SOURCE: Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “William Cowper: The Heightened Perception.” In The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets, pp. 165-206. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

As a writer of hymns, William Cowper is more renowned than [Christopher] Smart; his contributions to the Olney Hymns have been admired and sung for almost two centuries. If Smart's hymns gain much of their power from a vision turned freshly outward, Cowper's (to which Smart was a subscriber) depend as heavily on the quality of perception directed within. Several commentators have observed that a personal record of psychological distress and recovery is perceptible in his sequence of hymns. The hymns, says Lodwick Hartley, “represent various stages and aspects of the poet's struggle for faith: an ebb and a flow, but withal a progression, in this one respect not unlike the struggle for faith found in a more elaborate but not more poignant manner in In Memoriam.”¹ Kenneth MacLean suggests that the unique quality of Cowper's hymns depends on the fact that they “are poems in religious, in primitive fear,” an emotion “little considered by poets of Cowper's time.”² And Maurice Quinlan observes that, in Cowper's poetic production as a whole, “even a brief consideration of [his] imagery reveals that he was one of the most subjective of English poets.”³

What is particularly striking about Cowper's hymns as compared with his other work is their essentially slight dependence on imagery: their strength derives almost entirely from the quality of their psychological insight, and their attempts to translate that insight into images are rarely and incompletely successful. Key images identified by critics⁴ include the worm, the thorn, the tempest, the fig tree, and fetters. To this we may add imagery of light, of battle, and of streams or fountains. All are commonplaces of Evangelical discourse; most are common to religious language in general. And, upon examination, few seem truly essential to Cowper's record of religious agony occasionally modified by the faint hope of salvation.

One of the most moving of the Olney Hymns is number IX, “The Contrite Heart.”

The Lord will happiness divine
          On contrite hearts bestow:
Then tell me, gracious God, is mine
          A contrite heart, or no?
I hear, but seem to hear in vain,
          Insensible as steel;
If ought is felt, 'tis only pain,
          To find I cannot feel.
I sometimes think myself inclin'd
          To love thee, if I could;
But often feel another mind,
          Averse to all that's good.
My best desires are faint and few,
          I fain would strive for more;
But when I cry, “My strength renew,”
          Seem weaker than before.
Thy saints are comforted I know,
          And love thy house of pray'r;
I therefore go where others go,
          But find no comfort there.
Oh make this heart rejoice, or ache;
          Decide this doubt for me;
And if it be not broken, break,
          And heal it, if it be.

This is almost bare of figurative language; the only clear metaphor is “Insensible as steel”—the broken heart of the final stanza seems not metaphorical but literal. The hymn's power derives largely from its very bareness, and from the conviction with which the poet describes and analyzes his own emotional tension. Conflict is the essence of the poem. Initially, there seems to be a clash between the conventional—the automatic, easy assurance of the first two lines—and the personal: the bewilderment expressed in the succeeding two lines, underlined by the fact that they address a conventionally “gracious” God. Then Cowper redefines the opposition between conventional and personal as one between the expected (the speaker should “hear” the word of God) and the actual (he hears in vain). He is literally “of two minds”: one weakly “inclin'd” toward God; the other, more forceful, “Averse to all that's good.” Willing to go through the prescribed motions, the sufferer is constantly brought up short by awareness of his own feelings: he thinks himself inclined to love God, but feels averse to good; he cries, conventionally, “My strength renew,” only to feel his own weakness; he knows that “saints” love church, does what they do, but feels the lack of resultant comfort.

The Donnean appeal of the final stanza is fully justified by the exposition that precedes it. It is an appeal that emotion resolve conflict—not knowledge or even faith: God can “decide” the speaker's doubt only by making him feel intensely and unambiguously. The extreme economy of the final two lines helps to make them climactically moving. The poet's heart is unavoidably passive: it either is or is not broken; the stress on passive verb forms (increased by the use of be as the final rhyme word) emphasizes the human helplessness which is so often Cowper's theme. In contrast, only God is capable of meaningful action: He can “break” (the strong physical connotations of the word increase its power, suggesting the possibility that the will of God could shatter the whole personality) or “heal” all breaks, all human maladies; and breaking as well as healing may be a mode of salvation—through the restoration of feeling.

This evocation of God as all-powerful, but apparently strangely unwilling to use His power, and of man as forced by his own divided state into a condition of helpless passivity, is central to Cowper's thought. The same ideas emerge frequently in his other hymns, but rarely with as much energy and conviction as in “The Contrite Heart.” Here is another presentation of the same problem:

My God, how perfect are thy ways!
          But mine polluted are;
Sin twines itself about my praise,
          And slides into my pray'r.
When I would speak what thou hast done
          To save me from my sin,
I cannot make thy mercies known
          But self-applause creeps in.
Divine desire, that holy flame
          Thy grace creates in me;
Alas! impatience is its name,
          When it returns to thee.
This heart, a fountain of vile thoughts,
          How does it overflow?
While self upon the surface floats
          Still bubbling from below.
Let others in the gaudy dress
          Of fancied merit shine;
The Lord shall be my righteousness;
          The Lord for ever mine.

