SOURCE: Heller, Deborah. “Cowper's Task and the Writing of a Poet's Salvation.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 35, no. 3 (summer 1995): 575-98.

I

In the summer of 1764, while a patient at St. Albans Asylum for the Insane, William Cowper underwent a conversion to Calvinist Evangelicalism. During an intense bout of paranoia and self-contempt, he found a faith to save him from despair, a revivalist brand of Calvinism which stressed the absolute efficacy of faith and the uselessness or “filthy rags” of human effort. The keynotes of this theology are sounded in the Memoir Cowper wrote several years later, in which he describes the precise moment of his conversion. He recalls searching the scriptures for “comfort and instruction” and discovering some apt verses in Romans: “Immediately I received strength to believe it. Immediately the full beams of the sun of righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of my justification. In a moment I believed and received the Gospel.”¹ In this episode Cowper emphasizes the miraculous and instantaneous nature of salvation by conversion—the only mode of salvation the Calvinists recognized and an event upon which they placed great importance because a sinner received his full pardon through Christ's blood at this moment. The faith that the sinner receives comes not from his own will or desire, but from outside agency. This faith (“strength to believe”) brings the inner conviction of acceptance by God, which for Calvinists means conviction of election. As long as one maintains this felt conviction, election remains sure; but if the feeling of faith ever falters, the entire edifice of Calvinist salvation may come tumbling down.

In the case of William Cowper, it did indeed come tumbling down. We know from any number of good biographies—and from his letters themselves—that Cowper never renounced belief in the truth of Calvinism, but that he did lose faith in his own election. He had a “fateful dream” in 1773 during a second bout of madness, in which he heard God pronouncing his reprobation (actum est de te, periisti: “It is all over with thee, thou hast perished”). These Latin words may have been nothing more than an unconscious recollection of some Roman comedy Cowper had been reading or knew by heart.² Yet they were not at all amusing to him when he awoke into consciousness and pondered their meaning; indeed, he took them as his spiritual death sentence.³

Thus in 1773 Cowper had stripped from him the spiritual identity he had been given through his conversion some years earlier. Though once he had been saved by amazing grace, his salvation had been somehow revoked. And given the absolute dualism of the Calvinist system, which claims that one is either elected or reprobated, this loss of election amounted necessarily to proof of his reprobation—a state of permanent rejection by God that the tormented self can do nothing to redress. In letters written throughout his life, Cowper will persist in declaring himself a reprobate and in feebly lamenting the powerlessness and pathos of his fallen state. Cowper's Calvinist advisor, John Newton, could not help to free Cowper from the bondage in which Calvinism had tied him, for that would require rejecting Calvinism itself. As long as Cowper subscribed to Calvinism, he was bound inextricably in a psychic knot. He had been denied his Christian salvation, and he was powerless to bend the will of the Father who had withdrawn his blessing.

Yet the salvation that Cowper was not granted in life he seized for himself in his art. It is the thesis of this essay that The Task was Cowper's means to a poetic salvation, poetic in the sense that Cowper made or effected by artistic efforts at least an imaginary bestowal of God's gift of approval. Theologically it was impossible to force God's hand, but poetically Cowper was able to rewrite his life as a chosen “Servant of God,” an Old Testament type which forms and transforms the poetic persona of The Task. The Task tells the story of Cowper's own experience of retirement at Olney, focusing on the development of the poet's employments during his rural seclusion. But Cowper's own life experiences merely supply the materials for writing the persona of The Task. Through the use of typological allusions to the Old Testament and other devices, Cowper constitutes his persona as a man whose works follow a salvific path, leading ultimately to a blessed state, a state prospered by God. The close parallel between Cowper's own life and that of the persona in The Task allows a transference of the persona's success onto Cowper: salvation is bestowed upon the poet at last, if only through poetic wish fulfillment.

James King and others speak of The Task as “spiritual autobiography,”⁴ and I myself used similar language when I stated that The Task “tells the story” of Cowper's life. I have, however, also stated that Cowper fashions spiritual achievements for his persona in The Task that go infinitely beyond the somber facts of Cowper's own spiritual life. In order to maintain simultaneously these two seemingly contradictory ways of speaking, we must precisely define the sense in which The Task is spiritual autobiography. If autobiography means the “writing of one's own life,” where ought we to let the emphasis fall? Is autobiography the writing of one's own life? or is it the writing of one's own life? In The Task the emphasis indeed falls on the writing or poetic shaping of the persona's life out of the raw materials of Cowper's life.

The scriptive or poetic achievement of The Task is best perceived against the backdrop of Cowper's biography, specifically his search for work after his spiritual crisis. As Cowper writes in a letter of winter 1784, he feels that his usefulness, in the church at least, has been rendered null by his reprobation: “Why am I thus? Why crippled and made useless in the church just at that time of life when my judgement and experience being matured, I might be most usefull. Why cashiered and turn'd out of service, 'till … there is no reasonable hope left that the fruit can ever pay the expence of the fallow?” (2:200). In another letter, written about a year after finishing The Task, Cowper catalogues the occupations that he had used to assuage his feelings of uselessness: “I have been emerging gradually from this pit [of despair]. As soon as I became capable of action, I commenced carpenter, made cupboards, boxes, stools. I grew weary of this in about a twelvemonth, and addressed myself to the making of bird-cages. To this employment succeeded that of gardening, which I intermingled with that of drawing … I renounced it, and commenced poet” (2:455). In the poem “Retirement”, written several years before The Task, Cowper again enumerates some of the occupations that exercised him during his rural seclusion. These “pleasures harmlessly pursued” (line 784) are mentioned in a sequence including gardening, landscape painting, and poetry—occupations which, as John Baird has noted, “were all, at one time or another, Cowper's.”⁵The Task shows Cowper's persona engaged in many of the same occupations as those named in “Retirement” and the letters. The difference, however, is that The Task weaves these activities into a shaping narrative that culminates in the persona's salvational triumph. In order to appreciate how the poem achieves this triumph, it is helpful to imagine two axes running through it, one horizontally, and one vertically. Along the horizontal axis Cowper charts his persona's search for useful work: the speaker's employments begin, as we shall see, in relative purposelessness, bog down in failure and frustration midway, and reach assurance and, indeed, exalted status at the end. As the speaker's labors evolve from aimlessness to exalted service, the poem itself develops from the frivolous to the sublime, from mock-heroic to millennial prophecy. Thus what I call the horizontal axis is really a narrating of two histories: that of the poet in retirement and that of the poem he writes. But the ultimate achievement of the poem is due not to these dual narrative lines alone so much as to the vertical line of typological allusion that Cowper cuts through them; for these allusions transfigure the persona into a Servant of God, whose pursuit of tasks becomes his progress through the stages of a life of blessedness.

