The doubling at work in William Cowper’s shorter poems, through
which he projects elements of his own emotional and indeed authorial
self onto the characters (sometimes human, sometimes animal) of his
verse, has long been noted. For example, Vincent Newey has pointed us
to the way in which this doubling is at play in the poet’s final original
poem ‘The Castaway’ (begun in 1799, only published posthumously
in The Life and Posthumous Writings, 1803-4). Newey argues that the
suffering mariner of the poem serves as a ‘dark double’ for Cowper’s
own ‘feelings of lifelong affliction and approaching death’, whilst
simultaneously offering him a form of ‘immortality’.1 He also reminds
us that ‘The Castaway’ is a culmination of multiple experimentations
with ideas about identification and semblance, some of which – for
example ‘On the Loss of The Royal George’ (1782) – reveal an earlier
interest in tales of maritime suffering and misadventure.2 This essay will
consider the relationship between Cowper’s exploration of his own life
as an ordeal in which he has suffered the rejection of God as elaborated
in ‘The Castaway’, and the story of a mariner’s drowning at sea, told in
A Voyage Round the World […] by George Anson (1748), which inspired
it. In doing so I aim to highlight another form of doubling at work in the
poem, between Cowper’s verse and the tradition of voyage literature
that serves as its catalyst and inter-text.
Shipwreck narratives and related accounts of maritime suffering
and disaster were popular and commercially successful by the late
eighteenth century.3 This textual tradition has been studied in detail by
Carl Thompson, who argues that ‘Romantic-era readers […] encountered
a degree of consistency and coherence in the way these situations are
rendered’, with certain topoi and rhetorical conventions becoming
commonplace in the genre. However, Thompson also draws attention
to the fact that these volumes brought diverse contemporary discourses
together, sometimes uneasily. Readers were encouraged to understand
the suffering of mariners and shipwreck victims through the framework
43
of providentialism, but also, variously and sometimes simultaneously,
through rationalism, scepticism, and sentimentalism.4 Cowper’s ‘The
Castaway’, itself inspired by a prose voyage narrative, both draws upon
and complicates the familiar elements of this tradition; Cowper employs
rhythms and patterns of poetic language and imagery to elaborate and
subvert the narrative structures found elsewhere.
As Charles Ryskamp argues, ‘The image of the castaway is the most
persistent metaphor in Cowper’s work’, and Cowper’s first interest in it
‘must have come originally from the Authorized Version of the Bible’.5
Cowper’s final and most powerful exploration of this subject was ‘The
Castaway’, one of the poems in the ‘Norfolk MSS’,6 the details of which
are prompted not by the Bible, but by a passage in A Voyage Round the
World by George Anson (1748), which was read to him by his friend John
Johnson.7 Generally attributed to Richard Walter, who was the chaplain
on the Centurion, the flagship of Anson’s fleet and the ship from which
the castaway fell, the work was actually written by Benjamin Robins
‘who never sailed on the voyage’ but who, Glyndwr Williams argues,
essentially ‘ghosted’ Anson’s account.8 As the careful archival work
of Williams has demonstrated, A Voyage Round the World by George
Anson was the most successful of a number of textual responses to, and
imaginings of, the voyage of Anson and his squadron:
Descriptions of the voyage appeared in newspapers and periodicals; doggerel
verses and popular ballads were composed in Anson’s honour; unofficial
accounts of the voyage were published soon after the expedition’s return; and
in 1748 an authorised narrative appeared under the name of the Centurion’s
chaplain, Richard Walter. A Voyage Round the World by George Anson was
a best-seller; it ran through five editions within a year, fifteen by 1776, and
appeared in countless versions in the great eighteenth-century collections of
voyages and travels.9
When, a little over a year before his death, Cowper meditated upon
the last hour in the life of a drowning and wretched seaman who was
both like and unlike himself, he therefore contributed to what had
become one of the best-known stories of maritime misadventure during
Britain’s war with Spain, already over half a century in the telling.
