In “The Negro’s Complaint”, which was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in December 1793, William Cowper successfully creates a dramatic monologue in which the Negro slave is given the full chance to give a fervent, heartfelt account of the journey of suffering, cruelty, and disdain from the pleasures of freedom in Africa to the tortures of slavery in England. The Negro is further allowed to defend the humanity of the African race, refute all the slave traders’ pretexts for racial discrimination, and finally, investigate the validity of the European domineering power over their fellow human beings.
The Negro begins his pathetic complaint by a logical discussion of the basic pillar of slave trade, namely, financial benefits. He wonders how he could be bereaved of all the pleasures of his homeland in Africa, brutally carried to England, deprived of his freedom, bought and sold, tortured and forced to hard work only to increase the slave traders’ profits. He further argues that though his body is enslaved, his mind can never be bought and sold. The Negro’s refutation of the claims of slave traders begins with the assertion that:
Fleecy locks and black complexion
Cannot forfeit Nature’s claim;
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same (13-16)
Bidding the iron-hearted masters to reconsider the validity of their pretexts, the African slave discusses slave trade from the spiritual religious perspective. God has created plants for all men alike, not for a certain species of human beings, to urge them to work and toil. So, lethargically enjoying the sweets of Negroes’ sweat is against God’s will. In a satirical tone, the Negro again wonders:
Is there,–as ye sometimes tell us,–
Is there One who reigns on high?
Has He bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from his throne, the sky? (25-28)
Tangled whips, matches and blood-extorting nails can never be the objects, God approves of, for urging slaves to work.
Ask Him, if your knotted scourges,
Matches, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means that duty urges
Agents of his will to use? (29-32)
This point is further stressed through a well-structured dialogue between God and the Wild Tornadoes:
Hark! He answers!–Wild Tornadoes
Strewing yonder sea with wrecks,
Wasting towns, plantations, meadows,
Are the voice with which He speaks.
He, foreseeing what vexations
Afric’s sons should undergo,
Fixed their tyrants’ habitations
Where his whirlwinds answer – “No.” (33-40)
Foreseeing the tortures inflicted upon the Africans, God has created ferocious twisters, and granted them the power of destroying towns, plantations, and meadows. Hence, all the “tyrants’ habitations” and treasures, for the sake of which they viciously enslave and torture Africans, are only transient pleasures which can be eventually devastated.
The Negro sums up the terrible vices of slavery starting from malicious hunting of the poor defenseless Africans, chaining them up in the irons of enslavement, experiencing the horrors of the slave-carrying ship, going through the sufferings at the man-degrading mart, and finally, perceiving terrible spiritual and psychological agony for the remainder of the slaves’ lives. The eloquent Negro challenges received ideas about civilization, and asks slave-traders for any pretext proving that their human feelings are, in any respect, superior to the Africans they enslave and exploit:
Slaves of gold, whose sordid dealings
Tarnish all your boasted powers,
Prove that you have human feelings,
Ere you proudly question ours! (61-64)
To clarify his protests against slave trade, Cowper has chosen to dress his thought in the ballad form, which according to Stephen Matterson and Darryl Jones, is “essentially a popular narrative song characterized by uncomplicated verse-structure and diction,” and hence, “frequently used as a vehicle for the articulation of political radicalism or mass dissent” (20). Such uncomplicated, musically charged form, then, is quite appropriate to the expression of the Negro’s wretched complaints, and the circulation of Cowper’s anti-slavery ideals.
On another level, Cowper’s use of iambic tetrameter (four-beat) lines arranged in eight-line stanzas of alternatively rhyming couplets (ababcdcd) is perfectly in harmony with the content. The fast, strongly marked beat stresses the Negro’s zealous expressions of the horrors of slavery, and adds to the musicality inherent in the ballad form. The choice of end-rhyme words (such as “pleasures” and “treasures”, “gold” and “sold”, as well as “dealings” and “feelings”) testifies the Negro’s refutation of the slave traders’ claims through an ironic analogy between slaves’ aspiration for simplest human necessities, and slave traders’ malicious greed for the utmost materialistic benefits. Despite the fact that the lines are generally short, enjambment – by which is meant “the effect caused when the semantic content of a phrase carries on beyond the end of the line” (Roberts 278) – is prevailing throughout the poem:
Deem our nation brutes no longer,
Till some reason ye shall find
Worthier of regard and stronger
Than the colour of our kind. (57-60)
This gives the Negro enough space: firstly to express (in vigorous elaborately chosen words) the brutal torments inflicted upon slaves, and secondly, to refute the pretexts of slave traders in a logical sequence.