II

THE TASK: a sign on the title page pointing to what? pointing in what direction? First of all a name, THE TASK is juxtaposed on the title page with A POEM, IN SIX BOOKS. BY WILLIAM COWPER, OF THE INNER TEMPLE, ESQ.⁶ A name, then, without semantic depth, referring to the poem before us, a useful label for the volume in our hands. Yet THE TASK is more than a detachable label like the titulus or tag hanging from a papyrus roll. It is also a signifier with its place at the head of, and forming a part of, the chain of signifiers. Delimited by the definite article, it is at first, perhaps, the specific task imposed upon the poet by Lady Austen: to “sing the sofa.” But the meaning of the signifier slides as the poem unrolls. As the motto on the title page tells us, the task will evolve; it will develop through time: Fit surculus arbor (“the shoot becomes a tree”). Cowper's “Advertisement” further explains how the task of singing the sofa becomes, eventually, the whole poem, the “Volume” bearing Cowper's name on the title page:

ADVERTISEMENT

The history of the following production is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the SOFA for a subject. He obeyed; and, having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a Volume!

The vector drawn from the “trifle” to the “serious affair” is but little weakened by Cowper's self-deprecating gloss on “serious affair”—“a Volume!” nuanced by the exclamation point. The poem enacts this transformation from trifle to serious affair along what I have called its “horizontal axis.” Though the “Advertisement” claims that only the loosest of methods governs the composition of The Task, merely a fortuitously connected “train of thought,” the poem is in fact a carefully contrived apologia for Cowper's life. As the reader pursues the linear chain of the poem's movement—its syntax, as it were, or perhaps “syn-Task”—he may watch, if he looks closely, the subtle shifting of the signifier “task” in its reference to poetic work: from the task of “The Sofa,” through some intermediate tasks, to the high task of Miltonic religious verse, to the culmination of Cowper's lifework—The Task itself. Meanwhile, however, the reader is aware of the progressive development of the persona's depicted life tasks, tasks drawn from and particularized by Cowper's own occupations in retirement. At the poem's conclusion, poetic task and life task converge, as Cowper deftly reasserts his authorial presence, reidentifying his life with the depicted life of his persona:

It shall not grieve me, then, that once, when call'd
To dress a Sofa with the flow'rs of verse,
I play'd awhile, obedient to the fair,
With that light task; but soon, to please her more,
Whom flow'rs alone I knew would little please,
Let fall th' unfinish'd wreath, and rov'd for fruit.

(6.1006-11)

The task of the poem is here represented simply—too simply—as poetic performance, as a roving from “flow'rs” to “fruit.” In truth, the narrative of the task is paralleled by a narrative of tasks, which I have called “life tasks,” and which are represented in addition to the task of writing the poem itself. Thus as we proceed through the poem we have the parallel of a developing life with a developing poem.

To speak, as I have done, of two parallel lines of tasks, is perhaps somewhat misleading, since there is often a mixing of the two species of tasks. The semantic fields of poetic process (the poem's unfolding) and that of life labor (the persona's life evolving) interpenetrate each other promiscuously throughout the poem, and metaphor is usually the tool that permits the shift of registers from poem to life and vice versa. We see such a shift at the beginning of book 3, where Cowper uses an extended simile of traveling not only to describe the progress of the poem but to suggest generally the progress of a life with its vagaries and assumed goals (“His devious course uncertain, seeking home”):

As one who, long in thickets and in brakes
Entangled, winds now this way and now that
His devious course uncertain, seeking home;
Or, having long in miry ways been foil'd
And sore discomfited, from slough to slough
Plunging, and half despairing of escape;
If chance at length he find a greensward smooth
And faithful to the foot, his spirits rise,
He chirrups brisk his ear-erecting steed,
And winds his way with pleasure and with ease;
So I, designing other themes, and call'd
T' adorn the Sofa with eulogium due,
To tell its slumbers, and to paint its dreams,
Have rambled wide. In country, city, seat
Of academic fame (howe'er deserv'd),
Long held, and scarcely disengag'd at last.
But now, with pleasant pace, a cleanlier road
I mean to tread. I feel myself at large,
Courageous, and refresh'd for future toil,
If toil await me, or if dangers new.

(3.1-20)

The simile of wandering is here more than a mere vehicle for describing the progress of poetic style. It exists in excess of its metaphoric function and produces the supplementary notion of a wayfarer “seeking home,” suggesting, in addition to poetic progress, the career of a life, even a life-as-pilgrimage. At the same time, the notion of “task” has been shifted, via the travail of the road, from a single task—to sing the Sofa—to a more generalized notion of work (“future toil, / If toil await me”) or search for work. Work and wandering have been conjoined, appearing both as a metaphor for the poem's progress and, subsisting as metaphorical supplement, inscribing the narrative of the persona's life development.

