Context: This quotation appears in the fifth book of The Task, entitled "The Winter's Morning Walk." The Task is a long poem, fitting the taste of the time in which it was written. The structure of the poem is discursive and rambling, so that it can contain meditative passages on all sorts of subjects, as well as many remarkable descriptions of nature. In "A Winter's Morning Walk," the poet discusses many topics: the foddering of cattle, man's slavish nature, the respective merits of martyrs and patriots, the Bastille, the whimsical effects of frost at a waterfall, the perishable nature of human institutions, and, among others, the amusements of monarchs. In this passage the poet speaks of war itself as one of the amusements of kings, and he decries the fact that kings can spoil the world by making war. Wise subjects, Cowper comments, would not allow monarchs to "make the sorrows of mankind their sport." The verse paragraph in which the quotation appears is this: