No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone;
When, snatched from all effectual aid, We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

These lines come from William Cowper’s long poem “The Castaway,” written late in his life and published posthumously. Cowper bases the narrative on a real incident recorded in George Anson’s account of his circumnavigation: a sailor falls overboard during a storm and, despite being seen and heard, cannot be rescued. Cowper uses the maritime disaster as a frame for a more personal meditation. The speaker’s attention shifts from the doomed seaman to himself, turning the shipwreck into an emblem of Cowper’s own experience of spiritual desolation and recurrent depression—an anguish he often described as feeling abandoned by providence and cut off from saving help.

On the surface, the passage insists on the absence of miraculous intervention: no “voice divine” calms the storm, no favorable light appears, and each person “perished…alone.” The final couplet pivots from the literal sea to metaphor: the speaker claims to be overwhelmed by an even “rougher sea” and “deeper gulfs” than the sailor’s. Cowper thus converts a public calamity into an inward allegory of despair. The force of the lines lies in their stark refusal of easy consolation; they dramatize isolation as both physical (the castaway beyond reach) and spiritual (the mind that feels itself beyond grace), making the poem a powerful statement about suffering that seems unanswered.