The themes of work and wandering, shuttling back and forth between the register of poetry and the register of life, provide a kind of motive force in the poem—a mimesis of temporal structure simulating not only one-thing-after-another but also “project” or expectation of the future. As the persona strides across the poem, pausing occasionally to assess his position (e.g., “But truce with censure. Roving as I rove, / Where shall I find an end, or how proceed?” [4.232-4]), or as he takes up task after task, discarding one activity and beginning another, we get the impression of time passing and a life unfolding. The reader has the illusion of witnessing the persona's life unfold, so to speak, from the inside, viewing the process from within the lived flow of time. He does not view that developing life from the great height of omniscience, nor look back on it from the privilege of retrospect; instead, he has the illusion of watching the persona proceed through the minutiae of everyday life, working and wandering and resting—and constantly commenting on and appraising his activities.

Allowing, then, for the interpenetration and mixing of registers, the reader may follow the speaker traveling through the diachronic movement of the poem—its horizontal axis, as I have called it. After the speaker concludes in book 1 that the Sofa best suits “the gouty limb” (line 107) and the “relaxation of the languid frame” (line 81), he begins walking and does not cease his constant motion until the end of The Task. In book 1 he strides randomly across landscapes, taking the reader with him as companion: “Descending now (but cautious, lest too fast)” (line 266); “We mount again, and feel at ev'ry step / Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft” (lines 271-2); “The summit gain'd, behold the proud alcove / That crowns it!” (lines 278-9); “And now, with nerves new-brac'd and spirits cheer'd, / We tread the wilderness” (lines 350-1). A great walker—as was Cowper himself—the speaker enjoys the sheer freedom of muscular movement, that most primitive exertion of the will. Philosophizing, he rationalizes his practice:

By ceaseless action all that is subsists.
Constant rotation of th' unwearied wheel
That nature rides upon maintains her health,
Her beauty, her fertility.

(lines 367-70)

But here begins a critical meditation linking motion, activity, and work that will accompany us throughout the horizontal movement of the poem. In the lines just preceding, the speaker has been describing “the thresher at his task” and concludes:

                                        see him sweating o'er his bread
Before he eats it.—'Tis the primal curse,
But soften'd into mercy; made the pledge
Of cheerful days, and nights without a groan.

(lines 363-6)

Work, the merciful “primal curse,” is thus conjoined with the concept travel/activity (both are examples of the “ceaseless action” that provides the health of the universe), and so begins the persona's discursive discussion of work and the consequent hierarchization of tasks culminating in the writing of religious poetry in book 6.

The persona's “discursive” meditation on work helps produce the poem's reality effect of a life-being-lived: we seem to witness the speaker reasoning about the relative value of different tasks. Just as importantly, the meditation contributes to one of the major themes of the whole poem—the persona's concern to vindicate the usefulness of his life and tasks. Thus, as the discursive meditation on work proceeds, “ceaseless action” alone appears not good enough: an activity must be weighed for its usefulness. Even the poet's favorite activity—walking—must be scrutinized. As the discussion of work develops, so the description of the poet's walking takes on additional nuances. In book 1 he walked for sheer pleasure, without goal or purpose. He is indeed still walking in books 5 and 6 (entitled, respectively, “The Winter Morning Walk” and “The Winter Walk at Noon”), but the physical activity is no longer its own sufficient justification. Walking for health might now be described by the persona's exclamation as he watches the lengthened shadows of his legs move along a wall in the early morning of book 5: “Prepost'rous sight! the legs without the man” (line 20). A pair of legs moving unattached through space are indeed as preposterous as the proverbial decapitated chicken. It is the man who should be the object of our judgment, and the use he makes of his walking the basis of our evaluation. By book 6 the concept “walking” has been transformed into one of meditative, “sheltered walk” (6.Argument):

                                                                                                                        I again perceive
The soothing influence of the wafted strains,
And settle in soft musings as I tread
The walk …
.....No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.

(lines 67-76)

At the close of book 6, the walking poet will have been assimilated to the “solitary saint,” who “Isaac like” “Walks forth to meditate at even tide” (lines 948-9). Thus the favored activity of the persona, walking, will be welded to his special task—meditation and its product, meditative poetry.

Cowper's primary challenge was to “vindicate” “the retired man … from the charge of uselessness,” as he puts it in the Argument of book 6. Between books 1 and 6, he presents all the activities of the retired man—even the most trivial ones—as steps on his persona's life journey, stages in the realization of his hero's destiny. At first the persona is wandering aimlessly, not in pursuit of any obvious goals. Eventually, in book 2, he settles on the work of writing satire. But while he finds delight in the process of writing satiric verse (“There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know” [2.285-6]), he realizes also that poetry, unless useful, is vanity (“But is amusement all? Studious of song, / And yet ambitious not to sing in vain, / I would not trifle merely” [2.311-3]). The problem with satire is that it can subdue no vices (2.320); it can only treat superficial foibles. Therefore, although it has been a stage in the persona's journey, it is not an adequate activity in itself and so is rejected. At the beginning of book 3, Cowper's persona represents himself as one about to make a new beginning, free and striding on the open road, ready to introduce a new and more congenial poetic theme. He portrays himself as energetic, refreshed, ready for labor:

                                                                                I feel myself at large,
Courageous, and refresh'd for future toil,
If toil awaits me, or if dangers new.

(3.18-20)

Since book 3 illustrates so well the persona's discursive argumentation about work and displays in such detail the issues involved in his self-vindication, it will be worthwhile to examine the argument of that book more closely.

The poet's personal bliss in rural retreat, the personal paradise to be found in the Garden, is the ostensible subject of book 3. But there is more. The burden of the book's argument is to prove that God ordained rural retirement to be the setting most conducive to “the cause of piety, and sacred truth, / And virtue” (lines 707-8). Thus, expatiating on the charms of “domestic happiness,” the speaker declares, “Thou art the nurse of virtue” (line 48). The troubling question, however, will be, in what does virtue consist? Is it simply Candidean cultivation of one's own garden, or does it require a turning outward toward the uses of mankind? He enumerates the advantages of retirement repeatedly, almost compulsively—

O, friendly to the best pursuits of man,
Friendly to thought, to virtue, and to peace,
Domestic life in rural leisure pass'd!