(No. XI, “Jehovah Our Righteousness”)

Once more, the hymn's theme is the nature and destructiveness of the divided human spirit. This time Cowper concentrates on how good impulses can turn into their opposites: prayer into sin, praise into “self-applause,” “Divine desire” into impatience; the heart, traditionally the repository of gentle feelings, is actually “a fountain of vile thoughts.” Yet the final stanza somewhat smugly asserts the poet's superiority to others because he recognizes his own inability to achieve virtue and therefore relies solely on the goodness of God.

This conclusion is logical enough: the rational content of the poem consists of an elaboration of the opening two lines, and the concluding stanza defines an attitude toward the facts the poem has described. But that attitude, although logically plausible, contradicts the emotional emphasis of the stanzas that precede its statement. One may object to the imagery of serpent and fountain, but its emotional purport is clear: it insists upon self-disgust as the necessary consequence of man's awareness of his sinful nature. To deny that self-disgust in the conclusion exemplifies the very weakness pointed to in the second stanza: “I cannot make thy mercies known / But self-applause creeps in.” Although self-awareness is the subject of the hymn, there is none in the resolution. The disdain for less knowledgeable “others” implied by gaudy, the easy assurance of the pronouncement, “The Lord for ever mine”—these are far from the sense of doubt and questioning earlier conveyed.

The most moving stanzas are the second and third, most specifically concerned with the nature of inward contradiction, most direct in their statement of the problem. Their paucity of imagery also distinguishes them: “that holy flame” is the only clear metaphor. (“Creeps in,” in the preceding stanza, has undeveloped metaphoric implications.) This rather commonplace image exists in dramatic conjunction with expression of a very different sort: the holy flame of divine desire reveals itself to be simply impatience, and one perceives the relative pretentiousness of the metaphor when the quality it refers to receives a different “name.” The problem of using language properly is implicit in all but the final stanzas of this hymn: the sinner's self-examination is largely examination of the difficulty of expressing in words any inner integrity he may have. Sin contaminates the words of prayer; the effort to “speak” God's praises turns to self-applause; the name of divine desire becomes the name impatience.

Partly because the poem's concerns are mental (or spiritual) and verbal problems, the concreteness of sin conceived as serpent is disturbing: twining and sliding are motions too physical for the context. On the other hand, when Cowper treats sin simply as spiritual fact, in the second stanza, its force is considerably greater. The heart as “fountain of vile thoughts” is momentarily impressive, but as the image is elaborated its details become so concrete and specific as to remove stress from the main point. We may even find ourselves lost in contemplation of how and why the “self” manages to float on the surface of its own heart. The image is vivid, but its meaning becomes shadowy; the relation between the self and the heart is both obscure and grotesque.

The danger of grotesquerie is often imminent for Cowper because of his singular lack of tact in converting his ideas to images. Norman Nicholson may argue that “Praise for the Fountain Opened” (“There is a fountain fill'd with blood”) makes us “aware of rituals even older than the Old Testament: of the dying god of the fertility cults and of primitive symbols that probe deeply into the subconscious mind,”⁵ but the argument seems singularly irrelevant to the immediate effect of the hymn, which, on non-evangelical readers, is likely to be shocking but not illuminating.

There is a fountain fill'd with blood
          Drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
And sinners, plung'd beneath that flood,
          Lose all their guilty stains. …
E'er since, by faith, I saw the stream
          Thy flowing wounds supply;
Redeeming love has been my theme,
          And shall be till I die.

The effort at fruitful paradox is unsuccessful because the sheer physical specificity of the image, with its insistence on the source of the blood in veins (and later wounds) is so intense as to overpower its meaning in Christian tradition. Cowper's frequent references to the blood of Christ make it clear that he conceives it not as an image but as a symbol: what it stands for is of course immeasurably more important than what it is. Yet since the poet insists on reminding us in some detail of what precisely it is, readers less tradition-steeped than he are likely to have difficulty making the transition from image to meaning. “Comfortable thoughts arise / From the bleeding sacrifice,” observes another hymn (number VIII, “O Lord, I Will Praise Thee”); it is difficult to imagine anyone but Cowper composing such a couplet. The adjective bleeding presumably reminds him of the symbolic import of Christ's sacrifice; for the reader, it turns a relatively abstract noun into a sharp and perhaps unpleasant image. The attempt to evoke a Christian paradox by speaking of comfortable thoughts fails; the paradox is too easy to be convincing.

The most vivid single example of Cowper's lack of control of his images is the final hymn of his Olney series, which systematically turns the natural world into a series of emblems for Christ. This can hardly be what Hugh Fausset meant when he maintained that “of all the hymns which Cowper wrote, … those come nearest to pure poetry in which God is invoked through Nature.”⁶ The final stanzas are typical:

What! has autumn left to say
Nothing of a Saviour's grace?
Yes, the beams of milder day
Tell me of his smiling face.
Light appears with early dawn,
While the sun makes haste to rise,
See his bleeding beauties, drawn
On the blushes of the skies.
Ev'ning, with a silent pace,
Slowly moving in the west,
Show an emblem of his grace,
Points to an eternal rest.