As a number of commentators have demonstrated, by employing the
story of the mariner swept overboard, borrowed from Anson’s account,
44
Cowper sets himself adrift in a poetic space which powerfully conflates
abandonment by the drowning mariner’s crew with the poet’s sense of
being discarded by God. In this sense it is an intensely personal piece,
dependent for its power on the sublime setting of the ocean in which
the individual is absolutely alone, exploring his physical, emotional and
also, importantly, intellectual response to imminent death. However,
it should also be remembered that for many readers familiar with the
historical circumstances that ultimately stimulated Cowper’s work,
there would also be other frameworks of understanding through which
the poem might be processed: ‘there were evidently many Romanticera
readers steeped in accounts of shipwreck, and well versed in the
various situations and scenarios that these disasters could involve’.10
‘The Castaway’ might be read through the ‘master narratives’ of the
eighteenth-century shipwreck account tradition generally, but also, more
particularly, via the tragic accounts of ill-fated circumstance and human
loss on a mass scale which permeate the accounts of Anson’s voyage
told elsewhere.11
The first and second stanzas of ‘The Castaway’ emphasise the plight
of the overboard mariner by lamenting his irretrievable dislocation
from home, nostalgically figured first as his ship (the Centurion) and
second as his nation, ‘Albion’ (l. 7).12 Newey, noting the periphrastic
nature of ‘floating home’ (l. 6), has described it as a ‘telling image of an
existence, like Cowper’s own, in which rest and stability were always
more apparent than real’.13 It is worth noting the contrast here with Book
I of The Task, in which the ‘hoary head’ of Britain’s coastline signals
safety to the mariner ‘Bound homeward, and in hope already there’
(in turn juxtaposed with the very different fate of the sailor mourned
by ‘craz’d’ Kate, who ‘went to sea and died’) (ll. 520, 522, 556 and
538).14 The early reference in ‘The Castaway’ to the embarkation of
the Centurion from the British coast would be particularly poignant
for a reader familiar with the authorised account of Anson’s voyage.
The moment of departure, which is framed in terms of love and warm
wishes in the poem, had, in the official account of the voyage that John
Johnson read aloud to Cowper, been marked out as the ‘fatal source
of all the misfortunes we afterwards encountered’.15 Severe delays had
meant a ‘too late departure from England’,16 with the consequence that
45
Anson’s fleet lost the military advantage of surprise and had to try to
round Cape Horn in ‘the improper season’ – the ‘southern hemisphere
Autumn’ when ‘equinoctial gales were at their fiercest’.17 Cowper
untethers the individual mariner’s experiences from those practical
realities that were seen to have had such fateful consequences for
Anson’s entire fleet. This is but one example of the general impulse in
the poem to subsume the individual and historical particularities of the
mariner’s tale for the purpose of a wider narrative trajectory that reads
his plight metonymically for the suffering of the poet/speaker. There are
a number of similarities between the authorised prose account and the
poem, however. Like the poem, the Voyage does not name the drowned
mariner and, as in Cowper’s verse, the account of his demise is powerful
because of the fact that it serves to reveal another and supposedly more
significant narrative. In the Voyage, the drowning of the castaway sailor
is just one of a litany of disasters to befall the Centurion and the wider
fleet, which included diseases such as dysentery, typhus, malaria and
scurvy.18 In the text’s first mention of the mariner who falls overboard,
generally overlooked by critics who make reference to Cowper’s source
text, the castaway himself is presented as just one of many men injured
or killed in the height of the storms:
many of our people were forced from their hold; some of whom were killed,
and others greatly injured; in particular, one of our best seamen was canted
over-board and drowned, another dislocated his neck, a third was thrown into
the main-hold and broke his thigh, and one of our Boatswain’s Mates broke
his collar bone twice; not to mention many accidents of the same kind.19
The individual castaway who ultimately sparked the suffering
imagination of Cowper is, in A Voyage Round the World, just one
briefly acknowledged victim of an experience of maritime suffering that
is communal. His plight is not individualised; many experienced the
‘same’. His story forms part of a wider narrative patterning that can be
aligned with what Thompson describes as ‘Providentialist frameworks
of explication’,20 which trace the experiences of the crew of Anson’s
fleet through suffering, despair and hope, towards a fragile notion of
salvation.
