Cowper disliked the task, but he wrote two
or three anti-Slave-Trade ballads. _The Slave Trader in the Dumps_,
with its ghastly array of horrors dancing a jig to a ballad metre,
justifies the shrinking of an artist from a subject hardly fit for art.
If the cistern which had supplied _The Task_ was exhausted, the rill of
occasional poems still ran freely, fed by a spring which, so long as
life presented the most trivial object or incident could not fail. Why
did not Cowper go on writing these charming pieces which he evidently
produced with the greatest facility? Instead of this, he took, under
an evil star, to translating Homer. The translation of Homer into
verse is the Polar Expedition of literature, always failing, yet still
desperately renewed. Homer defies modern reproduction. His primeval
simplicity is a dew of the dawn which can never be re-distilled. His
primeval savagery is almost equally unpresentable. What civilized poet
can don the barbarian sufficiently to revel, or seem to revel, in the
ghastly details of carnage, in hideous wounds described with surgical
gusto, in the butchery of captives in cold blood, or even in those
particulars of the shambles and the spit which to the troubadour of
barbarism seem as delightful as the images of the harvest and the
vintage? Poetry can be translated into poetry only by taking up the
ideas of the original into the mind of the translator, which is very
difficult when the translator and the original are separated by a gulf
of thought and feeling, and when the gulf is very wide, becomes
impossible.
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