(no. LXVII, “I Will Praise the Lord at All Times”)

The grotesque conjunction of “the blushes of the skies” and “his bleeding beauties” is the most startling element in these stanzas, but the flatness of the first one quoted, the padding of its opening lines, the anticlimax of its conclusion, are also characteristic of Cowper the hymn-writer at his worst. Although the implied personification of this stanza is thematically appropriate, in the second stanza the personification emphasizes the awkwardness of the emblematic treatment, and in the final stanza it is simply irrelevant: how does evening conceived as a person “point to an eternal rest” in any way importantly different from that of evening as a physical phenomenon? This is poetry voulue with a vengeance, justifiable only by reference to its purpose, not to its effects. One recalls Dr. Johnson's strictures on metaphysical imagery: “the force of metaphors is lost when the mind by the mention of particulars is turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that from which the illustration is drawn than that to which it is applied.”⁷ Cowper's images, in his hymns, frequently seem to have a sort of fatality, to call one's attention inexorably to the “original” rather than the “secondary sense.” And his imagery is often “metaphysical” in two ways: its references, although they may purport to deal with the realm of concrete actuality, really concern only the realm beyond the physical; and the images often embody “the most heterogeneous ideas … yoked by violence together.”⁸ Unfortunately Cowper at his most “metaphysical” resembles John Cleveland (“my pen's the spout / Where the rain-water of mine eyes runs out”) more than John Donne; his extravagances, traditional though they often are, are imperfectly controlled, and likely to alienate rather than to attract the reader.

Yet the imagery of these hymns, when it is less extreme, is strangely revealing. Most deeply-felt of Cowper's images of the sinner's state seem to be those of storm and of battle. God may be a pilot in the storm (Hymn XXXVIII), or He may actually calm the storm (Hymn XLI); He may control the course of battle and supply the weapons (IV, V), or guard the city against besiegers (XIV), or brighten the Christian's armor in answer to prayer (XXIX); when the satanic “foe” takes the guise of bird of prey, God becomes a sheltering bird, protecting His children beneath His wings (XXIV). Only in the last of these functions, though, does God seem vividly present to the poet's imagination. Cowper's reiterated imagery of light (his favorite emblem of God) and of streams and fountains is more convincing. His most typical positive adjectives and nouns (calm, pleasant, cheerful, peace, comfort) suggest the state of restored innocence for which he, as a Christian, yearns, a state emblemized by the calm cheer of light, the steady flow of the fountain.

The conjunction of these facts is suggestive; two stanzas from Hymn LVIII, “The New Convert,” hint their significance:

No fears he feels, he sees no foes,
No conflict yet his faith employs,
Nor has he learnt to whom he owes
The strength and peace his soul enjoys.
But sin soon darts its cruel sting,
And, comforts sinking day by day,
What seem'd his own, a self-fed spring,
Proves but a brook that glides away.

The polarities of Cowper's universe are here suggested and partly described. On the one side is the realm of “conflict.” The new convert may postpone awareness of it, but he cannot avoid its actuality; he will ultimately be forced to “see” the foes which have existed all along; his comforts will “sink” as inevitably as the brook glides away. Conflict implies depletion of human resources; it involves a falling away from the state of “strength and peace,” of enjoyment, calm, cheer, which is Cowper's most potent vision. He dreams, too, of a never-exhausted fountain of grace, as he dreams of, and believes in, a divine source of spiritual light. But faith and perception seem, in this hymn at least, fundamentally opposed: faith temporarily protects a man from “seeing” what is to be seen; as the power of sin counteracts that of faith, he comes to realize that the inexhaustible spring is only a transient brook. In some of the most convincing hymns Cowper's perceptions of nature support him in his non-rational conviction of the essential hostility of the universe he inhabits. Yet his fundamental effort in all his poetry was to justify, and thus to retain, his dream of idyllic peace, in which he might return to the child-like state of the new convert.

In the hymns, by their very nature, Cowper's religious conviction dominates his poetic gifts. It is not necessary to agree with Hugh Fausset that the poet's life and work demonstrate the unalterable and fundamental opposition between his poetic impulses and his religious bias (“Throughout his life Cowper's allegiance was disastrously divided between poetry and religion.”⁹); one may still see that the hymn form emphasizes a dichotomy which may elsewhere disappear. In his most successful poetry, Cowper's concern with art and his preoccupation with morality unite—despite the fact that his own utterances on his poetry occasionally suggest a drastic separation between them, insisting even that all artistic devices must be a means for moral instruction. “My principal purpose,” he wrote to the Rev. John Newton, of The Task, “is to allure the reader, by character, by scenery, by imagery, and such poetical embellishments, to the reading of what may profit him.”¹⁰ Newton was far more interested in Cowper's spiritual development than in his artistic achievement; the poet's statement of his intent may have been colored by his sense of what his mentor expected of him. But his sense of a responsibility to make his poetry “useful” emerges elsewhere as well. “I can write nothing without aiming at least at usefulness,” he explained to the Reverend William Unwin: “it were beneath my years to do it, and still more dishonourable to my religion.”¹¹

One reason for Cowper's insistence on the didactic function of poetry seems to have been his conviction that his contemporaries subordinated matter to manner. An important subject of “Table Talk” is the deterioration of value implicit in the fact that modern standards of poetic excellence stress technique rather than content: “Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ, / The substitute for genius, sense, and wit” (ll. 542-543). Cowper insists that poets must be judged by their subject matter:

To dally much with subjects mean and low
Proves that the mind is weak, or makes it so. …
The man that means success should soar above
A soldier's feather, or a lady's glove;
Else, summoning the muse to such a theme,
The fruit of all her labour is whipt-cream.

