SOURCE: Griffin, Dustin. “Redefining Georgic: Cowper's Task.” ELH 57, no. 4 (winter 1990): 865-79.

[In the following essay, Griffin views The Task as an eighteenth-century modification of the classical Georgic poetic form, while arguing that it depicts a more privatized and spiritualized conception of labor and its relation to the divine order than its predecessors.]

Cowper's Task strikes most readers as a long and meandering discursive poem, divided rather arbitrarily into six books, and unified by little more than its concern with rural pleasures. Does the poem in fact have any clearer focus, any generic principle of order? My suggestion is that while the poem does not display the kind of unity or coherence one finds in a narrative long poem like Paradise Lost, or in an expository theodicy like An Essay On Man, it nonetheless possesses more than just the single “tendency” that Cowper claimed for it in a famous letter.¹

While Pope's poem moves from proposition to proposition in a progression accurately summarized in the poem's prose arguments, Cowper's—four times longer—deliberately follows a roundabout way, and seems to take up scenes and subjects as he happens upon them, in the course of a leisurely mental excursion. Certain central topics recur frequently in opposed pairs—town and country, God's works and man's works, simplicity and luxury, leisure and work—and Cowper works on these topics a series of variations not always consistent with each other, revealing what may be his own ambivalence, or else acknowledging that the mind is typically various and varying from itself. Indeed, the poem seems to assume and embrace the fluidity of mental life, in which “fleeting images … fill / The mirror of the mind” (2.290-91), in which “the mind / Of desultory man” (curiously fitted to the variousness of the earth), “studious of change, / And pleas'd with novelty” (1.506-10), may be indulged and gratified by the poet, much as the observer's eye is conducted along its “sinuous course, / Delighted” by the “slow winding Ouse” (1.163-66).²

The danger of such a sinuous style, open as it is to shifts and turns in mood and subject, yielding to the slightest pressure, is that the poet's meditative river will lose itself in an endless plain. To provide himself some sense of direction, Cowper establishes several large thematic or narrative frames. The end of his wandering walk—both its conclusion and its purpose—is a vision not of God's works but of God himself. In traditional fashion, this poem long loved for its natural description leads to an epiphany of nature's creator. At the end of book 5 Cowper bids his reader “Acquaint thyself with God, if thou would'st taste / His works” (5.779-80). One can read in nature “the unambiguous footsteps” of God (5.812), and can vividly imagine that mystical moment when Nature throws wide “her veil opaque” and “discloses … / The author of her beauties” (5.891-93).

Cowper reminds himself and his reader that though as narrator he rambles, he is always ultimately homeward bound. In book 3 the narrator (ironically resembling Milton's Satan) winds his “devious course uncertain” but is always “seeking home” (3.3). In book 5, like a foreign traveler panting to return to his own country, Cowper looks to the stars to guide him “home / From toilsome life to neverending rest” (5.837-41). Rest after labor is one of the most common biblical images of comfort, and the promise made to the faithful. Cowper may here also recall that in Paradise Lost, another poem about homecoming, fallen man is destined to wander until Christ at last “bring[s] back / Through the world's wilderness long wandered man / Safe to eternal paradise of rest.”³

For Cowper home means—in very traditional fashion—the final release from toil. But until that release mortal man must be a day-laborer, must work for his bread in the sweat of his face. And yet work for Cowper is not a curse; it is instead the means whereby man establishes his dignity, occupies his time productively, and serves his God. Ultimately it is through work that man earns his eternal rest: “let us labor therefore,” says Paul to the Hebrews, “to enter into that rest” (Heb. 4:11). Traditionally, the poetic form devoted to the celebration of labor (as Cowper knew) is the georgic. My argument is that Cowper found in the generic resources of georgic a means of focusing his long poem, and further that Cowper redefined the meaning of labor and thus redefined the georgic for his generation.