Other sound devices are also extensively and meaningfully employed. Such devices include, for instance, alliteration in words like “paid”, “price” and “paltry” in the first stanza, and consonance as apparent in “gold” and “sordid” in the last stanza. The utilization of such musical symmetry not only testifies the hollowness of the slave trader’s materialistic pretexts, but it also corroborates the conspicuousness of human liberty, which is incomparable to any pecuniary profits whatsoever. Onomatopoeia is also used in words like “sigh” and “lolling” in the third stanza to achieve a realistic sound effect juxtaposing the terrible anguish of the downtrodden slaves, and the slothful pleasures of the brutal slave traders. Thanks to Cowper’s clever use of such phonetic tools, the Negro’s passionate account of slavery penetrates directly into the reader’s soul, producing the desired satirical impression.
In his book Understanding Poetry, James Reeves writes:
We are reminded that poetry, like life itself, depends on a balance between the intellect and the senses, the mind and the body, thought and action. Yet in the best poetry it is the sensuous element which predominates. If there are to be ideas in a poem, it is better that they should be apprehended through concrete and sensuously realized imagery. (160)
It is through such “concrete sensuously realized imagery” that Cowper conveys his anti-slavery ideals. In his poem “The Negro’s Complaint”, Cowper’s main preoccupation is to “communicate experience, not information” (Perrine and Arp 553). He presents a specific situation initially introduced in the title of the poem. A socially dead outsider Negro slave persona, or a noble savage, is given voice to express and complain from the vicious evils of slave trade. The voice of the Negro – which varies in tone – is bitter while expressing the tortures of slave trade, passionate while remembering the
pleasures of Africa, and satirical while refuting the pretexts of slave traders. Closely associated with the Negro’s voice is a number of auditory images such as the raging billows, the Negro’s sighs, slave traders’ boasted powers, and the elaborate conversation between God and the Wild Tornadoes. Through such conversation, one can clearly hear the sound of the furious twisters messing with wrecks, destroying towns, and punishing those who stand against God’s will.
The atrocious hunting of the Africans, carrying them to England over the “raging billows”, and the auction where slaves are sold and bought are all described thoroughly and quite vividly through a series of visual images. These, for instance, include: “sighs must fan it, tears must water” (19), “By our blood in Afric wasted, / Ere our necks received the chain” (41-42), and “the man-degrading mart” (46). In addition, Cowper draws a detailed picture of racial discrimination through drawing a comparison between the black Negroes and the white English slave traders. The images of the African slaves’ fleecy locks, black complexion, hard work, smarted backs, physical torments, misery, and broken hearts are impressively placed in contrast with the white iron-hearted masters with their treasures, paltry gold, jovial boards, sweets, sordid dealings, and boasted powers.
The horrible torments inflicted upon slaves are extensively communicated through a number of tactile and olfactory images, which (through cleverly chosen details) provoke the reader’s feelings of pity for the poor defenseless Africans, disgust and hatred for the brutal tormentors, and astonishment at the ambiguities of the age of human justice. One can smell, and feel the tropical touch of the Negroes’ tears, sweat, and blood, the passionate heat of the Negro’s sighs, the hard coldness of iron-hearted masters, and the fearful cruelty of “knotted scourges”, “matches”, and “blood-extorting screws” (29-30). The gustatory imagery of the pleasant taste of sweet and cane tyrants enjoy is contrasted with the miseries Africans suffer in the chains of slavery.
In addition to sensuous imagery, Cowper further stresses his protests against the evils of slavery by means of figures of speech. Simile in the ninth line: “Still in thought as free as ever,” is used to elaborate the preceding metaphor: “Minds are never to be sold” (8). These images transpose an important aspect of the Negro’s argument; bodies can be enslaved but minds can never be apprehended. The metaphor in “O’er the raging billows borne” (4) sheds more light on the horrors of this stage, which the Negro further regards as the worst torment:
By our blood in Afric wasted
Ere our necks received the chain;
By the miseries that we tasted,
Crossing in your barks the main; (41-44)
The culmination of Cowper’s imagery of physical slavery is conveyed through the metaphor “Ere our necks received the chain;” (41). The utmost symbol of human dignity, liberty, and life is hideously downtrodden, restrained, and humiliated.
In the third stanza, Cowper uses an elaborate conceit stressing the usurpation and tyranny of the slave traders, who unjustifiably exploit Africans, and deplete their resources:
Why did all-creating nature
Make the plant for which we toil?
Sighs must fan it, tears must water,
Sweat of ours must dress the soil.