(3.290-2)

But after a defensive description of such advantages (3.352-60), he is reminded of a question he had asked himself in book 2: “But is amusement all?” (line 311). The enjoyments he enumerates—friends, books, gardening, writing, work around the home, excursions in nature—may indeed invite the accusation of idleness, if idleness can mean “lack of meaningful activity.”

The requirement of meaningful work must therefore be answered when the poet turns to his own case. Lines 361-78 of book 3 reveal the twists and turns of the persona's rationalizations. He is anxious to prove, first, that country retirement does not mean idleness or sloth: “Me, therefore, studious of laborious ease … bus'ness finds / Ev'n here” (lines 361-7). He further knows that God has entrusted each of his servants with talents from which he expects rich returns (lines 363-6). The poet's peculiar talents lie in the use of his mind (“sedulous I seek t'improve … The mind he gave me” [3.367-9]). He must drive it “To its just point—the service of mankind” (3.372). Here, then, is the crux: he must reconcile his turn inward to the inner garden with the impetus outward to the service of mankind. He appears to accomplish this in lines 373-8, but his success is only a rhetorical victory. The poet has sensibility (“interior self” and “heart”); he has “mind” and uses it; and he seeks “a social, not a dissipated life”: therefore, he concludes, he has “business” ; he “feels himself engag'd t'achieve … a silent task.” But what is this “silent” task? It cannot be the sounds of his poetry. It turns out instead to be the search for pearls of wisdom, “sought in still water, and beneath clear skies” (3.382). The poet, in his turnings, has not really progressed beyond the self-centered enclosure of his garden. Nor do the following lines (386-675), describing the activities of “the self-sequester'd man,” bring him beyond his trivial gardening pursuits. He prunes trees, sows flowers, and—in a mock-heroic account—grows laborious cucumbers. Defending his literary effort against unfriendly critics, he mocks those who would call his song, like the cucumbers, “the fruit / Of too much labour, worthless when produc'd” (3.564-5). Defensive, indeed, is the best description of the poet at this stage in the poem. He has not succeeded in proving the usefulness of his retirement; instead, it is a mere retreat from the world, a silent reveling in the joys of peace and quiet.

Nowhere in book 3 does Cowper's poet name a positive usefulness which the retired man extends to mankind. His only contribution is to “draw a picture of that bliss” (3.694) for mankind, even though he knows they will not take advantage of the blessings of the countryside. He furthermore asserts that God himself ordained the country as the scene of virtue, truth, and piety:

I therefore recommend, though at the risk
Of popular disgust, yet boldly still,
The cause of piety, and sacred truth,
And virtue, and those scenes which God ordain'd
Should best secure them and promote them most.

(3.705-9)

This is to win his point by fiat. He has brought in deus ex machina to justify his rural retreat. Still, we remember his earlier motions toward claiming the ultimate social usefulness of his life in the country. The proof of such usefulness will have to await the developments of book 6, where meditative walking forth in solitude will coincide with the supremely praiseworthy work of writing prophetic verse. But the ultimate resolution of the tension between social usefulness and rural retirement will not be the result of a dialectical argument. It will not be the syllogistic conclusion of discursive reasoning. Instead, it will be imposed on the horizontal argument of the poem by the crossfiber of the vertical dimension. (Let us use the metaphor of the warp and woof of a text.) As the poetic shuttle shoots the filling yarn through the growing web, and as the fabric of the poem grows line by line, eventually a pattern emerges as the whole is completed. The vertical threads, as I have already suggested, are provided by the transformative powers of biblical typology, specifically the “Servant of God” type that Cowper imposes on his persona. Meanwhile, the horizontal threads of the poem present a succession of tasks and a hierarchical evaluation of those tasks. As it would take too long to summarize this horizontal argument book by book, we must let our discussion of book 3 suffice as illustration. Let me merely emphasize that the discursive argument does not effect the salvational triumph of the poem. It serves rather as a means to unfold the persona's life (and Cowper's) in all its quotidian particulars while giving at the same time the impression of progress. Traveling, movement, succession of tasks, temporal progress of the poem: these all convey the impression of a life unfolding through time. What is required for the final salvific achievement of the poem is some device for showing the holiness of that life in its everyday, homely detail. That device is provided by the vertical strands of the web, the typological crossweave.

III

The metaphor of a vertical dimension to the poem opposed to a horizontal dimension finds its utility in its suggestion that one chain of signifiers—the “horizontal” one—can be given added depth or be shifted in meaning by the insertion of certain “vertical” elements into it. Perhaps the metaphor of the loom is still the most apt: vertical threads provide essential elements of a pattern that grows to completion as horizontal line is added to horizontal line. Such “vertical threads” are woven into the fabric of The Task in the form of typological markers. Though their influence extends throughout The Task, two main insertion points anchor the pattern: 3.108-33 and 6.747-1024. These two strategically placed passages superimpose on the persona's life the identity of Servant of God.

The first insertion point occurs at 3.108, where an abrupt utterance of personal confession jars the reader after some sixty lines of diatribe against the corruption of contemporary mores:

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg'd, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had himself
Been hurt by th'archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal'd, and bade me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few associates, and not wishing more.
Here much I ruminate, as much I may,
With other views of men and manners now
Than once, and others of a life to come.
I see that all are wand'rers, gone astray
Each in his own delusions; they are lost
In chase of fancied happiness, still woo'd
And never won.

(3.108-27)

Many critics have noted the intensely personal tone of this passage, even choosing, like me, the word “confession” to describe its contents.⁷ Vincent Newey speaks of the “transparency of its ‘confession,’” seeing in the passage one example of the “immediate presence … of authorial consciousness and self-consciousness” that he believes informs the poem as a whole.⁸ There is more than a grain of truth to this. The passage does evoke the impression of authorial confession, of the “real” author dropping his mask and revealing an element in his personal history. However, I must insist that this impression of “transparency” and “immediate presence” is above all a textual construct—albeit an extremely complex one. Whether or not Cowper did in fact use The Task as a fetishized and easily manipulated embodiment of his own life—as I believe he did—it is nevertheless too simple to speak of “Cowper's [direct] identification with the stricken deer,” as Newey does.⁹ The very definition of a literary text requires that the poet be absent in his poem. His “presence” in that absence, which I concede exists as impression, is indeed a mysterious epiphenomenon that needs to be discussed in terms of textual effects.