Reading Cowper's poem as a georgic will in fact help us sharpen our sense of a genre that we have defined rather casually. Georgic, we customarily say, means a poem that is discursive, didactic, concerned with the agricultural foundation of a great nation, even concerned with providing instruction in a rural art. Its locus classicus is Virgil's four-book poem (and we rarely look outside of Virgil for georgic topics). If a poem bears its Virgilian model closely in mind, and centers on a didactic purpose, we call it “formal georgic”—Phillips's Cyder, Dyer's Fleece, Smart's Hop-Garden—which, like Virgil's poem, links the strength of rural arts to the health of a nation. It is clear that The Task is not a formal georgic. Except for the section in book 3 on the growing of cucumbers, The Task devotes very little of its attention to agricultural practice, and when it does so makes clear that the growing of cucumbers is of little benefit to anybody but the gardener himself.

In recent years we have also used the term “georgic” to refer to a number of well-known poems in the eighteenth century that display the major characteristics of the genre in a less rigorous way. Denham's Cooper's Hill, Pope's Windsor Forest, even Dryden's Annus Mirabilis have been said to be shaped by georgic conventions, by which we usually mean not much more than that the poems are governed by a flexible decorum that permits the poet to range widely: the poems are discursive and didactic, they use the materials of rural nature as a means of dealing ultimately with larger political themes, and they may (or may not) touch on a rural art (or sport). By this looser conception of the genre, The Task might well be considered a georgic.

But the definition is so elastic that many quite different poems might gather under this large umbrella—Jonson's “To Penshurst,” Dryden's epistle “To my Honour'd Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton,” Thomson's Seasons, even some of Pope's Horatian epistles. We can recognize that eighteenth-century poets did not feel obliged to preserve the purity of the traditional genres, and that many poems in the period seem to be shaped by several different generic frames at once. But we should also recognize that in modifying or in combining genres, those poets were probably more aware of the conventions they were violating and the boundaries they were crossing than we are.

One traditional boundary, for example, is that which separates georgic from pastoral. For Virgil there was a clear distinction between the two forms, and we can be reasonably certain that the distinction survived among Renaissance English pastoralists, and among the translators of Virgil, including Dryden. Some modern critics, however, have assumed that the distinction lost clarity in the eighteenth century, perhaps because the narrow stream of classically-inspired pastoral seems to lose itself in the great flood of poetry of natural description. Richard Feingold, for example, has examined The Task within what he calls the “bucolic tradition” and what he sees as that tradition's recurrent concern with the relation of art and nature.⁴ His key term—“bucolic tradition”—tends to blur some important traditional distinctions between the two bucolic forms, the pastoral and the georgic. But there is some reason to believe that English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who knew their Virgil very well, retained a sense of the two genres that had as much to do with spirit as form. Pastoral traditionally concerns the relatively carefree world of shepherds, exemplars of the world of leisure or otium. The pastoral figure's object is pleasure, and this essentially pagan element has to be de-emphasized when the form is taken over by Christian writers. Georgic, on the other hand, concerns the more active world of farming, and the life of negotium, employment, occupation, work. In some respects georgic lends itself better than pastoral to Christian uses, since it shares with Christianity a high valuation of purposive labor. The Bible indeed is a far greater source of georgic imagery than pastoral: laborers in the vineyard outnumber scriptural shepherds. Because The Task does not emphasize instruction in any rural art, Feingold and most other critics have assumed that the poem contains at most a georgic episode, perhaps no more than a mock-georgic interlude, in book 3, entitled “The Garden.”⁵ But if we think of georgic since Virgil as a poem concerned above all with the value of work, we may have a useful way of seeing the wholeness of a poem that Cowper tellingly entitled The Task.

