III
The Colubriad (comp. August 1782/ pub. 1802) details a chance encounter between four
cats and a viper in Cowper’s garden. We know it is Cowper’s garden, for he first details the
incident in a letter on 5 August 1782 to William Unwin. Cowper frequently reworked incidents
from his letters into poems, and in transforming this one he also aligns it with a series of animal
poems cast as meditations on man’s first disobedience, the topic dearest to his favorite poet,
Milton. Cowper draws this point out to include the character of women, the frequent subject of
Pope, his greatest poetic rival.i Consequently, this garden and “villain” (l. 26) serpent also leave
traces of Eden, as first becomes clear in a key couplet explaining the location of the snake: “For
long ere now it should have been rehears’d / T’was in the garden that I found him first” (ll. 301). The Colubriad marries echoes of Eve’s fatal curiosity to the mock-heroic genre to question
the nature of heroism left to those exiled from the garden. It is one of a group of Cowper’s
animal poems on this lapsarian theme, including The Bee and the Pine Apple (comp. 1779/pub.
1890), The Pine Apple and the Bee (comp. 1779/ pub. 1782), The Doves (comp. 1780/
pub.1782), The Parrot (comp. 1777/ pub. 1782 , On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s
Goldfinch (comp. 1788/ pub. 1789), Pairing Time Anticipated: A Fable (comp. 1789/ pub.
1792), and To the Swallow (comp. 1799/ pub.1803). The Colubriad’s story of this disarming
snake is both simple and, according to the letter, perfectly true, as he explained to William
Unwin: a viper stared down three kittens and one adult cat until Cowper feared for the lives of all
his pet felines and killed the hapless snake with a garden hoe.ii The interest, however, comes in
the way the poet transforms this into a parable of innocence and experience, a meditation on the
burden of human knowledge, and an oblique, self-mocking portrait of the middle-aged artist as
Christian soldier. Cowper deftly blends martial, imperial, and chivalric elements in the poem and
subtly rereads heroic masculinity through the voices and actions of animals.
The poem opens with a turn on the Latin siste viator, or pause traveler convention;
however, here the deceased, the viper, will receive no epitaph. Instead of the tomb of a dead
human stranger causing the poet to pause and reflect on mortality, morality, and the dynamics of
friendship, themes dear to Cowper, in this case what is figured forth as theme for reflection is the
inscrutable behavior of other animals toward each other, and the gulf between human and animal
life. What causes our speaker, “passing swift and inattentive by” (l. 3), to arrest his steps and
thoughts is “a loud and furious hiss”(l. 7); he is transfixed by a snake so close to one of three
kittens that it can flick its forked tongue against the kitten’s nose. The scene unfolds on a
threshold between inside and outside spaces metonymic of human and animal worlds, a threshold
marked by a border meant to be secure: a “door nailed fast” (l. 1). The fastness of the door,
however, brings no security and is deftly played against the swiftness of the speaker. The space
literally divides the garden proper, a neat English garden as nature methodized, from both the
wilds beyond and the snug, safer, domestic manufactured enclosure of the garden house, a locale
identified by Bruce Redford as the kind of sanctuary space Cowper always seeks to build out of
letters and poems to shelter him from a hostile world. iii In this liminal space of the poem’s
second action, what stills Cowper’s swift first action is not just the iconic, theologically redolent
hiss of the serpent in the garden, but the remarkable reaction of one kitten to it.
As the viper brushes the kitten’s nose, apparently tasting this morsel before aiming to
consume it, the kitten, unlike the frantic man who will feel the need to act heroically to rescue
the poor deluded brute, confronts the beast pointedly with an “attention due” (l. 16), an attitude
initially beyond the ken of the inattentive speaker. Cowper then modulates the genre into animal
fable, using speaking animals to “draw a moral from an everyday particular,” as Rachel Trickett
recognizes Cowper’s animal fable poems often do.iv For the nameless, but not sexless, female
kitten disarmingly asks the viper, “who are you?” (l. 17). Whereas readers may think the answer
is obvious—it’s Satan, flee! Innocent fool—the question also states what Cowper, always outside
the borders of conventional social and personal identity, and sometimes as naïve about the great
world as this young creature, repeatedly asks himself, often with no satisfactory, lasting answer
ensuing. This was essentially the question he was asked by the examiner for the Clerkship in
1767---who are you to take this position?-- prompting his first utter mental collapse.