(ll. 544-545, 548-551)

Yet Cowper's notion of the poet's proper subject matter was by no means limited to the promulgation of religious doctrine; he had also an idea of imaginative truth. His scorn for “mere matters of fact” is worthy of a nineteenth-century “Romantic”: “I do not know,” he writes to Newton, “that a poet is obliged to write with a philosopher at his elbow, prepared always to bind down his imagination to mere matters of fact.”¹² And his concern for the substance of poetry did not prevent him from being deeply aware of the demands and resources of technique, considered in isolation from content. The struggle for technical dexterity offered a sort of salvation for him. In a touching letter to Newton, Cowper dilates upon his religious despair, describing himself as engaged in “continual listening to the language of a heart hopeless and deserted” and therefore as unfit for conversation about theological matters. He admits, however, that he is able to write verse about subjects he cannot discuss in talk or in written prose. The reason is that “The search after poetical expression, the rhyme, and the numbers, are all affairs of some difficulty; they amuse, indeed, but are not to be attained without study, and engross, perhaps, a larger share of the attention than the subject itself. Persons fond of music will sometimes find pleasure in the tune, when the words afford them none.”¹³ Cowper was much concerned with the “tune” of his poetry in its very specific aspects. “To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic—to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an exemplary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.”¹⁴ This is, at least in its opening phrases, such an ideal as Wordsworth was to enunciate, and Cowper appears to have pursued it assiduously.

Yet Donald Davie is surely right in maintaining that Cowper's “work is far more the consummation of one tradition than the prelude to another.”¹⁵ Mr. Davie points out that the Augustans in general, like Wordsworth, insisted “that the poet had a duty to the spoken language. … But for them this requirement, this duty laid upon the poet, was one among many, others being the observance of decorum, the need for compactness, and metrical felicity” (p. 188). Cowper's adverbs in the passage quoted above (harmoniously, elegantly) indicate his concern with decorum and “felicity.” The extent to which his poetic principles corresponded to those of his contemporaries and predecessors emerges even more vividly in his ideal of “perspicuity.” “Blank verse, by the unusual arrangement of the words, and by the frequent infusion of one line into another, not less than by the style, which requires a kind of tragical magnificence, cannot be chargeable with much obscurity,—must rather be singularly perspicuous,—to be so easily comprehended. It is my labour, and my principal one, to be as clear as possible.”¹⁶ Again, six years later: “Only remember, that in writing, perspicuity is always more than half the battle: the want of it is the ruin of more than half the poetry that is published. A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning, because nobody will take the pains to poke for it.”¹⁷ Years before, Fénelon had written, “We shou'd use a simple, exact, easy Stile, that lays every thing open to the Reader, and even prevents his Attention. When an Author writes for the Publick, he shou'd take all the Pains imaginable to prevent his Reader's having any.”¹⁸ The goal, and the sense of audience which determines it, remain precisely the same at the century's end as at its beginning. The most authoritative critics of Cowper's own time were unwavering in their advocacy of perspicuity as a prime—perhaps the prime—poetic virtue. Lord Kames exposes the logic of their view: “communication of thought being the chief end of language, it is a rule, That perspicuity ought not to be sacrificed to any other beauty whatever.”¹⁹ Blair echoes him with greater elaboration and even more emphasis: “Perspicuity, it will be readily admitted, is the fundamental quality of Style; a quality so essential in every kind of writing, that, for the want of it, nothing can atone. … This, therefore, must be our first object, to make our meaning clearly and fully understood, and understood without the least difficulty.”²⁰

For twentieth-century readers, trained to value complexity as an index to poetic merit, such an ideal may seem to promise a dull and obvious sort of poetry. These adjectives, however, do not describe Cowper's best poetic achievement (any more than they describe much of the other poetry written in the service of the same ideal). One may theorize that Cowper was wiser as a poet than as a commentator on poetry, that he did not actually attempt to achieve the goals to which he pays lip service. But the goal of perspicuity itself implies a more complicated critical perception than one may at first realize, for perspicuity can only be achieved through simultaneous awareness of the demands of form and of content: indeed, it specifically implies a union of these concerns. Style, Hugh Blair pointed out, “is a picture of the ideas which rise in [an author's] mind, and of the manner in which they rise there; and, hence, when we are examining an author's composition, it is, in many cases, extremely difficult to separate the Style from the sentiment. … Style is nothing else, than that sort of expression which our thoughts most readily assume.”²¹