A recent book by Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution, shows how the English poets of the seventeenth century concerned themselves, far more than we have realized, with a world in which labor—even physical labor—was not simply the curse of Adam, or the fate of servants and rustic clowns—but was a basis of human dignity and the foundation for a strong society.⁶ Milton is perhaps the poet of that century who most clearly reorients the attention of the English gentleman from an aristocratic code of honor and heroic deeds to an alternative ethic of painstaking dedication to one's duties and responsibilities, religious, domestic, and civil. The epic virtues are those of a magistrate—boldness and courage, ambition, decisive leadership. The georgic virtues are less spectacular: steadiness, application, endurance, what Adam must learn in Paradise Lost and what Jesus displays in Paradise Regained. Cowper was of course a deep admirer of Milton, and though I would not claim that Cowper consciously set out to write a Miltonic georgic, and indeed cannot claim that he ever used the term “georgic” in describing The Task, I argue that the georgic spirit is the presiding principle of his poem. I suggest further that Cowper went back to Virgil's own Georgics, though his use of the poem is critical rather than reverential, and in some cases even corrective. One means of correcting Virgil is to look to a higher authority—the Bible—and to draw into his poem, by means of subtle allusion, the Christianized georgic world of Milton.

Cowper of course knew Virgil's Georgics, and often quoted from them (presumably by memory) in his letters. More significant is that Cowper seems to have understood what Virgil meant by labor improbus—the unrelenting toil which ultimately conquers all (1.145).⁷ Cowper too knows how “slow / The growth of what is excellent; so hard / T'attain perfection in this nether world” (Task, 1.83-85). “Perfection” may indeed be beyond reach, especially for Cowper, who feared that regardless of his performance in this “nether world,” his ultimate fate was sealed, and would not be altered by deeds no matter how perfect. But unremitting labor might serve the lesser function of occupying the mind. As James King's recent biography suggests, Cowper himself was never so happy, so free from mental anguish, as when he was working steadily, absorbing himself wholly in the task of translating Homer: “My task that I assign myself,” he wrote in 1785 (the year The Task was published), “is to translate forty lines a day. … Perhaps I am occupied an hour and a half, perhaps three hours. … This, you see, is labour that can hurt no man.”⁸ Indeed, given Cowper's religious mania, it is perhaps not unreasonable to speculate that entitling his poem The Task obliquely invoked a world, like Milton's, where God, a severe “task-master,” laid tasks on the poet.⁹ God had (so it seemed) assigned Cowper no task, no necessary work, in this life. The poet longed for a task to be performed, that he might work and thereby satisfy the just demands made upon him. For Milton the word “task” had strongly literary associations—the “noble task” of defending liberty (“To Mr. Cyriack Skinner,” 11), the “sad task” of narrating the fall of man (Paradise Lost, 9.13), the “sad task and hard” of narrating the war in heaven (5.564). Such tasks are heroic; more important, they constitute service and obedience to God's will, and are thus part of what Pope (another important predecessor to Cowper) called “that task, which as we follow, or despise, / The eldest is a fool, the youngest wise.”¹⁰

Cowper's Task begins with an oblique allusion to the end of Virgil's own Georgics and the pseudo-Virgilian proem at the beginning of the Aeneid. Virgil had concluded his Georgics with an implicitly mock-heroic contrast between his own leisurely singing of rural pleasures and great Caesar's thundering wars: “Thus I sang of the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees, while great Caesar thundered in war by deep Euphrates” (4.559-61). In the rejected proem to the Aeneid—lines that may be spurious—Virgil puts pastoral and georgic behind him and turns to epic wars: “Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena / carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi / ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, / gratum opus agricolis; at nunc horrentia Martis” [I am he who once turned my song on a slender reed, then, leaving the woodland, constrained the neighbouring fields to serve the husbandmen, however grasping—work welcome to farmers: but now of Mars' bristling]. Cowper reverses the progress, and turns from great themes to small.

I sing the Sofa. I, who lately sang
Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touch'd with awe
The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand,
Escap'd with pain from that advent'rous flight,
Now seek repose upon an humbler theme;
The theme though humble, yet august and proud
Th' occasion—for the Fair commands the song.