The poem hinges on an oscillation between the realistic and the symbolic such that an
appropriate answer for the snake, anticipating Freud, might be, “sometimes a snake is just a
snake.” Two animals communicating with smell and taste as tongue touches nose enclose a
world that the human cannot penetrate without immediately overlaying it with an enmity
between living creatures characteristic of the early modern view of how animal relations changed
after the Fall, as Keith Thomas, Laurie Shannon and others have argued.v Nor does the initial
genre frame disappear, for the arrested traveler fails to follow through and stay calm and
meditative. Instead our speaker springs into a flurry of mock-heroic action, now “swift as
lightning” (l. 19 ), and as quickly acquires the trappings of classical heroism: a weapon, and
bloodlust. As he arms himself with a long-handled Dutch hoe and grows filled with “heroic
ardour”(l. 36 ), before he can slay the beast, Cowper pointedly doubles the animal: animal
encounter as an adult cat next confronts the snake after it initially and easily eludes the man’s
attempt to stop it. It blithely passes the insecure border from shed and manufactured world to the
garden and its animal inhabitants.
This reversal of the movement of Edenic exile, a type of return to the light of God’s
favor, always eluded Cowper after his disastrous dreams of damnation. Our speaker, convinced
that this snake represents certain death to kittens and cats alike, fails also to notice that in the
animal world in front of his eyes there is no easy correlation between youth as innocence, and
adult as experienced, as in Blake, to whom Cowper’s animal typology is sometimes compared.vi
For here the emphatically “full-grown cat” is even more a type of Eve, and initially seems closer
to Thomas’ Gray’s Selena in “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat.” However, despite being full
of fatal curiosity, she also acts like a good scientist by embodying the behavior of calm reason
and simply wanting to understand things in her world. She is even graced with the language of
philosophy, as Cowper narrates:
For long ere now it should have been rehears’d,
‘Twas in the garden that I found him first.
E’en there I found him; there the full-grown cat
His head with velvet paws did gently pat,
As curious as the kittens erst had been
To learn what this phenomenon might mean. (ll.30-5)
What is truly disarming to the human, armed, soon-to-be warrior in this scene is this moment of
unexpected friendship between animals; it pointedly defies the Satanic scenario of mortal
enemies with one gentle pat, a gesture also quite realistic in cat behavior and adding a feline
touch to the earlier accuracy of the reptilian touch of the tongue. Cowper shows us animal
communication beyond language and enacted in registers of sense other than vision, the sense so
dear to human philosophers, as Derrida argues, from Plato to the present.vii The cats collectively
outstrip the man in exercising the admirable traits of calm, reasonable and philosophic
deliberation based on individually verified sense data, behaviors often adduced as signs of our
superiority to other animals. The human misconstruction of animal relations is underscored in the
phrasing of the danger our speaker projects onto the adult cat inexplicably caressing the snake:
Fill’d with heroic ardour at the sight,
And fearing every moment he would bite,
And rob our household of our only cat
That was of age to combat with a rat (ll.36-9)
The speaker immediately links being of age with being suitable for warfare, when the actions of
the animals have been anything but bellicose, especially the older cat’s. Next to fall curious
victim to the poem’s own moral is any attempt to preserve logic for people and cast cats to mere
instinct. For even though the ending is emphatically in the animal fable genre, the moral is
undercut. It is both so hyperbolic, pointedly yet blusteringly delivered in all capitals by a speaker
who perhaps doth protest too much, and it is logically empty and pointless. Over the slain snake
Cowper vaunts that he has taught the beast “NEVER TO COME THERE NO MORE” (l. 41).
Well, of course he won’t, being now headless. The real lesson is the impossibility of eradicating
evil from the human world. Cowper intimates in this weird scene of intimacy that a subtle new
kind of evil takes root in this garden whenever people too readily allegorize the natural world in
fixed moral terms that admit no doubt, and overlay it with pathetic and empathetic fallacies,
especially when we use those to claim knowledge of the future. As today, dogma too often gives
license to abuse the animal world, whether that dogma is Biblical about one animal, or Cartesian
about all of them as unfeeling machines. Our speaker here is absolutely convinced that this snake
will strike these cats and wants to eat them. But should we be?
