![]() ![]() Between 20 May and 5 July, Wordsworth wrote three elegies for him: ‘To the Daisy’, ‘I only look’d for pain and grief’, and ‘Distressful gift! this Book receives’ ( Poems 608n., 611n., 617n.). John Wordsworth drowned on 5 February 1805 when his ship, The Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off Portland Bill. One might say that Wordsworth composed his elegies against his memories of Cowper’s poem, resisting the idea that his brother had suffered like the Cast-away. Wordsworth echoed phrases and images from ‘The Cast-away’ in each of his elegies, but he often echoed them in order to reject or modify them. There is no shipwreck in ‘The Cast-away’, but it describes the death of a sailor in terms which closely resemble the circumstances of John’s death, and provides a memorial which was highly charged for Wordsworth when he was grieving. This focus on the sailor’s final thoughts made it a powerful point of reference for Wordsworth’s elegies. Cowper uses the details of the sailor’s death to reflect on his personal history, while distilling ‘emblematic truth out of the particular experience of the “castaway”, who is now indivisibly both self and narrative subject’ (Newey 307). It records Cowper’s acceptance of approaching death in the absence of God’s grace, likening his fate to that of a sailor washed overboard: ‘No voice divine the storm allayed, / No light propitious shone, / When, snatched from all effectual aid, / We perished, each alone’ (Hayley 2: 217). ‘The Cast-away’ was Cowper’s last original composition, written in April 1799 while he was living under the care of his kinsman, John Johnson, in Norfolk. These echoes suggest, and then work to refute, the idea that John Wordsworth was a version of the drowned sailor abandoned by his friends in Cowper’s poem. Wordsworth’s elegies for his brother, John, contain a series of echoes of William Cowper’s poem ‘The Cast-away’. As he worked through the series of elegies, Wordsworth increasingly came to accept the accidental resemblances between John and the Cast-away, until he made the identification clear in the third elegy, ‘Distressful gift’. The first elegy, ‘To the Daisy’, originally contained two stanzas which described John’s shipwreck in terms that echoed Cowper’s poem, yet Wordsworth deleted these stanzas in the manuscript. Specifically, he raises and then refutes the possibility that John resembled the Cast-away in having been abandoned to a life at sea. Wordsworth’s echoes of images and phrases from ‘The Cast-away’ in his elegies show him attempting to resist his memories of Cowper’s poem. ![]() ![]() Wordsworth first encountered this poem shortly before John drowned, in volume two of Hayley’s work The Life, and Posthumous Writings, of William Cowper. The three elegies that Wordsworth wrote after the death of his brother John in 1805 contain echoes of Cowper’s poem ‘The Cast-away’. John Wordsworth as Cowper’s ‘Cast-away’ Tom Clucas Cowper uses the details of the sailor’s death to reflect on his personal history, while distilling ‘emblematic truth out of the particular experience of John Wordsworth as Cowper’s ‘Cast-away’ Tom Clucas Abstract The three elegies that Wordsworth wrote after the death of his brother John in 1805 contain echoes of Cowper’s poem ‘The Cast-away’.
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