(1.1-7)

Cowper descends from the high moral strains of his 1782 Poems to an apparently humbler song of a sofa, “commanded” to his task by the mighty “Fair.” After Miltonic “advent'rous flight” he seeks “repose” (equally Miltonic, in fact), and hints perhaps that this will be a task that he can accomplish lying down, in literal “repose” upon the sofa.¹¹ While Milton has “escaped the Stygian Pool” of hell on “bolder wing” to sing of heaven (Paradise Lost, 3.13-14), Cowper inverts the direction, and ironically resembles Milton's devils, who seek “repose” in “abject posture” after their dangerous flight (1.319-22). The parodic beginning of The Task, with its facetious tone, should not mislead us into thinking that Cowper is ironically subverting a georgic tradition characterized by earnestness and sobriety. The poem is not simply the result of the task, assigned him by Lady Austen, of writing about her sofa. It quickly moves beyond this genteel domestic assignment to consider the importance of labor, occupation, and employment (all three words recurrent in the poem). At its close Cowper surveys how far he has come. He had begun playfully with a “light task,” dressing the sofa with flowers, “obedient to the fair” (6.1008-1009). But he went on to a more georgic task, from flowers to better fruits, “wholesome, well-digested; grateful some / To palates that can taste immortal truth” (6.1014-15). And his real audience, it becomes plain, is not Lady Austen, or even “the world” (1020) at large, but God, “whose eye is on the heart” (6.1022). His real taskmaster (and model) is not “the Fair” but “the First and Only Fair” (5.675), by whose work the world and man were made, and by whose “labours of love” (5.570) man is transformed “from fool to wise, from earthly to divine” (5.697).

Cowper's georgic poem of course celebrates the life of retirement and “repose.” He is aware of the implicit paradox and, perhaps somewhat defensively, takes pains to assert that the retired life is in fact a life of activity:

How various his employments whom the world
Calls idle; and who justly, in return,
Esteems that busy world an idler too!
Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen,
Delightful industry enjoy'd at home,
And nature in her cultivated trim
Dress'd to his taste, inviting him abroad—
Can he want occupation who has these?
Will he be idle who has much t'enjoy?
Me, therefore, studious of laborious ease,
Not slothful; happy to deceive the time,
Not waste it; and aware that human life
Is but a loan to be repaid with use,
When he shall call his debtors to account
From whom are all our blessings; bus'ness finds
Ev'n here.

(3.352-367)

The passage is thematically central to the pattern I am describing. Employments, industry, occupation, business—this cluster of georgic terms asserts, against the suspicions of the great world, that retirement is not idleness. Time may be deceived or beguiled, but at the same time it must be used, not wasted. Cowper's pompous Miltonism—“Me, therefore, studious of laborious ease”—is a deliberate self-mocking touch, but it sustains Cowper's design of correcting the world's mistaken impressions. Poets are traditionally devoted to ease, otium rather than negotium. Cowper wants to insist that poets are laborers too. At the end of the Georgics Virgil speaks of “flourishing in the arts of inglorious ease” (4.564), a line Cowper knew well, and used as the epigraph for his own poem, “Retirement,” in 1782. Through a kind of bilingual pun, Virgil's studiis florentem ignobilis oti becomes Cowper's “studious of laborious ease, / Not slothful”: an ease not inglorious but laborious, not pastoral but georgic. The emphatic “not slothful” (362) perhaps fends off the fear that “ease” is a sign of moral lapse. Cowper is explicitly not like Milton's Belial, who counsels “ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth” in hell (Paradise Lost, 2.227). And Cowper's seriousness is underlined by the glancing allusion to the Parable of the Talents: life is only loaned to us, and must be repaid “with use” (Cowper puns here on the old term for “interest”).

The employments of the retired life include the tasks performed in the drawing room, from writing poems to “weaving nets for bird-alluring fruit” or “twining silken threads round iv'ry reels” (4.263-64). Though the tasks require little strenuous effort, and the end results may seem more ornamental than useful, Cowper stresses that he sees them as responsibilities laid upon him by those “whom man was born to please” (265). Even the embroidering of a cushion with a floral pattern is a “task,” patiently performed. The pleasing result of “female industry” is “a wreath that cannot fade” (4.156, 165). Cowper's tone is difficult to catch here. On the one hand he is wittily aware of making great things of small; on the other, his appropriation of Isaiah and Peter hints at his hope that those who lead a quiet and decent domestic life are on their way toward receiving a greater wreath, “a crown of glory that fadeth not away” (1 Peter 5:4).