What makes the Stricken Deer passage stand out as the “personal” confession of the author is its abrupt shift of tone away from the satiric voice that immediately precedes it to a sudden and unexpected voice of pathos. This new voice appears as a dropping of the Horatian, satiric mask that immediately precedes it and as a deviation from the tradition-laden Virgilian voice with which the poem begins: “I sing the Sofa. I, who lately sang / Truth, Hope, and Charity,” etc. (1.1-2).¹⁰ But besides the pathetic tone, the passage appears to roll away the stage props of the poet-in-retirement-singing-his-song and to reveal something about the condition of the author before the performance began. The real reason for retirement is that the author has been wounded by the world; and the real nature of the retirement may be best explained by comparing it with a state of exilic sacrifice.

Readers often identify the Stricken Deer passage as autobiographical because the satiric mask is almost immediately resumed in a deliberate gesture, as the poem takes up again a tone of diatribe, this time against “men of science.” The brief glimpse behind the scenes lets us believe that we have seen the real Cowper out of costume, and it leads us to posit an autobiographical dimension, albeit a concealed one, for the entire poem. But this posited autobiography is but half of the significance of the Stricken Deer passage. The special power of these lines lies in their use of typology to transform the entire poem. Over against the “life” revealed in the passage stands the “writing” of that life—or its “rewriting”—in biblical types. As I shall show, the Servant of God type, which is inserted here, has the power to shift our interpretation of the persona's evolving life to a higher register, thus leading to a “transcendent” view of the poet-in-retirement which effectively reveals him as the chosen of God.

Paul Korshin, the only writer I have found who even addresses the matter of typology in The Task, cites Psalms 42:1 as the probable source of Cowper's imagery here; and he emphasizes the “personal typology” of these lines,¹¹ thus stressing the autobiographical dimension. An allusion to that passage in Psalms (“As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God”), with the use of the deer or hart as a type of Christ, is surely to be found here. We can go a step further, however, by recognizing that the passage actually evokes the more general type of the Servant of God, of which the deer or hart symbol is itself a species. The defining characteristic of the deer in the poem and his common feature with Christ is his quality as “stricken.” This, I believe, alludes to a different biblical context (the Servant Song at Isa. 52:13-53:12) and evokes the typology of the Servant of God found there. I quote the portion of the Servant Song that Cowper makes verbal and conceptual allusion to:

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted … All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all … for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

Isa. 53:3-8 (my italics)

Cowper uses certain keywords and paraphrases to evoke the Isaianic passage as a whole: “stricken,” “all gone astray,” and, as a distributive gloss on “all gone astray,” “each in his own delusions.” Add to this his use in the passage of the typology of the suffering Christ (who is the supreme antitype of the Servant of God), and we may confidently read in Cowper's lines a literary application of Servant of God typology. Furthermore, as we shall see, the use of the Servant type at 3.108-27 is but the left-hand bracket of a set of parentheses that is closed in book 6, where we find extensive echoes of Isaiah at 6.759-816, and where the entire Servant Song at Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is reiterated structurally at 6.906-50.

The Servant of God is an Old Testament type who finds his greatest antitype in the person of Christ. Some of his important characteristics are as follows:

• (1) He resembles the sacrificial victim or scapegoat, in that he suffers for the sins of the people. (Under this aspect he is sometimes referred to as the “Suffering Servant.”)
• (2) He has redemptive powers, though they are often for a time hidden.
• (3) He is despised by the very people whom he has been sent to save.
• (4) He is God's chosen and will be glorified in the end.

Though the Servant type is fulfilled by many biblical figures (the patriarchs, the prophets, Moses, David, and Job have all been designated as the Servant of God),¹² the most important—and, indeed, defining—instance occurs at Isaiah 52:13-53:12, which is the longest and most elaborate of the four “Servant Songs” found in the Book of Isaiah.¹³ Knowledge of the type—with the characteristics I have listed above—is so deeply embedded in Western consciousness, that we are quite familiar with the type, even if we do not happen to know the name scholars have attached to it. It is this implicit knowledge of the typological code that Cowper was relying on to bring home to his readers the significance of the Stricken Deer passage. Indeed, it is this implicit knowledge of the code that makes readers attribute to the passage the pathos that, by the code, informs it. Even readers not familiar with the Isaianic passage in question would be able to read Cowper's lines correctly, just by virtue of their cultural “competence.”

The suffering aspect of Cowper's speaker (“I was a stricken deer,” etc.) and the comparison with the suffering Christ mark him as the type of the Servant of God. As yet, however, only the aspect of the suffering Servant has been applied to him. The redemptive powers (like Christ's: “With gentle force soliciting the darts, / He drew them forth, and heal'd and bade me live” [3.115-6]) have not yet been applied. The effect, then, of the Stricken Deer within its context, is to suggest a reinterpretation of the persona's retirement as a life of exile, occasioned by some unnamed wound. The ones who wounded him are, however, the same ones who wounded Christ: “There was I found by one who had himself / Been hurt by th'archers” (3.112-3, my italics). The archers are the “world,” the “many” in their unremitting wickedness, the ones whom Cowper's speaker rebukes in his satiric diatribe. It is their wickedness that has occasioned the rural retreat. Cowper's persona has therefore been excused for his retirement, but he has not yet been justified by his redemptive work. As we have seen, his satiric labors are useless for redeeming the world; yet it is just these satiric labors that he resumes after the interruption occasioned by the Stricken Deer passage.