The style most readily assumed by Cowper's thoughts, in The Task for example, is fluent and deceptively simple. “I always write as smoothly as I can,” he explained to Joseph Johnson; “but … I never did, never will, sacrifice the spirit or sense of a passage to the sound of it.”²² On the other hand, he scorned a poet “Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force” (“Table Talk,” l. 683) and articulated a poetic ideal involving both form and content:

Fervency, freedom, fluency of thought,
Harmony, strength, words exquisitely sought;
Fancy, that from the bow that spans the sky
Brings colours, dipt in heav'n, that never die;
A soul exalted above earth, a mind
Skill'd in the characters that form mankind …

(“Table Talk,” ll. 700-705)

This passage on the poetic character develops an elaborate simile of the poet as resembling the sun:

Like his to shed illuminating rays
On ev'ry scene and subject it surveys.

(ll. 712-713)

It was not a new comparison: Daniel Webb, for example, had pointed out that “poetry is to the soul, what the sun is to nature; it calls forth, it cherishes, it adorns her beauties.”²³ Yet as an instance of Cowper's poetic technique and as a statement of conviction, this description of the poet's gifts is important. Its insistence on metaphors from nature (the rainbow, the sun) is more than accidental: the best examples of Cowper's successful and quite individual fusion of the claims of form and content characteristically develop from his concern with natural imagery. The intellectual progressions recorded in The Task depend heavily on the implications of images often presented quite unemphatically.

Cowper's letters sometimes expressed his worry that The Task might not immediately reveal its coherence. In a letter to Unwin he supplied his most detailed account of what he considers himself to have achieved in the poem. His defense of his own achievement rests on his expressed belief that his work demonstrates independence of spirit (in its use of his own experience as the sole basis for descriptions both of human and terrestrial nature, and in its “numbers”), authenticity of feeling and, he strongly implies, a rather more “regular” plan than may be immediately apparent. The explanation is worth quoting in full:

My descriptions are all from nature: not one of them second-handed. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience: not one of them borrowed from books, or in the least degree conjectural. In my numbers, which I have varied as much as I could (for blank verse without variety of numbers is no better than bladder and string), I have imitated nobody, though sometimes perhaps there may be an apparent resemblance; because at the same time that I would not imitate, I have not affectedly differed.

If the work cannot boast a regular plan (in which respect however I do not think it altogether indefensible), it may yet boast, that the reflections are naturally suggested always by the preceding passage, and that except the fifth book, which is rather of a political aspect, the whole has one tendency: to discountenance the modern enthusiasm after a London life, and to recommend rural ease and leisure, as friendly to the cause of piety and virtue.²⁴

Cowper here suggests that the unity of The Task derives from its consistent recommendation of country over city life, its insistence that “God made the country, and man made the town” ; but he explicitly excepts the “political” fifth book from the general unity of the whole. Yet the fifth book, too, fits into a more subtly articulated pattern of unity than Cowper ever explicitly claimed, a unity derived largely from the reiteration and elaboration of certain sorts of imagery and reference. Examination of the first book—which contains Cowper's announcement of his intentions in the poem along with certain well-known passages of natural description—and the fifth—largely concerned with political and theological issues—may suggest the nature of that unity.

Book I, entitled “The Sofa,” begins with a mock-heroic account of the evolution of the sofa. With a rather heavy-handed piece of levity Cowper announces that, having previously sung “Truth, Hope, and Charity,” he now proposes to “seek repose upon an humbler theme” (l. 5). The justification for such a concern is merely that “the Fair commands the song” (l. 7); in an accompanying note the author explains the origin of the poem in the arbitrary and fanciful suggestion of Lady Austen. In the succeeding history of the sofa's development, occasional references suggest the possibility of some allegorical connection between the creation of sofas and the creation of poems. Both may be “employed t'accommodate the fair” (l. 73); both may be based on plans simple or elaborate; both may use shepherds or flowers as decoration (see ll. 35-38). And both attain excellence only as a result of slow, hard labor (ll. 83-85). Such connections are merely hinted; their significance emerges gradually.

The transition from consideration of the sofa to presentation of the poet's experience of the natural world involves a rejection of the indoor life associated with diseases resulting from “libertine excess” (l. 106). The speaker, who prefers the outdoors, recounts his memories of the sights and sounds of the country (ll. 109-364); these lead him to reflections on their significance which occupy most of the rest of the first book. The visual perceptions he offers are organized in “scenes.”²⁵ The value of these, the real point of their inclusion, seems to be their effect on the observer rather than any inherent meaning.

          scenes that sooth'd
Or charm'd me young, no longer young, I find
Still soothing, and of pow'r to charm me still.

(ll. 141-143)

Scenes must be beautiful, which, daily view'd,
Please daily.

(ll. 177-178)

          Now roves the eye;
And, posted on this speculative height,
Exults in its command.

