own right. His version of
Homer is a single activity that brings together the comparative exercise
of his school days, comparing the Greek to Pope’s translation; the fierce
rivalry he felt with Pope for the full length of his mature poetic life;
and his admiration of Milton’s style. The translations of Gay into Latin
and Bourne into English also represent an employment which creates
a return to childhood. Cowper’s early fondness for Gay’s fables is
well-established, and Vincent Bourne was his usher at Westminster.
Additionally, Bourne translated some of Gay’s work into Latin, and
Cowper had previously translated some of Bourne’s Latin work into
English.21 This triangulation creates a particular homeliness around the
act of translating Bourne.
65
As with Churchill, whom in ‘Table-Talk’ Cowper claims ‘[c]
ontemporaries all surpassed’ (670), Cowper’s affection for Bourne may
have suggested critical positions that required post hoc justifications. In
a 1781 letter to William Unwin he explains
I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than
Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the Writers in his way, except Ovid,
and not at all inferior to Him. I love him too with a Love of Partiality, because
he was Usher of the 5th form at Westminster when I pass’d through it.22
In similar vein, Cowper writes again to Unwin in 1783 about Bourne’s
translations of ballads by Gay and poems by Prior, observing that
The Ballads that Bourne has translated, beautifull in themselves are still
more beautifull in his version of them, infinitely surpassing in my judgment,
all that Ovid or Tibullus have left behind them. They are quite as elegant, and
far more touching and pathetic than the tenderest strokes of either.23
This is high praise indeed, and Cowper’s affection for Bourne and his
works was enduring; he is translating him during the late Norfolk period,
but as early as 1777 he had asked Hill to send a copy of Bourne’s poems
to Olney.24
There is personal warmth of feeling as well as appreciation for
Bourne’s craft of verse in Cowper’s reflections on him. He writes to
Samuel Rose in 1788 that
I shall have great pleasure in taking now and then a peep at my old friend
Vincent Bourne, the neatest of all men in his versification, though when I was
under his ushership at Westminster, the most slovenly in his person. He was
so inattentive to his boys, and so indifferent whether they brought him good
or bad exercises, or none at all, that he seem’d determined, as he was the best,
so to be the last Latin poet of the Westminster line; a plot which I believe
he has executed very successfully, for I have not heard of any who has at all
deserved to be compared with him.25
Cowper’s last point here is very witty, and debunked only by Cowper’s
own Latin poetry. The point of Cowper’s history with Vincent Bourne is
worth recalling in relation to his work on ‘The Snail’ and other poems
during his time in Norfolk. Bourne was selected by Cowper because
Bourne himself was a token reminder of Cowper’s Westminster days,
and because the translation of Bourne was an activity first undertaken
66
during Cowper’s years in Olney. Intriguingly, Cowper began translating
Gay’s ‘The Butterfly and the Snail’ shortly before turning to ‘Limax’,
although he only produced the title and opening couplet. The links
between Gay and Bourne are clear: Cowper was always reminded of
one by the other, and sentimentally invested in both.26
Home thoughts
Martin Priestman, writing on The Task, gives several examples of
topography as an organising principle of Cowper’s poetry, one of which
is ‘The Snail’:
Another way of being comically at once abroad and at home is by taking the
home itself on the journey, like the snail in the best of Cowper’s translations
from Vincent Bourne […] The point in all these cases is protection from
exposure, and therefore from real contact with the conditions of the journey.
Such protection often seems to strike Cowper as so paradoxical that he
leaves such images simply to stand in his poems in all their absurdity or
miraculousness.27
The recognition of this ‘paradox’ is, in its simplest application, borne
out by Cowper’s pleasure in walking even when adverse conditions led
Mary Unwin to stay at home. However, this strolling is mediated and
reshaped by the reflection and versification of The Task, and the sofa
and the walk are the two poles between which the poem necessarily
oscillates.
Because the translation of ‘The Snail’ was made in the spring of
1799, it is tempting to respond to the poem in more final, grave, and
valedictory terms than the text itself invites. Nonetheless, the poem is
more than the translation of a skilled hobbyist, and both the text and the
act of its creation arise from Cowper’s relationship to the idea of home.
The closing moment of the poem is a light quip, but reminds us that
Cowper ‘once passed Pope’s Lodgings, when a boy, and looked for him
but he was not to be seen’.28 In its particular context of composition in
Dereham, 1799, the near-unity of self and home in the poem makes some
claim of homeliness in the very creation of the text and the existence of
its creator despite Cowper’s recent removal from familiar life; further
than this, the closeness of the shell is not only cosily self-containing but
also a confinement, recalling the phrases ‘fleshly tomb’ and ‘[b]uried
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above ground’ in the much earlier ‘Hatred and Vengeance’ (ll. 19-20).
Vincent Newey has written of the ‘topos of the happy-unhappy shutin’
which the poetry of Gray and Cowper inaugurated.29 If ‘Hatred and
Vengeance’ delineates the darkest and most Calvinist version of the idea
in Cowper’s poetry, ‘The Snail’ offers a more happily secular and down
to earth vision. Like ‘To Mary’, it is written in a gentler variation of
the more violent Sapphic metre which Cowper used for ‘Hatred and
Vengeance’, and the metrical similarities between ‘To Mary’ and ‘The
Snail’ suggest that the solitary domesticity of the latter is an apt emblem
for this stage in Cowper’s life, after Mary’s death in 1796.
More happily, the image of the snail also recalls the famous portrait of
Cowper in his cambric cap. Indeed, snails and hats remind us of the Fool
in King Lear, who says ‘I can tell why a snail has a house. […] Why, to
put his head in; not to give it away’ (I. v. 21, 23). This in turn reminds us
of Rosalind in As You Like It, declaring that she would be as well wooed
by a snail as by Orlando: ‘though he comes slowly, he carries his house
on his head; a better jointure, I think, than you make a woman: besides
he brings his destiny with him’ (IV. i. 49-51). Although Rosalind then
descends into banter about cuckoldry, the endearing image of the snail
resonates with Cowper’s life with women and the ‘happy man’ who
would ‘make his fate his choice’ in The Task (VI, ll. 906, 910).
The snail of the poem is very much like Cowper, easily injured,
carefully observing the world with inquisitive and mobile eye-stems;
also self-possessed and somewhat parasitic. He is no fixed and static
limpet, but moves, taking his home with him wherever he goes. ‘The
Snail’ as a translation is an example of this, as a satisfying and selfcontained
activity that reaffirms his identity as poet and reconnects
him with poems and people that he knew and loved in his youth. This
self-collecting shell is irremovably anchored to the body of the poet
or gastropod and protects it from the harshness of the world. Erasmus
Darwin wrote that ‘if a part of [a snail’s] shell be broken it becomes
repaired in a similar manner with mucus, which by degrees hardens into
shell.’30 In the same way, the poet’s defensive shell is made of language,
a perceptive and controlling tool by which he may seize and reorder
his world, which requires continual secretion and hardening in order
to protect him. Cowper’s life-long production of poetry was a way of
68
carrying his home with him wherever he went; writing left a visible trail
of where he had been, and this record allowed him to revisit people,
books, and moments of earlier life so as to enter into the homely comfort
of his memory. This is, in varying degrees, true of much of Cowper’s
writing, but is neatly illustrated by this poem in particular.