‘The Castaway’ is permeated by oxymorons and contraries. The
confluence between the metre of the poem and the implied motion of the
46
waves has been described elsewhere,21 and the ambiguities throughout
the poem extend that sense of flux and mutability. The mariner has
‘waged with Death a lasting strife / Supported by despair of life’ (ll.
17-18), which endows despair with a strange buoyancy that anticipates
the description of the drowning man’s courage and strength of spirit
three stanzas later. Resignation to Death supplies the strength to fight it.
The enjambment in these lines extends their potential meaning beyond
this moment of extreme strife in the water, however; the term ‘lasting’
suggests that the protagonist’s battle with Death is enduring. We are
reminded of the way in which these moments of crisis in the ocean
might seem like hours, a reference to the trickery and elasticity of time,
which recurs later in the poem. The ambiguity here also leaves room
for the reader to map the moments of distress experienced by Anson’s
crewman onto the long historic struggles with despair of the poem’s
speaker. Similarly open to interpretation are the lines which narrate the
actions of the crew who watch yet cannot save their friend. The notion
of abandonment seems implicit in the lines ‘They left their outcast mate
behind, / And scudded still before the wind’ (ll. 23-4). Yet the poem
as a whole poses questions about the relationship of those sailors to
their drowning shipmate, and about their capacity for action. The phrase
‘scudded still’ suggests action without motion, and implies the effort
required by the men just to maintain their position in the face of the storm.
The ultimate stillness of that image contrasts with the later association
of the crew with ‘haste’ and ‘flight’ from the scene of crisis. The actions
of the other crew members are cast as self-preservation – ‘flight in such
a sea / Alone could rescue them’ (ll. 33-4). However, despite the fact that
the drowning mariner cannot ‘condemn’ their behaviour, this stanza’s
emphasis on the idea of abandonment – underscored through the primacy
of the term ‘Deserted’ at the beginning of the last line – passes its own
judgement. The awful irony here is again achieved through the coupling
of contraries – the closeness of the friends who are ‘so nigh’ yet leave
the man in the water feeling ‘bitter’ and utterly alone (ll. 35-6).
The ambiguous world of Cowper’s castaway can be aligned with
voyage narratives discussed by Carl Thompson, such as those by George
Shelvocke and John Byron, which disrupt the providential patterns in
accounts found elsewhere, by authors including Cowper’s friend John
47
Newton.22 Such texts, Thompson argues, take on the uncertainty of the
location and circumstances narrated:
The world of these misadventurers thus starts to seem doubly untrustworthy.
Not only does the narrative evoke the experience of moving through a strange,
indecipherable environment, but it becomes itself such an environment, full
of indeterminacies: the reader too can feel at sea in the texts.23
In Cowper’s case, the indeterminate world of the poem offers what
seems a deliberate reconceptualization of the account of events narrated
in the source text. Whereas the poem’s opening stanza suggests that the
unfortunate ‘wretch’ has been ‘Wash’d headlong from on board’ as a
result of the tumultuous weather (ll. 3-4), the prose text suggests his fate
is a direct consequence of decisions made on ship to ride out the storm:
[…] as we dared not venture any sail abroad, we were obliged to make use
of an expedient, which answered our purpose; this was putting the helm
a weather, and manning the fore-shrouds: But though this method proved
successful for the end intended, yet in the execution of it, one of our ablest
sea-man [sic] was canted over-board; we perceived that notwithstanding the
prodigious agitation of the waves, he swam very strong, and it was with the
utmost concern that we found ourselves incapable of assisting him … 24
Cowper seems unwilling to acknowledge that the mariner’s fate might
be the result of human decisions and actions. Instead he is cast as the
victim of greater and more arbitrary forces. The prose voyage account,
like Cowper’s later poem, emphasises the strength of the mariner.