(ll. 288-290)

The observer is more important than the phenomena he perceives. In a revealing sequence, Cowper discusses a small cottage which he has named “the peasant's nest” and romantically yearned to inhabit. Considering the possibilities more carefully, he realizes that life in such rural isolation would offer far too many hardships, and concludes

          thou seeming sweet,
Be still a pleasing object in my view;
My visit still, but never mine abode.

(ll. 249-251)

To make external reality into a series of pleasing objects in his view seems to be part of Cowper's goal; a partial justification for this procedure is that it does no harm: “the guiltless eye / Commits no wrong, nor wastes what it enjoys” (ll. 333-334).

The reduction of nature to an object of aesthetic perception implies the possibility of a close relation between nature and art; this relation is a significant part of Cowper's subject, although his concern with it sometimes emerges only through his choice of metaphors. His description of rural scenes frequently insists, explicitly or implicitly, on the fact that nature provides “works of art” for contemplation. Like many eighteenth-century poets, Cowper often perceives landscapes as spatially organized like paintings, but he seems more aware than most of what he is doing. A typical passage is full of indications of spatial relationships: there, here, there, far beyond. But it also expresses the perceiver's conscious—or almost conscious—pleasure in having discovered a point of view from which nature and people in the natural world can be considered as purely aesthetic phenomena.

Thence with what pleasure have we just discern'd
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!
Here Ouse, slow-winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er
Conducts the eye along its sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlook'd, our fav'rite elms,
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut;
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds.

(ll. 158-171)

The sturdy swain, visually diminished to a boy, therefore need not be considered as a suffering, striving human being. The pleasures of perspective make it unnecessary to contemplate hard realities. (Cowper elsewhere in The Task demonstrates some capacity to participate imaginatively in the difficulties of peasant life. He does so clearly from a sense of duty; the pleasure of contemplating peasants depends on thinking of them as children, or as figures in a landscape). Similarly, the cattle, “sprinkled o'er” the spacious meads, are elements of composition, not real animals; even the “lab'ring team” is described with primary emphasis on its participation in a visual pattern (“swerved not from the track”). The Ouse is significant because, like a river in a painting, it can conduct the eye along its sinuous course and thereby “delight” the perceiver. The final metaphor of the stream “inlaying” the vale “as with molten glass” sums up many implications of the passage. The visual joys of nature are thoroughly analogous to those of art; to see the river as resembling a stream of molten glass is to assert its place in an ordered aesthetic whole. This is nature tamed and methodized in a particularly significant way, nature made comprehensible through analogy, subordinated to the aesthetic needs of the observer.

The scenes Cowper describes frequently have this sort of neatness, orderliness—frequently, but by no means always. The first book, however, describes the natural universe almost entirely from the point of view of the connoisseur of art, whose eye orders even the relative confusion of the forest.

Nor less attractive is the woodland scene,
Diversified with trees of ev'ry growth,
Alike, yet various. Here the gray smooth trunks
Of ash, or lime, or beech, distinctly shine,
Within the twilight of their distant shades;
There, lost behind a rising ground …

(ll. 300-305)

Once more we have the here-there organization; Cowper asserts confidently, “No tree in all the grove but has its charms” (l. 307), and then specifies with sharp visual detail the individual attractions of each, providing a brilliant objectification of that Augustan ideal of “order in variety” hinted by the opening lines of the passage. He can perceive the panorama of hill and valley between wood and water as “a spacious map” (l. 321) with no implied deprecation of its beauty: the fact that it is describable in terms of human achievement suggests its praiseworthy orderliness. The effect of this reference to nature as a map is at the opposite pole from that of Smart's “All scenes of painting crowd the map / Of nature,” which dramatizes the poet's impression of an overflowingly rich universe, in which the distinction between the works of God and those of man becomes finally irrelevant. Cowper's metaphor describes a world in which the human need for perceptual order is dominant.

“The love of Nature, and the scene she draws, / Is Nature's dictate,” Cowper observes (ll. 412-413) in one of his most explicit uses of the analogy between nature and art. The purpose of the analogy is to insist on the superiority of nature to art:

          Strange! there should be found, …
Who, satisfied with only pencil'd scenes,
Prefer to the performance of a God
Th' inferior wonders of an artist's hand!
Lovely indeed the mimic works of art;
But Nature's works far lovelier.

(ll. 413-421)

Cowper offers a standard argument for the greater loveliness of nature: painting pleases only the eye, “sweet Nature ev'ry sense” (l. 427). But this is only a superficial justification for a preference which is in fact the key to the structure and meaning of the first book and in a sense of the poem as a whole.

The more profound significance of the poet's belief in the aesthetic superiority of nature to art emerges only gradually, although it is implicit even in the early natural descriptions. Immediately after his direct statement that nature's works are lovelier than man's—in the same verse paragraph—Cowper begins exploring the aesthetic principle of contrast which had interested Thomson and Akenside. The prisoner, the invalid, the sailor deprived of sight of land: these appreciate the “feast” spread by nature (l. 433) more than can men to whom that feast is constantly available. (In the case of the sailor, longing for the beauty of nature brings about his destruction: looking into the ocean he sees “visions prompted by intense desire” [l. 451], visions of the fields he has left behind; seeking those fields, he plunges to his death. The destructive agent is not nature but his own imagination. The dangers of fancy are an important subordinate theme of The Task.) Earlier, Cowper had pointed out the principle of contrast operating in other areas: nature herself subsists by constant change (ll. 367-384); man gains the greatest goods through alternation of activity and rest. “Measure life / By its true worth, the comforts it affords,” the poet commands (ll. 396-397); then one perceives that only through contrast can genuine pleasure be achieved.