When viewed as one link in the horizontal chain of the poem, this passage can be read as merely one more attempt to prove to the world the acceptability of rural seclusion. Read this way, the Stricken Deer confession appears of a piece with the various other argumentative tactics undertaken by the speaker to vindicate himself in the face of a world he presumes to be hostile to him. The persona announces his identity metaphorically to give a special spiritual luster to his retired life.¹⁴ However, to see only the local function of the Stricken Deer is to miss its special role as a colorful vertical thread constituting an essential part of the text's pattern as a whole. As is often the case with typology, the use of the Servant type here establishes not merely a relationship of similarity in this or that respect between two compared things; rather, other qualities of identity besides the immediate point of comparison are transferred from the type to the antitype. In the case of Cowper's Stricken Deer, the point of contact between the persona (the antitype) and the Servant of God (the type) is the aspect of suffering. However, all the other aspects exist in the antitype in potentia, awaiting future realization. When these other aspects are in fact realized in book 6, we have the luxury of seeing in retrospect the expectation that was set up, but remained unfulfilled, at 3.108-27.

Though, as I have said, we need not refer Cowper's passage back to the Isaianic text in order to appreciate his use of Servant of God typology, there is no better place to contemplate the type in all its features than Isaiah 52:13-53:12. There we find the other features besides suffering that I have already mentioned in my list above: redemptive powers, chosenness, and glorification. The future glorification of the Servant is the point on which the Servant Song at Isaiah 52:13-53:12 begins: “Behold, my servant shall deal prudently [RSV: “prosper”], he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high.” Gerhard von Rad comments on the passage as follows: “The unusual aspect of this great poem is that it begins with what is really the end of the whole story, the Servant's glorification and the recognition of his significance for the world. This indicates, however, one of the most important factors in the whole song—the events centring on the Servant can in principle only be understood in the light of their end. It is only thus that all the preceding action can be seen in its true colours.”¹⁵ As von Rad's remarks suggest, the type of the Servant of God is more than simply an individual with more or less static characteristics; he is rather hero of a story (histoire) with certain elements that can be rearranged in any particular telling of the story (discours). The end of the story—glorification—is essential for understanding all other events of the story. In fact we might say that this promise for the future is a necessary constituent of the type of Servant of God. The suffering servant will be vindicated by his future glorification: it will be proved that he is really the chosen Servant of God. The proof is projected into the future. In any application of the Servant typology, therefore, the vindication of the suffering servant must eventually be realized, or the type remains incomplete. This necessity can produce, as it were, the narrative tension of unfulfilled prophecy. In the case of The Task, we might say that Cowper's persona has been handed, at the “stricken deer” passage, one half of a symbolon, or broken coin, but must produce the other half in order to prove that he is truly God's chosen servant. The “stricken deer” typology implies both halves of the story: exaltation and glory as well as lowliness and suffering. The reinterpretation of the humble Servant as chosen of God thus not only exists in potentia at this stage of the poem, but it begins to color our reading of the “horizontal” progress of the poet's humble life in retirement. Already at this stage, the reader is being schooled to reinterpret the life and travails of the persona as resembling the unappreciated—even despised—life of the Servant of God, whose humble life conceals his real glory as God's chosen instrument. The informed reader will even begin to see traits of the to-be-exalted Isaianic prophet: compare, for example, 3.261-2 (“All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades / Like the fair flow'r dishevell'd in the wind”) with Isaiah 40:6-7. Yet, as I have suggested, the growing pattern supplies first hint, then ambiguous interpretation, then completed picture.

The “tension of unfulfilled prophecy,” as I have called it, is built into the typology of the Servant of God in the aspect of hiddenness.¹⁶ The servant's name was named before he was born (Isa. 49:1); then God hid him “in the shadow of his hand” (Isa. 49:2), and those whom he was sent to redeem despised him and “esteemed him not” (Isa. 53:3); yet God has pledged his glorification in the future (Isa. 49:3: “Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified”), when the Servant shall fulfill his prophetic mission (Isa. 49:6: “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth”). In short, the Servant must be humbled, even despised; he must for a time be unrecognized as the chosen of God: such is the hiddenness built into his character.

The true identity of the Servant must, however, be revealed. Cowper's persona, who appeared as a Suffering Servant in book 3, is finally revealed in book 6 to have the other characteristics of the Servant of God: redemptive powers and glorification by God. The first evidence of his true identity is met at 6.759-817, where the poet erupts into full-blown prophetic utterance. His song of the New Jerusalem (6.759-817) echoes the prophetic Book of Isaiah in so many particulars that it might, indeed, be called a New Isaiah.¹⁷ This is a fitting fulfillment of the Servant's redemptive potential, for the Servant in Deutero-Isaiah, as suffering mediator and prophet,¹⁸ was destined both to proclaim and to help bring in the renewed Jerusalem. Yet we must look to the poetic use that Cowper makes of his Isaianic intertext. He uses typology to suggest not that his persona is a second Isaiah, or an Isaiah redivivus, but that he is like Isaiah. Just as Isaiah in his office as prophet fulfilled his special service to God, so Cowper's poet, in translating Isaiah's prophecy into millennial terms, is also serving God by writing the New Isaiah. But, while this prophetic display provides a specimen of the persona's poetic powers, we still have not been given a “proof” that the humble retired man is really, in all particulars, the blessed and chosen of God. That occurs at 6.906-50.

Cowper's poet has argued ceaselessly for the usefulness of his tasks, mundane as they seem. Yet no amount of discursive argument has succeeded. It is only through typology that Cowper manages to prove his persona's identity as God's chosen servant. As Paul Korshin puts it, typology can be used as an “evidentiary technique” in secular literature “for purposes of proof, demonstration, and convincing … [T]he writer who introduces typological figuralism into a work of literature is proving something, but he or she is not going about it in a direct way.”¹⁹ Cowper's “proof” is indeed indirect. After suggesting the climactic fulfillment of the Isaianic prophecy with his song of the New Jerusalem, Cowper comes back down to this premillennial “shatter'd world” (6.823). He calls for Christ to return and to rule over this fallen world. Then all things will be renewed:

Custom and prejudice shall bear no sway,
That govern all things here, should'ring aside
The meek and modest truth, and forcing her
To seek a refuge from the tongue of strife
In nooks obscure, far from the ways of men.