Think, ye masters iron-hearted,
Lolling at your jovial boards,
Think how many backs have smarted
For the sweets your cane affords. (17-24)
The conceit depends on a series of metaphors including, on the one hand, the Negroes’ sighs that fan plant, tears that water it, and sweat that dresses the soil, and on the other, the iron-hearted masters. This last metaphor is further elaborated in the last stanza, when slave traders are again described as the “Slaves of gold” whose “sordid dealings tarnish” all their “boasted powers” (53-54). By virtue of these carefully and wittily chosen metaphors, Cowper destroys all the claims of slave traders. While the Africans are forced into physical slavery, slave traders are willingly enslaved – both spiritually and morally – by their vicious greed for gold and power. However, such materialistic benefits are tarnished by their moral degradation and ethical deterioration.
To convey his concept of slave trade from the moral perspective, Cowper makes a meaningful utilization of allegory in the fifth stanza. The Wild Tornadoes are symbolically personified and represented as the agents of God’s justice that punish those who transcend their human limits, and stand against God’s laws. Not only does such image serve as a threat to slave traders and a solace to slaves, but it also compares natural fury with human viciousness. Such comparison is further clarified in Cowper’s letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot:
In earthquakes, high winds, tempestuous sea, there is the grand as well as the terrible. But when man is active to disturb, there is much meanness in the design, and such cruelty in the execution, that I both hate and despise the whole operation. (191)
Cowper resorts to personification in other parts of the poem as in the second stanza, where affection is represented as a living being dwelling in “white and black the same” (16). In the third stanza, soil is also represented as a child who needs to be dressed and looked after. Gold, in the last stanza, is personified as a tyrant master, who has ironically enslaved the souls of slave traders.
The third level of imagery, in addition to sensuous images and figures of speech, is the embodiment of “symbolic vision” or “non discursive truth” by means of “the imagery-bearing language itself and its significations” (Frie 363). To fortify his argument, secure his position, and launch his bitterly satirical attack against slave trade, Cowper extensively utilizes the figurative reflections of word play. Throughout his rationally justified refutation of slave trade, Cowper largely depends on antithesis – “a form of expression, in verse or prose, in which contrasting words emphasize a contrast in ideas” (Reeves, Critical Sense 149). The “pleasures” and “delights” of the Negro’s homeland, are pathetically contrasted with the “torture”, “task”, “sighs”, “tears”, “miseries”, and “sufferings” of slavery in England, and the worthless treasures slave traders unjustifiably accumulate. Such priceless pleasures, in the Negro’s viewpoint, are incomparable with the “paltry gold” for which he is brutally enslaved.
The picture of the torments inflicted upon the poor African slaves (as represented in the smarted backs, knotted scourges, matches, and blood-extorting screws) is compared to the image of the iron-hearted masters lolling at their jovial boards. Such juxtaposition not only arouses the reader’s sympathy for the defenseless Negroes, but it also ridicules the Enlightenment ideals of social justice and human freedom. The contrast between the words “sold” and “bought” on the one side, and between the enslavement of bodies and the unscathed freedom of mind and thought on the other, adds weight to Cowper’s satirical argument. It is true that the Africans have totally lost control over their bodies and fate, nevertheless, they can never be deprived of their free minds and unshackled thought. Hence, the black Negroes’ affection, and spiritual liberty is contrasted with the white Englishmen’s iron hearts enslaved by materialistic profits.
Repetition, either of individual words, phrases or structures, is significantly employed for further clarification and emphasis of the theme. The repetition of the commercially related words such as “sell”, “buy”, and “gold” reveals the hypocrisy of slave traders, who justify their enslavement of Negroes by means of religious pretexts, while their crucial motive is commercial and financial profits. Similarly, the repetition of the verb “think” in the third stanza is quite meaningful and to the point. Cowper, in a sardonically satirical note, ardently urges the whole iron-hearted English community to reconsider, and reevaluate the issue of slave trade from new moral and religious perspectives other than the hereditary commercial and racial foundations.
Again the repetition of the structure “By our blood”, “By the miseries”, and “By our sufferings” in the sixth stanza is quite genuine and totally impressive in its representation of the horrors and agonies of slavery. It can also be observed that the words “blood”, “miseries” and finally “sufferings” are carefully chosen, and perfectly arranged to denote the stages of anguish slaves endure throughout their disaster-prone journey form freedom to enslavement. The terror of being hunted by the slave traders, the fear of being either enslaved or killed, and the horror of watching relatives or mutual friends slaughtered are all represented in the “blood in Afric wasted” (41). Psychological miseries, tasted in the slave-carrying ship, represent the second stage of agony, while “sufferings” (which denote both physical torments and psychological agony) faultlessly represent the doom-laden prospects of slaves for the remainder of their lives.