The greatest pleasure for Cowper is unquestionably aesthetic contemplation, contemplation as an observer. Actual participation in life is dangerous and debilitating; life can become “A peddler's pack, that bows the bearer down” (l. 465); men cling to it although it is essentially meaningless, long for society through mere dread of solitude. Cowper's images of all but peasant life are characteristically images of deprivation and desperation. To the horrors of the urban life which, through its very gaiety, “fills the bones with pain, / The mouth with blasphemy, the heart with woe” (ll. 504-505), the poet opposes, once more, his vision of nature as essentially designed for human contemplation:

The earth was made so various, that the mind
Of desultory man, studious of change,
And pleas'd with novelty, might be indulg'd.

(ll. 506-508)

The principle of change and contrast in nature seems now to exist to fulfill man's aesthetic needs: man may become bored with individual “prospects,” but other prospects always exist; he may contemplate landscapes interrupted by hedges which provide visual variety; the shapeless gorse offers “ornaments of gold” (l. 529) made more pleasing because opposed to the “deform'd” (l. 527) bush itself.

In the last third of the first book, nature as aesthetic object is not so important. The organization of episodes now begins to seem relatively random; yet subterraneously the same theme remains dominant: the theme of nature's importance as an object of contemplation and a source of the comforts life affords, its superiority in these respects to human art and artifice. We learn about crazy Kate, whose insanity results from an over-active fancy (ll. 534-556); then about the gypsies, lazy and immoral, who none the less enjoy “health and gaiety of heart” (l. 587), direct results of their contact with nature. Then comes, rather surprisingly, an extended passage of praise for civilization (ll. 592-677), in the course of which Cowper considers the limitations of the “noble savage.” Finally the book moves into its lengthy denunciation of cities (a denunciation which, however, painstakingly accords credit to urban achievement) and its ultimate praise of the superiority of country life (ll. 678-774).

The need to record the glories of civilization seems to come, in the context, from recognition of the fact that man is, after all, by necessity, a being who must act as well as contemplate. In the first two-thirds of this book, Cowper has insisted upon the value of nature to man, who is the passive recipient of what it has to offer. Partly through reiterated analogies between nature and art, he has stressed the inferiority of art to nature as an object of contemplation, the aesthetic value of nature, the moral innocence of “nature appreciation,” the importance of the physical and mental health which nature offers man as recipient. As long as man sees rather than does, he is secure; he may even be happy, gaining the “comforts” by which the value of life is to be judged. On the other hand, there have also been hints of darker possibility. The sailor is killed, Kate crazed as a result of the operations of fancy. The gypsies steal; as doers they are unattractive, though blessed as recipients of nature's power. And we have had a somber sketch of those who give their lives to the pursuit of pleasure in a social environment: a pursuit which makes life empty, valueless. On the other hand, Cowper has asserted the value of “strenuous toil”—but only because it provides, by contrast, “sweetest ease” (l. 388).

In the context of the values implied, Cowper faces a dilemma when he begins to consider the possibility of man's acting positively rather than negatively. In what context can man act properly; and what, precisely, is the relation between action and contemplation? Does action necessarily result in that “sinking” of comfort which the poet so deeply dreads? Only civilization, Cowper concludes, makes possible true and consistent virtue in action. “Here virtue thrives as in her proper soil” (l. 600): repeated uses of natural analogy insist that the patterns of nature are the models to man. Thus civilized virtue is “By culture tam'd, by liberty refresh'd / And all her fruits by radiant truth matur'd” (ll. 606-607). It tends to exist only in temperate climates; the inhabitant of the frozen north feels “severe constraint” (l. 612), and—more interestingly—residents of tropic isles

Can boast but little virtue; and inert
Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain
In manners—victims of luxurious ease.
These therefore I can pity, plac'd remote
From all that science traces, art invents,
Or inspiration teaches.

(ll. 623-628)

The distaste for the inertness of ease and of over-constraint, the admiration for the accomplishments of science and art—these are standard eighteenth-century attitudes, associated with belief in the doctrine of progress. They are not, however, really compatible with Cowper's more fundamental convictions, and his uneasiness with them soon emerges through his expressed consciousness of the gap between the ideal of progress and the actuality. Ideally, civilized virtue is “gentle, kind” (l. 605). Actually, it is Omai, the South Sea Islander, who is gentle—and he is a “gentle savage” (l. 633). The real result of civilization is

With what superior skill we can abuse
The gifts of Providence, and squander life.

