The poet recalls the affection and tenderness lavished upon him by his mother; he relates how he felt at her death, and was deceived by the maids who told him that she would return. He again sees her in her nightly visits to him in his chamber to see him laid away safe to sleep. He mentions the biscuits she gave him, dwells on her constant flow of love and on the way she stroked his head and smiled. He thus re-lives those days. One should remember these are the reflections of a man fifty-eight years old. In his troubles he still looks back to her for support. He contrasts his position then with his situation now. He is suffering from depression and the memory of many griefs. His dead mother is like a bark safe in port. "But me scarce hoping to attain that rest, Always from port withheld, always distressed, Me howling blasts drive devious, tempests tossed, Sails ripping, seams opening wide, and compass lost. And day by day some current's thwarting force Sets me more distant from a prosperous course." It of course displeases people to have any association made between the noblest sentiment, mother love, and so repulsive a feature as incest. When Freud interpreted the marriage of Œdipus to his mother both from a historical and psychological point of view, and called attention to the dream in the play where the Chorus mentions the most obnoxious dream that sometimes visits us mortals, that of incestuous relationship with the mother, he opened up a new field not only in psychology but in medicine. Psychoanalytic treatment has cured many people whose neurosis arose from the early attachment to the mother from which they were finally freed. Cowper was a victim of the Œdipus Complex; it was buried in his unconscious and in this poem of his he shows that the seeds that were sown fifty-two years ago were still bearing fruit. Literature can hardly furnish so good an example of the influence of the Œdipus Complex through so great a distance of time. In this poem Cowper put his hand unknowingly on the cause of all his troubles, but he never realised it. Had the poem been written in his twenties instead of his late fifties, the subliminal process of freeing himself by art from his Œdipus Complex might have made his life more pleasant. The fact that the poem was written so late shows that the unhealthy attachment clung to him all his life; it ruined him mentally and gave us his strange personality.