Through metonymy, as in “raging billows” (4), Cowper substitutes the slave carrying ship (the artificial secondary means of transportation) by the sea waves – the natural primary mechanism for earthly interaction. The fury of the surrounding nature is stimulated by means of the slave traders’ abuse of the inestimable natural blessings for the sake of transient worthless materialistic profits. Despite the fact that such natural wrath might serve as a warning for the slave traders to reconsider their vicious exploitation and maltreatment of their fellow human beings, it adds to the terrible physical and psychological anguish of the Negroes during the early phase of enslavement. It further denotes the frightening prospects, and gloomy future in the shackles of servitude. Synecdoche, as exemplified in “Afric’s coast I left forlorn” (2), where the whole (African coast) is made to stand for the part (the Negro’s tribe), broadens the sphere of the generic and racial vices of slave trade. The connotations of the word “coast” – which include water, beach, sun, fresh air, freedom, and happiness – further intensify the psychological tortures of the Negro for being deprived of all these pleasures.
With the intention of quashing the slave traders’ pretexts, and strengthening his refutation, Cowper makes impressive use of rhetorical questions. In the second stanza the Negro wonders:
Still in thought as free as ever,
What are England’s rights, I ask,
Me from my delights to sever,
Me to torture, me to task? (9-12)
It is not for the sake of gaining information that the Negro asks such a question, but to assure quite emphatically the obvious answer to what he asks. The Negro pathetically struggles to prove the injustice and falsity of England’s pretexts for enslaving other human beings, depriving them of all their homeland pleasures, and condemning them to a fate of task and torture. Another utilization of rhetorical questions comes in the fourth stanza where Cowper allows the downtrodden atheist Negro to ridicule the slave traders’ boasted Christian teachings, which are totally in contrast with the concept and practices of slave trade. God has never allowed human beings to enslave their fellow men. Neither has He permitted slave traders to torture their defenseless slaves by means of knotted scourges, matches, blood-extorting screws, or any other tormenting tools. The exclamation in the following stanza: “Hark! He answers!” (33), reinforces the Negro’s refutation, as God Himself reveals His disapproval of the malicious practices of slave traders, and forewarns that His punishment will soon befall.
To transcend the limited realm of moral protests against slave trade into a broad sphere condemning all forms of tyranny, and usurpation, Cowper has fully charged his words with symbolic associations. The word “Blood”, for instance, writes Michael Ferber:
A substance so vital to human life and so striking in appearance is bound to have many symbolic meanings, but we shall stress three clusters of meaning here: blood as “life” (or “lifeblood”), blood as family or ancestry, and blood as sacrifice. (29)
All the aforementioned clusters are suggested in “blood-extorting screws” (30), and “By our blood in Afric wasted” (41). Blood here symbolizes the physical as well as psychological tortures inflicted upon slaves. The wasted blood stands for the killing of the Negro’s fellow Africans during the process of slave hunting. It further denotes the humiliating inferiority of the Blacks in the eyes of the white Englishmen, and reinforces the readers’ condemnation of slave traders brutality and viciousness. The word “Africa” has also turned into a motif denoting the Negro’s dreams of freedom, security, and happiness.
Similarly, “nature” is a recurrent symbol suggesting God’s laws and original Christian principals, which urge social justice, equality, welfare, and freedom for all human beings alike. The words “forlorn” and “strangers”, in the first stanza, denote the psychological anguish of isolation and loneliness in the strange cruel enslaving community. The word “wrecks”, in the fifth stanza, reflects God’s wrath and punishment for those who disobey His laws. The whirlwinds’ answer “No” to the question whether God has fixed tyrants’ habitations or not, is a powerful fear-provoking threat to slave traders. The “man-degrading mart” does not only stand for the actual auction where slaves are bought and sold, but it also represents the Enlightenment Age with all its social and moral maladies.
While the finest imagery is that which clarifies and enriches the subject so that “the comparison made will seem an inevitable one, and the deep, hidden meaning of an idea will be revealed” (“Imagery”), the best style “is that in which the language is most appropriately suited to the thought that is being expressed” (“Style”). Such literary codes are quite applicable to “The Negro’s Complaint” in which Cowper – who as A. C. Ward maintains, “was uniquely fitted to express the tenderest emotions without dropping into sentimentality or bathos” (23) – has demonstrated his literary talent and satirical capabilities. Pat Rogers argues:
With Cowper the simile trails along across several mini-statements, the movement of the lines “plunging” us into fresh areas of experience: the syntax straggles into a mass of subsidiary clauses governed by hazy present participles. [. . .] A crucial fact is that Cowper allows each new idea to subvert the expected movement, to alter the center of rhythmic and syntactic gravity. (5)
Cowper’s style then, which according to William J. Heim “is marked by a tension between subjectivity and objectivity, a tension which, at its best, produces a unique poetry defying easy classification as either neoclassical or Romantic” (720), is genuine, coherent, and utterly accurate in his representation of the mentality and psychology of the Negro slave persona.