However, whereas Anson’s account suggests that the crew were
‘incapable of assisting’ their overboard friend, Cowper in fact imagines
a more active role for the men; they throw ‘The cask, the coop, the
floated cord’ (l. 27) into the water in an effort to offer ‘succour’ (l. 25).
This is an important recalibration of events, which shifts attention from
the castaway’s fellow shipmates’ culpability in his demise, and turns
instead to consider whether they do all they can in order to save him.
As such, Cowper’s poem contributes to wider contemporary discussions
about what it means to witness disaster, as, for example exemplified
by Cowper’s contemporary William Gilpin. In Observations on the
Western Parts of England, published in 1798, the year before Cowper
began work on ‘The Castaway’, Gilpin describes coastal communities
who carry the burden of having to observe shipwrecks in circumstances
48
in which assistance is futile. Discussing wrecks off the Isle of Wight
coast, he writes that ‘Signals can be of no use; yet they [the inhabitants
of the coastline] make what signals they can to point out the danger’.25
As in Cowper’s poem, where the objects thrown out to the drowning
mariner merely delay his inevitable death, the actions of the observers
are redundant ones, and merely emphasise their powerlessness.
In Gilpin’s account of shipwreck, imagined through the observation
of mainland inhabitants, the painful clarity with which the onlookers
understand the tragedy about to unfold before them is contrasted with
the ignorance of the seamen who do not know the danger they are
in. A similar sense of distance and difference is established in ‘The
Castaway’, between the individual mariner and wider society. That
distance is established through the loss of sensory understanding and
connection. He will never see Anson or Albion again (l. 12), and the
final moment in which the castaway is overwhelmed by the waves is
distinguished by the fact that his voice can no longer be heard by his
friends: ‘His comrades […] Could catch the sound no more’ (ll. 44 and
46). In the critical discourse of travel, Cowper has in many ways become
synonymous with visual supremacy, via another castaway narrative, the
‘Verses, Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk’ (1782).26 The
opening line of the poem in which Selkirk declares himself to be the
‘monarch of all I survey’ has become a term used to identify a set-piece
scene in travel description, in which a European traveller describes the
place they have travelled to as observed from a high viewing point. The
declaration of absolute visual cognition made in such pieces of prospect
description are frequently found to serve a colonial agenda which
assumes the traveller’s social and moral superiority over the landscape,
and by implication the people, they ‘survey’.27 Yet, Selkirk’s imagined
declaration in Cowper’s poem is, of course, poignantly ironic: ‘Better
dwell in the midst of alarms, / Than reign in this horrible place’ (ll.
7-8). There is significant ‘refiguring of authority’ here in relation to the
politics of vision, which Tim Fulford notes is also present in Cowper’s
‘undercutting’ of the ‘assumption of authority’ prevalent in the prospect
view as developed by James Thomson.28 And in ‘The Castaway’, the
poet subverts the authority of vision further, which is correlative with a
shift in narrative agency as Cowper moves from the castaway as speaker
49
in his Selkirk poem, to the castaway as narrated by another in his final
original work. The mariner at the centre of the narrative is sinking rather
than elevated, and he is wrapped in ‘Obscurest night’ (l. 1). He is in
many ways defined by what he will never see again.
Loss of sensory perception and understanding is central to the
development of the theme of absolute isolation – physical, social,
spiritual – which reverberates through the stanzas of ‘The Castaway’. The
language of negation which is used repeatedly and persistently through
the poem reinforces that sense of an individual life being incrementally
delimited and denied. Together, there are sixteen instances of ‘no’, ‘nor’
or ‘not’ in the poem. In some cases their use serves to emphasise what
is irretrievably lost to the mariner in his final moments: ‘But He, they
knew, nor ship nor shore, / Whate’er they gave, should visit more’ (ll.