I am not claiming that Cowper’s meditation on doubt and certainty here is linking his
intimations of immorality with atheism. He holds fast to his faith, even when it puts him in the
position of his hapless alter ego in his final poem, The Castaway. What is instead fascinating
about The Colubriad, in terms of Cowper’s poetry acting as self-therapy, is that he so often lived
in dread of the very thing that he here is able to imagine himself avoiding: a future that he is
absolutely convinced will bring him only damnation and put him in league with Satan. He knows
what he will be and it shadows his every move in the present, except perhaps in the dream-world
of poetry, where the thresholds between worlds are less nailed fast. The inscrutability of the
animal world as a sign of God’s mysterious ways just beyond his ken may figure a state Cowper
longs for. It beckons with an alternative to his mentally and socially debilitating world’s pairing
of knowledge with sorrow, and certainty with misery. If, for Cowper, “natural life is full of
instruction, prophecy, and revelation,” then this poem fits very well into a Scriblerian strain of
late-Augustan mock tradition by showing how this garden Gulliver, confident teacher with his
hollow animal-fable lesson, remains most in need of instruction himself.viii
Not only consciousness, but class and gender are also threaded through Cowper’s heroic
couplets in The Colubriad. This creates a discursive dynamic in which the private garden mirrors
the public world. It is striking to me that the sole line in the poem which Charles Ryskamp
annotates for modern readers is the line fusing the male sex with the diabolical, the alien, and the
bellicose, but the female with other non-human animals who act more wisely. In this one line,
the viper is first described as being as “long as Count de Grasse’s queue,” an historical simile
conjuring for its contemporaries a mental picture of the elaborate wig worn by Francois Joseph
Paul de Grasse, the French Admiral who commanded the fleet at Yorktown, a battle leading
directly to the loss of America and thus of some heroic, martial prestige for Britain. Cowper
remarks in the letter providing the prose template of the poem that he had indeed attended to
newspaper reports about De Grasse when he became a British prisoner of war in London. It is
also likely that Cowper knew the 1782 James Gilray caricature of the towering but rail-thin and
somewhat snake-like de Grasse wearing a foppish, French-style periwig with high loft and an
excessively long tail or “queue.” It may also be the case that the learned Cowper knew that the
word ‘queue’ came from heraldry, signifying the tail of any beast, and usually one with a forked
tail. So not only is de Grasse rendered Satanic much as Napoleon will emphatically be treated
later by the British press, he becomes both the political serpent driving Britain from treating
America like its private imperial garden, and an initial image of the Satanic as the traditional
fusion of human with animal, as in any cloven-footed devil. However, as I’ve argued, folly and
evil in The Colubriad is the legacy of men, not beasts, whether snakes or cats. Consequently an
image that begins by linking evil to the tail of the beast, also pulls in aristocracy via their luxury
goods, and the national foreigner as alien. Whereas Cowper mirrors most eighteenth-century
moral satirists in his consistent decrying of luxury, a theme prominent in his most famous poem,
The Task, the image depends as much on the fact that this man is not just an aristocrat, but an
admiral, a professional soldier. Hence when our “heroic” speaker takes up household arms to
slay the beast threatening the feline damsels in distress, his chivalric ardor aligns him with the
diabolical, and with the false victors who instead lose, thus becoming prisoners of their own
heroic actions—exactly as de Grasse did. The poem’s political and theriological narratives
intersect in the particular ways the mock-heroic speaker takes up arms against misunderstood
animals.
Furthermore, it seems no accident that the mock-knight’s weapon used against a snake
linked to war between France and England, and a key battle off the coast of a state consolidated
for the British empire in the time of William and Mary, is a “Dutch hoe.” A Dutch hoe is a longhandled garden tool, but it also figures Holland, Hanover and perhaps its most famous British
export, William of Orange. This chain of associations links the ostensibly heroic Christian
soldier, through his arms in heraldic fashion, directly with his foe: long, lean, alien, and therefore
indubitably dangerous—matching his misreading of the snake. The quotidian and unremarkable
presence of this Dutch hoe in an average English garden shed may also act to expose delusional
distinctions between what is domestic and what is foreign, much as Defoe does in The True-Born
Englishman (1701).