Other employments include the famous labors of the gentleman gardener. These tasks require “skill” rather than “force.” Like the classical husbandman he bears responsibility for the success or failure of the enterprise. The “many cares” of the garden are ultimately his. But he serves primarily as planner and supervisor, making sure that “the hand / Of lubbard labour”—the servants who do the hard work—does not loiter or misapply its “unskilful strength” (3.397-407). Brute force, he says, “may turn the clod, and wheel the compost home,” but “elegance, chief grace the garden shows / … is the fair result / Of thought, the creature of a polish'd mind” (3.637-40). Cowper clearly retains some of the aristocratic prejudice against manual labor that compromises the pure georgic spirit. (I will come back to this point.) When the gentleman retires from his gardening labors, he repairs to the parlor for tea and conversation with his friend and patroness, Mrs. Unwin; his hired hands join the village artisans to drown their weariness in the local alehouse:

                                                            the craftsman there
Takes a Lethean leave of all his toil;
Smith, cobbler, joiner, he that plies the shears,
And he that kneads the dough; all loud alike,
All learned, and all drunk!

(4.474-78)

The gentleman's delights are finer. Because “lubbard labour” is unable to feel a keen pleasure in a well-espaliered fruit tree, the gentleman himself takes personal charge of pruning, and acts the Calvinist role of merciless judge, dooming the weak, distempered, and barren shoots.

More important are the “occupations of the poet's mind” (2.298). Again, poetry is both a difficult task and (for that reason) a source of pleasure. “There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know” (2.285-86). Though “retired” and “stretch'd at ease in Chertsey's silent bowers,” the poet Cowley (like his admirer, Cowper) was “not unemploy'd” (4.727-29). Calm evening's “gentle hours” are gladly devoted to “the poet's toil” (4.262). Whether as gardener or as poet the retired man is engaged in what Cowper (using a venerable European pun) calls “cultivation” (6.189)—of the rural garden, of those arts which make up “cultivated life” (1.679), and finally of himself. His primary task, indeed, is to cultivate, to “improve,” and at least not to leave “unemploy'd” the mind that God gave him (3.368). And when the laboring poet finds a great task, “lights at last / On some fair theme, some theme divinely fair” (6.753-54), such as might be imposed by (and might please) “the First and Only Fair,” then it is less “arduous” to write than not to write. The great theme of book 6, as Cowper's headnote puts it, is “the Restoration of all Things.” “Not t'attempt it, arduous as he deems / The labour, were a task more arduous still” (6.757-58).

Such labors are no curse, or if so, they are “soften'd into mercy” (1.364-65). “The employs of rural life” (3.625) for Cowper are in fact repeatedly associated with health: they bring sound sleep (1.365) as “strenuous toil” brings “sweetest ease” (1.388). Ease is not just the effect of a grateful vicissitude, a pause from labor. The labor itself, as in Milton's Eden, is almost refreshing. The laborer's “spirits” are “prompt to undertake, / And not soon spent, though in an arduous task” (1.400-401). Just as all creation subsists by “ceaseless action” (1.367), so man subsists by labor. “Absence of occupation,” Cowper says in another poem, “is not rest; / A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd” (“Retirement”, 623-24). Work is “pleasant” (3.656), industry is “delightful” (3.356). A life of “constant occupation” is a life “without care” (3.693). Such labor recalls not only the innocent gardening of Adam and Eve in Eden; it is an image of God's own work. The account of growing cucumbers is broken, like God's original labors, into stages. When the greenhouse is completed, “the first labour ends” (3.489), perhaps a subsurface allusion to the refrain in Genesis: “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (1:5). Man's “constant occupation” is an image too of the “ceaseless force” that sustains the universe, God “Whose work is without labour” (6.219, 228).