29-30). In others, the use of negators obscures positive action, and casts
the mariner in ambiguous and strange terms:
Not long beneath the whelming brine
Expert to swim, he lay,
Nor soon he felt his strength decline
Or courage die away … (ll. 13-16)
The physical strength and courage of the seaman is here defamiliarised
through the use of ‘not’ and ‘nor’ which gain emphasis through their startof-
line placing, and through the connection of the ‘brine’/’decline’ rhyme.
Whilst the reader is reassured that the castaway is not overwhelmed by
the waves, his (temporary) survival is nevertheless expressed in terms
that demand us to imagine an alternative version of events in which
he is. This duality creates tension and anxiety: whilst reading of the
courageous man’s battle to survive we are already painfully aware of that
other possibility, that he is subsumed, which in turn would be a narrative
theme familiar to those readers accustomed to the popular prose voyage
account tradition. The persistence of such negators into the final stanzas
of the poem, which turn to consider the supposedly superior suffering
of the speaker/poet, underscores the doubling of the unnamed sailor and
Cowper himself. In the final stanza the absence of God is expressed in
terms of a lack of sensory cognition: ‘No voice divine the storm allay’d,
/ No light propitious shone’ (ll. 61-2). The reader knows those negations
50
by this point: they echo back across the poem’s seascape. The lack of
‘divine’ voice (l. 61) reminds us of the castaway’s voice being lost to
his ‘comrades’ (ll. 44-46). The absence of light takes us all the way
back to the first line of the poem which situates the action of the poem
in ‘Obscurest night’. Those rhythms in the poem justify the claim to
‘semblance’ made by the speaker. Providential frameworks of narrative
might be absent here, but in their place are alternative patterns: of loss
and limitation.
The poem traces the slow death of the castaway in terms of severed
social and personal connections, and a physical environment which
closes in upon and finally subsumes him. Yet ‘The Castaway’ also offers
a counter-narrative to that language of limitation and denial, elaborated
through the complex temporal movements of the poem. Taken as a whole,
‘The Castaway’ broadly follows a chronological progression, tracing the
demise of Anson’s crewman. That trajectory is cut through in a number
of ways, however. The poem opens with the moment when the mariner
is washed overboard in the Atlantic, yet in the second stanza reflects
back upon his embarkation, with Anson’s fleet, from the British coast. It
also lays the present-time of Cowper’s speaker (which it is tempting to
align with the poet’s own temporal moment of writing in 1799) on top of
the events of March 1741. Elsewhere, time both expands and contracts
within the space of a single stanza:
He long survives who lives an hour
In ocean, self-upheld;
And so long he with unspent pow’r
His destiny repell’d,
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried, Adieu! (ll. 37-42)
The speaker of the poem demands that we acknowledge the alternative
temporality of this dying man: an hour in the ocean is presented as a
significant period of survival. The repetition of ‘long’, reinforced by the
word’s reoccurrence on rhyming lines (which are the longer, tetrameter,
lines of the stanza), elaborates the idea of time being extended. This
expansive temporality is curtailed in the rhyming couplet, however, as
time gathers pace again – ‘the minutes flew’ (l. 41) – and the castaway’s
51
cry brings an urgent close. These examples demonstrate the temporal
fluctuations in the poem, which speak to the movements of the water
within which the mariner flounders. Cowper’s portrayal of the slow,
drawn-out time of the ‘proverbially eternal “hour” (l. 37) of the
drowning man’29 contrasts markedly with many prose voyage accounts
in which drownings are narrated quickly, and often ‘without explanation
or reflection’.30 A Voyage Round the World only offers a brief lament for
the man washed overboard, before moving on to discuss the damage
caused to the ship by the storm:
indeed we were the more grieved at his unhappy fate, as we lost sight of
him struggling with the waves, and conceived from the manner in which he
swam, that he might continue sensible for a considerable time longer, of the
horror attending his irretrievable situation.31
The inspiration for many of the motifs in Cowper’s poem is clear here,
yet unlike ‘The Castaway’, the voyage account quickly loses sight of the
man overboard, just as his crewmates lost sight of him in the darkness.