In The Colubriad’s sly picture of what is human versus what is truly animal, we have
seen curiosity, openness to experience, exploration, and calm, gentle motions on the side of the
beasts, perhaps aligning them with the Prince of Peace, but impulsiveness, carelessness, bigotry,
pig-headed certainty, and violence dwelling with man and shackling him to the devil. In such
moral geometry truly dispatching the devil becomes a figurative act of suicide. Man, as Swift
wrote, is the creature of warfare who preys on his own kind. Those interested in Cowper as a
satirist have often seen him as just too gentle to succeed in turning violence into sport; here we
may see further reasons Cowper distances himself from satire as practiced by Cowper’s bête
noir, Pope. If the satirist’s life is a warfare on earth, as Pope claimed, then it is one not nearly
heavenly enough for Cowper’s pacifistic taste and real doubts about whether the Christian
soldier represents the worst kind of paradox in his world of Britain in the 1780s, one where
conventional masculinity is so insistently martial, whether on the field of battle or in the field of
letters.
Equally important is the fate of conventionally gendered femininity and class in this short
poem of many tales. The first curious kitten, purportedly in grave danger from the viper, is
gendered female, and the snake in the position of villain is male via Cowper’s pronoun choice;
however, as a “villain” (l. 26) the viper is also, etymologically, associated with the low-born.
From the speaker’s point of view, the axis of evil aligns male and lower class; female links with
innocence, dangerous curiosity, and the damsel in distress role in chivalry, soon to be celebrated
by Edmund Burke. However, as we have seen, this viper is not necessarily malevolent, and is
more immediately conjoined with aristocracy and luxury. And as for chivalry, the knight errant is
more in error than the feline-as-lady-fair, for he acts on dubious knowledge of what the snake
really is by exercising impulsive violence followed by a hollow, vaunting moral. He gravitates
toward the associative pole of Conte de Grasse, as the feared alien, bellicose and ultimately selfdestructive. Meanwhile the kitten’s innocence, necessary for a traditional Edenic allegory, is
vindicated when she mirrors her adult cat counterpart and is aligned not with jaded maturity, but
gentleness—perhaps even gentilesse in the poem’s mock-chivalric register. Nowhere do we rest
with a stable sociology in which female is worse than male intellectually or morally. Most
tellingly, for Cowper, the attempt to formulate and fix people and animals alike in such schemes
leads to an unwitting act of figurative suicide as the speaker unwittingly slays an image of
himself. Similar to that great exponent of the animal fable in the twentieth century, Walt Kelly,
Cowper hints that we have met the enemy and he is us. Cowper, however, adds that neither a he
nor a she is necessarily bound to be that enemy.
The martial, imperial, and chivalric elements are crucial to The Colubriad and are further
illuminated by comparing this poem to Cowper’s prose account of the same incident in the letter
he writes to William Unwin. In prose, Cowper explicitly frames the moral of the story as a
paradox, an “apparent contradiction” that “[W]e are never more in danger than when we think
ourselves most secure, nor in reality more secure than when we seem perhaps to be most in
danger” (1.54). As the poem borne of the ensuing story teaches, that “seem perhaps” double
hedge hides several snakes in its grass. For clearly the kittens and cat, not the man, are subjects
best suited to being in danger; however, whether they really are, and from what or whom, is the
question of the poem. The answer to the question asked of the snake--“who are you?”--controls
the action on either side. The animal subjects do not know the answer but wish to; the human is
convinced that he does, and acts ostensibly to protect the ignorant. Were they in danger? Surely
if the snake is a type of Old Scratch. But were they really? We simply don’t know from the
pointedly open evidence of the poem. Cowper’s poem exemplifies what Keats later calls
negative capability, as the capacity to remain in doubt. Cowper’s prose narration matches the
action of the poem, as does the degree of thought and care with which he considers the cats.