The end of man's labor is not the traditional georgic end of nation-building. As Feingold has well shown, Cowper has no faith in corporate life.¹² His occupations are self-directed: they can build some order in his own life, or at least keep off despair, and secure “the mind / From all assaults of evil” (3.679-80). The devil, after all, finds work for idle hands and minds. His efforts to gain “triumphs o'er himself” (6.937) win him no epic laurels. This is a Miltonic better fortitude. “His warfare is within” (6.935), and the victory—as in traditional georgic—comes only through the fervent labors of an unfatigued spirit:

                                                                                                    There unfatigu'd
His fervent spirit labours. There he fights,
And there obtains fresh triumphs o'er himself,
And never with'ring wreaths, compar'd with which
The laurels that a Caesar reaps are weeds.

(6.935-39)

With guidance from Milton, Cowper here returns to correct his georgic ancestor, Virgil, whose Georgics began and ended with a tribute to Caesar, wreathed with myrtle (1.28), and the subject of an extravagant “triumph” at the beginning of book 3. Cowper's wreath, once more, is the crown of glory that fadeth not away. By an ironic reversal the unfatigued georgic laborer is the true epic warrior; the military chief is a mere reaper in the fields, and his labor is fruitless, for the laurels he “reaps are weeds.”

To say that Cowper corrects Virgil is perhaps to put it too strongly. For the Georgics as a whole are deeply ambivalent about the world of Caesar that the poem in part celebrates. Virgil presents more than one view of the relation between country virtue and Roman greatness. In the words of one recent critic, rustic life may be seen either as the “source” of Roman strength and virtue, or as an “alternative” to it.¹³ Particularly in the famous passage that concludes the second book, “O fortunatos nimium …” (2.458), Virgil—like Cowper after him—finds in the security and contemplative pleasures of the country a world exempt from the flashing display and furor of the capital. It is to this side of Virgil's Georgics—not the celebration of Roman power—that Cowper is attracted. But where Virgil makes of rustic life what Gary Miles calls an “uncertain ideal,” and finally associates it with a “remote and inaccessible past” in the long-gone Golden Age, Cowper displays some confidence (if not for himself, then for others) that a life of quiet virtue, “more golden than that age of fabled gold / Renown'd in ancient song” (6.996-97), can still be led in Pitt's imperial England.¹⁴

And yet by the end of The Task Cowper even claims—perhaps because he does not wish to sever the traditional georgic link between the sturdy farmer and the health of the state—that the retired man, by doing good works within his humble sphere, “serves his country, recompenses well / The state,” and “in the scale of life / Holds no ignoble, though a slighted, place” (6.968-71). Cowper's implicit claim that as poet he “serves … the state” springs from his grafting of Horace onto Virgil's georgic. Horace in the Epistle to Augustus had argued that the poet “serves the state” [utilis urbi].¹⁵ In Cowper's hands Horace's poet, the retired man (from Horatian tradition), and Virgil's farmer blend into one exemplary figure. But the link between private labor and public good is far less realized than in Virgil. Cowper's retired man is not a producer of food, a dispenser of laws, or a guarantor of liberty. He may indeed appear to others to be only an “incumbrance on the state, / Receiving benefits, and rend'ring none” (6.958-59). Yet the retired man serves his country. Not because the country “stand[s]” by the “skill” of its sturdy farmer-soldiers (6.975), but because the retired man can at least claim that “his follies have not wrought her fall” (6.975-76). And the “state” which Cowper's retired man “recompenses” turns out not to be the civil power at all.¹⁶ It is a higher power, “the state, beneath the shadow of whose vine / He sits secure” (6.969-70). Cowper invokes another georgic metaphor (Tityrus sits under the cover or protective shade of a beech tree at the end of the Georgics), but its strongest associations are biblical rather than Virgilian.