(6.838-42)

In this fallen world the Truth, like Cowper's persona, must “seek a refuge … / In nooks obscure, far from the ways of men.” This is a message expounded already in book 3—that rural retirement is the best setting for virtuous works of contemplation. Yet what we have here in book 6 is more than mere repetition of the sentiment, “God made the country, and man made the town” (1.749). The retired man is here vindicated through typological “proof” as his hiddenness is shown to conceal the blessed life of the Servant of God. The “proof” begins at 6.906:

(1) 6.906-7: He is the happy man, whose life ev'n now
                                                                                          Shows somewhat of that happier life to come.
(2) 6.915-8: The world o'erlooks him in her busy search
                                                                                          Of objects, more illustrious in her view;
                                                                                          And, occupied as earnestly as she,
                                                                                          Though more sublimely, he o'erlooks the world.
(3) 6.924-9: Therefore in contemplation is his bliss,
                                                                                          Whose pow'r is such, that whom she lifts from earth
                                                                                          She makes familiar with a heav'n unseen,
                                                                                          And shows him glories yet to be reveal'd.
                                                                                          Not slothful he, though seeming unemploy'd,
                                                                                          And censur'd oft as useless.
(4) 6.940-50: Perhaps the self-approving haughty world,
                                                                                          That as she sweeps him with her whistling silks
                                                                                          Scarce deigns to notice him, or, if she see,
                                                                                          Deems him a cypher in the works of God,
                                                                                          Receives advantage from his noiseless hours,
                                                                                          Of which she little dreams. Perhaps she owes
                                                                                          Her sunshine and her rain, her blooming spring
                                                                                          And plenteous harvest, to the pray'r he makes,
                                                                                          When, Isaac like, the solitary saint
                                                                                          Walks forth to meditate at even tide,
                                                                                          And think on her, who thinks not for herself.

In the course of this passage, the Christianized beatus ille of country retreat is transformed into a “solitary saint” who intercedes for the sinners of the world. He has indeed become the Servant of God, fulfilled in his glorious work. Even the structure of this passage resembles that of the Servant Song at Isaiah 52:13-53:12:

• (1) The presentation of the Servant (6.906-7) = Isaiah 52:13 (“Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high”).
• (2) The hiddenness and neglect of the Servant (6.915-8) = Isaiah 53:3 (“and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not”).
• (3) The prophetic powers and knowledge of the Servant justify many (6.924-9) = Isaiah 53:11 (“by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many”).
• (4) The Servant's intercession for the sins of many (6.940-50) = Isaiah 53:12 (“and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors”).²⁰

I would not want to push this structural parallel too far. It shows, however, the analogy—in all essential features—between the Servant of God and Cowper's “happy man” (who, though presented in the third person, is precisely a representative of the persona and, by extension, of Cowper). The final step in Cowper's typological “proof” is the curious “Isaac like, the solitary saint / Walks forth to meditate at even tide” (6.958-9). This allusion to the language of the KJV Genesis 24:63 (“And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide: and he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming”) is a very complex application of typological as well as linguistic detail. Isaac is in fact a type of the Servant of God, but Cowper uses him here for a very particular purpose. It is Isaac's specificity as obscure figure, who is also carrier of the blessing, that recommends him for Cowper's use here.

The narrative of Genesis 24:1-67, in which the verse Cowper alludes to is embedded, tells the story of Abraham sending his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac. The remarkable feature of the narrative, according to Gerhard von Rad, is the way the trivial, seemingly unimportant details of the story are shown to be managed in all their particularity by the providence of God.²¹ Similarly, Isaac's actions in the narrative, though slight and seemingly commonplace, also take their place in the chain of God's providence. Isaac does not appear as actor in the story until the verse I have cited above (Gen. 24:63), and then his actions are strangely unmotivated and arbitrary: he goes out to meditate at eventide and happens to see the caravan bringing his future wife, Rebekah. The circumstantial character of these details can be explained philologically by the assumption that the entire narrative was written as a “connecting piece” to fill a gap in the already existing patriarchal stories.²² Be that as it may, it was precisely the haecceity of Isaac's walking forth to meditate at eventide and happening to meet his destiny (in the form of Rebekah, future carrier of the seed of Abraham) that recommended this passage of the KJV to Cowper. Isaac's walking forth, his meditation—these are the details which tie him to the ambulatory, contemplative poet-in-retirement; but his blessedness, hidden in seeming blandness—this is the detail that is especially relevant to Cowper's persona and completes the proof of his special status as Servant of God. Thus the persona of The Task has been handed the second half of the symbolon promised in book 3, and the typological “proof” is complete.

In conclusion, I argue that, just as the persona is in many ways Cowper's poetic double, so the blessed status imputed to him has also been imputed to Cowper by means of the poem. Cowper's dilemma in real life was that his lot—so he was unalterably convinced—was reprobation. No amount of work, no amount of arguing about work, could secure him God's approval. Yet his imaginative double is shown, from the omniscient perspective of the completed poem, to have been God's chosen from before his birth. Through the device of paralleling life and poem, of paralleling task and Task, Cowper has been able to present a God's-eye view—sub specie aeternitatis—of his persona's life as a whole, completed as the poem is completed. From that perspective, we are able to see the parts in uno and thus realize what we were unable to discern from the horizontal, “temporal” progress of the poem—that the retired poet-persona is in fact one of God's elect. As Cowper reinserts himself into the Task's close as the poem's author, we learn that his real goal has been to reverse God's sentence of reprobation and to create a poem—and a life—prospered by his maker's approbation:

But all is in his hand whose praise I seek.
In vain the poet sings, and the world hears,
If he regard not, though divine the theme.
'Tis not in artful measures, in the chime
And idle tinkling of a minstrel's lyre,
To charm his ear, whose eye is on the heart;
Whose frown can disappoint the proudest strain,
Whose approbation—prosper even mine.