After the snake darts out into the yard and “out of the garden,” (1.55) it seems like the story is set
to deliver an Edenic moral. Instead, the Eve figure’s curiosity, as in the poem, appears admirable
as Cowper starts this act with a scene of animal contact represented as language: “I went round
immediately, and there found him in close conversation with the Old Cat, whose curiosity being
excited by so novel an appearance, inclined her to pat his head repeatedly with her forefoot, with
her claws however sheathed, and not in anger, but in the way of philosophical enquiry and
examination” (1.55). Even though the “female philosopher” was typically a satirical target in the
eighteenth-century, Cowper here neither ridicules cats nor women for this act of intellectual
curiosity. Instead, just as in the poem, the rectitude, heroism and effectiveness of the human’s act
is more shadowed by doubts, as Cowper continues to shift words of praise to the cat while
undercutting his own efficacy: “To prevent her falling a victim to so laudable an exercise of her
talents, I interposed in a moment with the hoe, and performed upon him an act of decapitation,
which though not immediately mortal, proved so in the end” (1.55) Several things are
noteworthy in Cowper’s rather funny, formal locutions. The larger paradox than security’s being
dangerous here is found in the contrast between the human act of well-intentioned heroism
figured as an imaginative, longed for salvation “to prevent her [/Eve/us all ] from falling.”
Unfortunately, what this preventive measure will thwart, the exercise of female talent and
intellect, is itself praised. Eve’s fatal curiosity, that notorious foundation of pre-modern
Christian morality, is on the cusp of keeping women out of science. Curiosity, instead of
damning people, might now save cats from our less than laudable conflation of their behaviors
with the kinds of moral paradigms, those based on absolute certainty, that so often lead to
violence, whether verbal or physical. In the letter’s account of this curious incident in the
garden, martial heroism is deflated by the fact that the decapitation fails to kill. The snake’s end
proves neither “immediately mortal” nor readily fit to a moral, for that shadow-land of hesitation
between T. S. Eliot’s motion and act is preserved and developed beautifully in The Colubriad’s
complex intimations of morality by means of the poetic mock form.
As mentioned earlier, The Colubriad forms a loose cycle of poems in which the iconic
character of women as derived from the character of Eve is consistently played against the
meditations on the character of men, while weighing both against other animals. Whereas Pope
had used his moral essays to plumb the character of men and women, Cowper’s great move
beyond his powerful predecessor comes well before his overt attempt to unseat Pope with a new
Homer translation. It was to add the character of other animals as just as vital to the moral
spectrum. In fact, in our next poem, Cowper not only echoes Pope’s interest in delineating the
character of women, he borrows the name of Pope’s most famous heroine, Belinda, and expands
the links between empires and morals seen in The Colubriad, while echoing Pope’s lines on the
pheasant’s self-destructive plumage in Windsor Forest. In the The Parrot, which preceded
Colubriad by a matter of months and was published first, Cowper translates into English a Latin
poem by his teacher Vincent Bourne. In it we see Cowper’s consistent ideological edge and his
fascination with gender roles. By picking the works of others that also feature representations of
animals, Cowper is able to represent the common-sense thinking about animals at the time, and
to deconstruct it. What he shows us in his animal poems is how these typical opinions about
animals are always bound up with and complicated by the social roles prescribed and proscribed
for the human sexes. Cowper’s ideas about animals are intertwined with beliefs about gender as
insistent as those in aesthetic theory of his contemporary Edmund Burke. Whereas in The
Coulbriad Cowper’s cats destabilize Eve’s character and heroic courtly male values alike, his
translation of Bourne’s bird into The Parrot makes central the role of language in courtship and
education, and the characters of women, much as Mary Wollstonecraft will later. As in his
meditation on his cats and a snake, this poem brings in what become Cowper’s favorite animal
subjects—birds—and the verse is paired with a prose version of the poem’s subject in a letter.
The Parrot also anatomizes the act of Cowper’s own poetic creation, as I will highlight by
comparing Cowper’s English version with Bourne’s Latin original. The act of translation allows
Cowper to form new structures of thought and feeling as he considers what others contemporary
with him think about animals and people alike.
Cowper is quite blunt about this rivalry, calling Pope “a ‘disgusting’ letter writer,” and
denigrating his Homer in no uncertain terms: “’Pope resembles Homer just as Homer resembled
himself when he was dead. His figures and features might be found, but the animation was all
departed’” (qtd. in King, William Cowper, 132, 194).
i
ii
iii
To William Unwin, 3 Aug. 1782, Letters, 1.68-70.
Redford, 52-53. He remarks on the mock heroic qualities of the narrative version of the
Colubriad story in this letter (59).
iv
Trickett, 471.
v
See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, and Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated
Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
vi
See Perkins, Animal Rights, 34.
vii
See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982).
viii
Trickett, 474.