After the temporal fluctuations which have characterised the telling of
the castaway’s story, in the final stanzas of the poem the speaker denies
any intention of extending the moment of the mariner’s suffering:
I, therefore, purpose not or dream,
Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date … (ll. 55-8)
Yet again, however, the use of ‘not’ here reminds us of the possibility
that extending the life and memory of this man through verse might
have been precisely the intention of the poet. As Newey has argued,
whilst claiming that he has not written an elegy that is ‘of course, in
a sense’, exactly what Cowper has done.32 Patricia Meyer Spacks has
noted that the analogy between the speaker and the sailor is introduced
in line 3, but only picked up again in line 59. The space in between, she
argues, creates sympathy for the victim of this maritime misadventure.33
When the self-reflective turn in the poem’s ending does come, ushered
in by the suggestion of ‘semblance’ between the speaker and his subject,
the connection between the two men is severed almost as soon as it is
made:
52
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
We perish’d, each, alone;
But I, beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he. (ll. 63-6)
Ultimately, it seems, the ‘difference between himself and the marinercastaway
becomes more important that the similarity’.34 It could also be
said that the claim to superior suffering on the part of the poem’s speaker
(his sea is ‘rougher’ and the ‘gulphs’ ‘deeper’) echoes the conventions
of maritime accounts in which the particular voyage being narrated is
presented as more difficult or dangerous than any other. This is how
the ordeal experienced by Anson and his crew is depicted in the Walter/
Robins account: ‘the distresses with which we struggled, during the
three succeeding months, will not easily be paralleled in the relation of
any former naval expedition’.35
To read ‘The Castaway’ alongside the prose account in which it
originates, and to consider Cowper’s poetic rendering of maritime
suffering alongside the popular voyage narrative tradition with which
many readers would be familiar, is to recognise a complex relationship
of both assimilation and rejection. Furthermore, reading it in those terms
acknowledges and responds to the way in which the poem actively
encourages readers to remember their own material encounter with
earlier versions of the story. The closing stanzas of the poem present
the mariner’s fate as one that has been inscribed in other texts. They
sentimentally evoke the emotional responses of readers, embodied in the
figure of Anson himself, who weep at his demise as recorded on those
other pages: ‘but the page / Of narrative sincere /That tells his name,
his worth, his age, / Is wet with Anson’s tear,’ (ll.49-52). The drowning
sailor is an inevitably common topos of many accounts of shipwreck,
or maritime misadventure more generally. However, by placing
the individual, drowning man at the centre of his poem, rather than
including him in a description of group catastrophe in which many men
experience the ‘same’ suffering, Cowper offers a sustained individual
perspective that is firmly denied to readers of those other texts. The
poem also fundamentally questions what it means to be a survivor. Carl
Thompson has explored the way in which voyage accounts, generally
narrated by ‘a figure who has survived the disasters and misadventures
53
described’, ultimately offer readers an ‘emblem of the enduring self’,
who ultimately ‘gains from its trauma’, often through the attainment of
‘profound insight and knowledge’.36 The authorised narrative of Anson’s
voyage was presented to readers as just such an account, supposedly
authored by Richard Walter the chaplain of the Centurion, who unlike
the castaway sailor safely returned home. The speaker of Cowper’s poem
is also a survivor of sorts. Despite the claim that he has experienced
worse storms and more tumultuous seas than the eponymous mariner
of his title, he lives on and writes the poem that remembers the other,
unnamed, man. What sort of survival is this though? The speaker of ‘The
Castaway’ has already ‘perish’d’ along with the sailor. If the voyage
accounts discussed by Thompson are ultimately written in order to attest
to survival, then this verse appears authored to confirm that death has
already taken place, and has been welcomed.