To sit under the shadow of a vine is a common image of comfort or security in the Bible (1 Kings 4:25; compare Song of Sol. 2:3; Jon. 4:5). But Cowper probably has in mind the famous prophecy in Micah of the last days, when God “shall be established in the top of the mountains.” After the familiar words about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, Micah foretells the days when “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it” (4:1-4). Whose “state” can Cowper refer to but that of God, who hides his faithful under the shadow of his wings (Ps. 17:8, cf. Ps. 57:1)? Though far from the world of the court, ministry, and place-men, the retired man too (as the quiet pun brings out) has a “place” in the “scale of life” more important (because by gradual steps it reaches up to God) than any in the great world.¹⁷ “Ignoble” may be one more memory and correction of Virgil's ignobilis oti. For Virgil ignobilis also suggested humble or obscure, for which a poet need not apologize. By Cowper's time the English equivalent “ignoble” was more likely to suggest “worthless” than “humble.” Virgil's retired poet is ignobilis—out of the limelight that properly belongs to Caesar. Cowper won't render that much to the Caesars of the world. His poet is emphatically not “ignoble”—but unjustly “slighted” by the great world, just as the “homely … shepherd's trade” (i. e., the poet's) is “slighted” in Milton's “Lycidas” (65). Indeed, Cowper's line and his image of the ultimately rewarded retired man seems a reworking—with details from Virgil and the Bible—of a famous apostrophe in “Lycidas.” Milton asks a painful question about the uncertainty of earthly fame: “Alas! what boots it with uncessant care [itself a georgic image] / To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade” (64-65). He is answered with reassurance that true fame “is no plant that grows on mortal soil” (78).

The Task emerges from Feingold's analysis as a poem which finds bucolic topics unable to express and apprehend the modern state, almost an anti-georgic.¹⁸ I have tried to suggest, on the other hand, that the poem has a clear georgic design. By redefining labor—with help from the Bible and from Milton—as a virtually spiritual activity, and shifting his attention from the public sphere to the private, Cowper reaffirms, though he significantly modifies, the traditional georgic values of steady dedication to a homely and unspectacular task. And his poetry—quietly allusive, soberly witty, temperately fervent—embodies those values.

Cowper would perhaps be happy if we concluded here, and adopted his perspective on spiritual labor in the private sphere. But it is worth remembering his distinction between such labor and real physical labor, and worth noting what Cowper's spiritual georgic leaves out of account. As a barometer of late eighteenth-century English culture, Cowper registers the power of rural evangelicalism. But he tells us little of the incipient concern for the real laborers in England's fields whose pinched lives begin to be visible in a contemporary poem like Crabbe's The Village (1784) or in the recently rediscovered work of poets like Ann Yearsley.¹⁹

What is more, Cowper's redefined idea of georgic almost conceals the economic base that makes possible the life of retired leisure/labor that he celebrates. Occasionally we glimpse the hand of “lubbard labour.” But for the most part Cowper prefers to look at physical labor from afar. The “clinking hammers” and “grinding wheels” in the village and town are “unpleasing sounds” (1.229-31) which he prefers to escape. He takes more pleasure in beholding the plowman as part of the picturesque scenery, “the distant plough slow-moving, and beside / His lab'ring team that swerv'd not from the track, / The sturdy swain diminish'd to a boy!” (1.160-62). Labor goes on all around him, and makes possible the gentleman-farmer's quiet life, produces and delivers the bread promptly (1.244-45), and supplies his many wants. The “industrious hands” that satisfy his “temp'rate wishes” (1.597-99) are not—for the most part—his own. He is freed for leisurely walks. Thanks to the largesse of a neighboring squire, he has access to a private park (we can be sure its “folded gates” [1.330] do not open to admit the peasant). Even if “Nature's works” are “free to all” (1.434), the finer delights that Cowper praises are not really available to the man who works until sundown. The “pensive wanderer” (1.761) in noontide groves is not, so to speak, a field laborer on his lunch break.