(6.1017-24)

Notes

1. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979-84), 1:39. All references to Cowper's prose and letters hereafter will be to this edition, by volume and page, and will appear in the text parenthetically.

2. This combination of the passive perfect participle of ago, meaning “finished, all up with” (see Oxford Latin Dictionary: ago, 21c), and a form of the perfect of pereo used as hyperbolic exclamation meaning “to be ruined, done for” (see OLD: pereo, 5) is frequent in Roman comedy: e.g., Terence Ad. 324, periimus; actumst; Terence Heaut. 564, acta haec res est: perii; Terence Eun. 54, actumst, ilicet, peristi. Concordances to the Vulgate show no instances of actum (in any number, case, or gender) with this meaning.

3. This was the dream, Cowper explained later to John Newton, “before the recollection of which, all consolation vanishes, and, as it seems to me, must always vanish” (2:385). In another letter Cowper comments enigmatically to Newton: “That a Calvinist in principle, should know himself to have been Elected, and yet believe that he is lost, is indeed a Riddle, and so obscure that it Sounds like a Solecism in terms, and may bring the assertor of it under the Suspicion of Insanity. But it is not so, and it will not be found to be so” (1:341).

4. James King, William Cowper: A Biography (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 155-6. See also Vincent Newey's second chapter (pp. 24-49) in Cowper's Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1982), where Newey analyzes the confessional and psychodramatic elements of Cowper's poetry.

5. The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, vol. 1:1748-1782 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 543. I use this edition when quoting poems written before 1782.

6. From a facsimile of the title page of the 1785 edition, reproduced in William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 4th edn. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 128. All references to Cowper's The Task appear parenthetically in the text, by book and line number, and refer to Milford's edition.

7. See Newey, p. 96. Also see Martin Priestman, Cowper's “Task”: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), p. 92.

8. Newey, p. 96.

9. Newey, p. 95, alludes here directly to Northrop Frye's seminal article on the Age of Sensibility, where Frye would see the Stricken Deer as an instance of “metaphor … conceived as part of an oracular and half-ecstatic process, [where] there is a direct identification in which the poet himself is involved” (Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963], p. 137; first published in ELH 23, 2 [June 1956]: 144-52).

10. Dustin Griffin has pointed out that “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”: see his article “Redefining Georgic: Cowper's Task,” ELH 57, 4 (Winter 1990): 865-79, 869.

11. Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650-1820 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), p. 360.

12. Gerhard von Rad notes this fact in his Old Testament Theology (hereafter OTT), vol. 2: The Theology of Israel's Prophetic Traditions, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 258 n. 35.

13. Most scholars identify Isa. 42:1-4, Isa. 49:1-6, Isa. 50:4-9, and Isa. 52:13-53:12 as Servant Songs and attribute them to a writer they designate as Deutero-Isaiah. For a good account, see von Rad, OTT, 2:250-62. A more exhaustive discussion is available in W. Zimmerli and J. Jeremias, The Servant of God, trans. H. Knight et al., rev. edn., Studies in Biblical Theology 20 (Naperville IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1965).

14. This is the reading Martin Priestman makes of the passage: “Here the growing move to establish a ‘humble man’ persona is justified in terms of the Christian conversion of weakness into strength, and the old conflict between labour and ease begins to be resolved in the paradoxical ‘gentle force’ of the Christian experience” (pp. 92-3). Priestman's notion of the “humble man” persona shows that he has responded to the Servant of God typology, even though he has not recognized it.

15. Von Rad, OTT, 2:256.

16. On the idea of hiddenness of the Servant of God, consult Zimmerli and Jeremias, p. 60.

17. Some echoes are the following: (1) There will be no violence. Animals lose their enmity to each other and to man: 6.773-7 (“The lion, and the libbard, and the bear / Graze with the fearless flocks”); cf. Isa. 11:6, Isa. 66:25. The mother watches unconcerned as the infant plays with the serpent: 6.777-82; cf. Isa. 11:8. (2) The mountain-tops sing and shout: 6.793-5; cf. Isa. 42:11, Isa. 55:12. (3) The brightness of the New Jerusalem, to which kings and gentiles will come: 6.800-2; cf. Isa. 60:1-5 and Isa. 60:19-20. (4) Gentiles will serve the people of Israel: 6.804-17, esp. 804-5 (“Thy rams are there, / Nebaioth, and the flocks of Kedar there”); cf. Isa. 60:7 (“All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee”) and Isa. 60:3-16. (5) Walls of Salvation and gates of Praise: 6.808-10; cf. Isa. 60:18. (6) The end of barrenness and a new fruitfulness: 6.764-8; cf. Isa. 54:1-3.

18. On the Servant as prophet, see von Rad, OTT, 2:259.

19. Korshin, p. 391.

20. It is interesting that Talmudic interpretation understands the “intercession” named in this verse as prayer: B. Sotah 14a: “‘He interceded for the transgressors’ (Isa. 53:12): for he implored mercy for the transgressors of Israel that they might return in penitence; by this ‘intercession’ is meant nothing other than prayer” (cited in Zimmerli and Jeremias, p. 65 n. 283).

21. See Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev. edn. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), pp. 259-60: “Characteristic [of the narrative of Gen. 24:1-67] is the dispensing with external miracles. The story does not say, ‘God smote Pharaoh,’ ‘he opened Hagar's eyes,’ ‘he visited Abraham,’ ‘rained fire from heaven,’ ‘called to Abraham from heaven,’ etc. Here no causal connection is broken, but the miracle takes place in a concealed, quite unsensational management of the events. For in our narrative the actual field of activity for this guidance is less the external, spatial world of things, but rather the inner realm of the human heart in which God works, mysteriously directing, evening, and removing resistance.”

22. Von Rad, Genesis, p. 259. That would explain the circumstantiality and blandness of Isaac's role in the narrative.