To be fair to Cowper, it must be granted that his rural landscape is not utterly unpeopled (a charge that Collins, Gray, and even Wordsworth do not always escape). The “foddering of cattle” is accomplished not by an unseen hand but by a laborer who carves hay from the stack, “deep-plunging and again deep-plunging oft / His broad keen knife into the solid mass” (5.33-35), and Cowper shows real appreciation for his skill. The “woodman” is observed leaving “the cheerful haunts of men” to wield his axe in “yonder forest drear,” but Cowper is as much interested in the woodman's scampering dog as in the “sturdy churl” himself (5.41-53). The archaism both distances the woodman and places him as a member of a distinctly lower order, equipped by nature to bear his burdens. Indeed, Cowper's “compassion” (4.374) with the industrious poor is checked by the assurance that the rural laborers are “form'd to bear” hard weather (350) and—lucky for them—are “denied / That sensibility of pain with which / Refinement is endu'd” (357-58). So the wagoner feels cold “unimpair'd” (361), and “plods on” (353) with “half-shut eyes, and pucker'd cheeks” (352), more like the beasts that drag the wagon than the sympathizing poet.²⁰ It would be unfair to demand that Cowper find a way to include the world of Crabbe's Village within the georgic confines of The Task. (Crabbe is in fact selective in other ways). But it is worth remembering that Cowper's world of spiritual labor—despite the universalist claims of his evangelicalism—is limited to the few (whether happy few or anxious few is beside the point). The physical laborer is capable at best of the virtues of industry, patience, and resignation, but Cowper's woodman, wagoner, and fodderer do not raise their eyes to a higher state. In this respect Cowper is very much a man of his age and of its dominant conservative ideology. Just as it is the independent landed gentleman who, freed from the limits of an occupation and the lure of the court and city, is qualified to govern and to survey society with authority,²¹ so it is the man of “refinement”—education, leisure, and a comfortable income—who rises through spiritual georgic to an apprehension of divine order.

Notes

1. To William Unwin, 10 October 1784, in Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 2:285.

2. Cowper's poems are cited from his Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Mitford, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934). All further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

3. Paradise Lost, 12.312-14, cited from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1964). All subsequent references to Milton's poetry will be cited from this edition by book and/or line number parenthetically in the text.

4. Richard Feingold, Nature and Art: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1978).

5. Feingold, 159. See also Vincent Newey, Cowper's Poetry (Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 184-85; and John Chalker, The English Georgic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 203.

6. Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985).

7. I cite the Georgics from the Loeb Library edition, Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aenied 1-6 (London: Heineman, rev. ed. 1967). All further references to Virgil will be cited parenthetically in the text. For Cowper's quotations from the Georgics, see Letters and Prose Writing (note 1), 1:297, 324; 2:240; 3:198, 4:440.

8. Quoted in James King, William Cowper (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1986), 208. Cf. “Cowper may well have felt that as long as there was Homer there was life for him. Certainly the prospect of future labors on the project seemed to revive and refresh him at this time” (214).

9. Sonnet 7 (“How soon hath time”), 14. A “task,” as Johnson notes in his Dictionary, is not simply work; it is “imposed by another.”

10. Imitations of Horace, Ep. 1.1.43-44, quoted from The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963).

11. The word “repose” is especially associated by Milton with prelapsarian Eden.

12. Feingold, esp. 155-92.

13. Gary Miles, Virgil's “Georgics”: A New Interpretation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), xi.

14. Miles, 160.

15. Horace, Epistle 2.1 (“To Augustus”), line 124, cited from the Loeb Library edition, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica (Cambridge: Harvard, 1970).

16. The word “recompense” seems odd here. In Cowper's day it was strongly associated with biblical reward and retribution. Is Cowper unconsciously hoping that the retired man—or that he himself—will one day be “recompensed” ? Cf. 3.430-31, where the gardner's summer labors are recompensed with fruits in winter.

17. Cowper perhaps here recalls Milton's “scale of nature” (Paradise Lost, 5.509), where, as Raphael says, “in contemplation of created things / By steps we may ascend to God” (511-12).

18. Feingold, 191-92.

19. Yearsley's Poems on Several Occasions, sponsored by Hannah More, appeared in 1785, and her Poems on Various Subjects in 1787.

20. Even syntax assimilates man to beast. “Forth goes the woodman, … / From morn to eve his solitary task. / Shaggy and lean and shrew'd …” We assume Cowper still refers to the woodman, until he continues: “… with pointed ears / And tail cropp'd short … / His dog attends him” (5.41-47).

21. On this theme, see John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-1780 (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), 33-40.