(ll. 637-638)

“Doing good, / Disinterested good, is not our trade,” Cowper explains (ll. 673-674); the conflict between commercial and moral values is fundamental and unalterable. Lacking such conflicts, the South Sea Islander, despite his lack also of civilized graces, seems in all his passivity the moral superior of the energetic Englishman. Like Wordsworth, who advocated a “wise passiveness” toward nature, unlike Thomson, who felt obliged to condemn such passivity as “indolence,” Cowper seems to feel the passive relation to nature as an ideal state of being. Indeed, in one of his letters he suggests that man can achieve even active virtue only in a state of nature. “I accede most readily to the justice of your remark on the subject of the truly Roman heroism of the Sandwich islanders,” he wrote John Newton. “Proofs of such prowess, I believe, are seldom exhibited by a people who have attained to a high degree of civilization. Refinement and profligacy of principle are too nearly allied, to admit of any thing so noble.”²⁶

Cowper insists on a distinction between the “civilization” of cities—characterized by “refinement”—and that of the country. Virtue thrives “in the mild / And genial soil of cultivated life” (ll. 678-679)—“Yet not in cities oft” (l. 681), to which flow, as to a sewer, “The dregs and feculence of ev'ry land” (l. 683). In one respect alone are cities truly praiseworthy: they are “nurs'ries of the arts” (l. 693). The poet praises Joshua Reynolds—who can turn “a dull blank” into “A lucid mirror, in which Nature sees / All her reflected features” (ll. 700-702)—the sculptor John Bacon, and the powers of sculpture in general. He also appears to admire the achievements of “philosophy” and of commerce—although his comparison of London as the thriving mart of commerce with ancient Babylon, the city of captivity, qualifies the positive implications of his presentation. His damnation of London is far more emphatic than his praise; it centers on the evils of urban activity, the injustice and hypocrisies of a life where “civilized” forms have quite replaced moral content.

The argument of the first book is now complete: Cowper has both asserted and demonstrated the value of aesthetic contemplation of the natural world; he has opposed to his insistence on nature's aesthetic value an equally clear awareness of the dangers of participation in worldly activity. He has suggested repeatedly that art is necessarily inferior to nature, although art provides useful analogies for the understanding of nature—and nature for the proper appreciation of art. And he has hinted that commitment to the life of imagination may be dangerous: the perception through which man sees, the memory with which he recalls satisfying sights, the judgment with which he guards against moral danger—all these human faculties are more unambiguously valuable than the fancy. The final lines of the book, beginning, “God made the country, and man made the town,” sum up these implications.

What wonder then that health and virtue, gifts
That can alone make sweet the bitter draught
That life holds out to all, should most abound
And least be threaten'd in the fields and groves?

(ll. 750-753)

Nature's lack of threat to passive man is as significant a value as her more positive virtues. But the ultimate value is once more aesthetic. Cowper abandons city-dwellers to their own element: they “taste no scenes / But such as art contrives” (ll. 756-757). Then he returns to the “scenes” which interest him more, the groves and birds and moonlight of the country, whose aesthetic appeal is now systematically contrasted with that achieved by human art and artifice. The conclusion strikes a strong moral note:

          Folly such as your's,
Grac'd with a sword, and worthier of a fan,
Has made, what enemies could ne'er have done,
Our arch of empire, stedfast but for you,
A multilated structure, soon to fall.

(ll. 770-774)

This final condemnation of those who live in cities is justified by reference to no sin more serious than their preference of opera singers to birds, lamplight to moonlight. In Cowper's ethical system, however, such lapses of judgment, such willing acceptance of inferior sorts of perception, amount to genuine moral failing. He has not yet fully revealed the basis for his consistent association of strong perceptual response to nature with moral uprightness; it emerges completely in the fifth book, paradoxically one of the sections of the poem least obviously concerned with nature.

Book V, despite its title (“The Winter Morning Walk”), is a record primarily of man reflecting rather than man perceiving. It begins with a hundred and seventy-five lines of description and meditation on nature and man in nature, but the succeeding seven hundred and thirty lines virtually abandon nature as subject. Yet the problem of perception is once more central to the argument of the book, although liberty and permanence are the subjects which most clearly unify the poet's concerns.

The opening lines present a direct record of perception, visual awareness modulating imperceptibly into moral. The sun, at first an image of great power, loses force as it rises. First “with ruddy orb / Ascending, [it] fires th'horizon” (ll. 1-2); the regal associations of orb support the sense of potency in the image of the sun “firing” the whole horizon. By line 4, the sun is no longer an orb, but merely a disk. Two lines later, “his slanting ray / Slides ineffectual down the snowy vale” (ll. 6-7); with an increasing sense of the sun's ineffectuality we learn that now its power consists merely in “tinging all with his own rosy hue” (l. 8)—a considerable falling-off, both visually and conceptually, from the energy which fired the horizon. Finally, the sun creates shadows; the observer in the scene is thus united with “ev'ry herb and ev'ry spiry blade” (l. 9), which, like him, cast their shadows. When the human participant in the natural scene reflects on the import of his shadow he announces, with surprising levity, one of the major themes of this book. The relative impermanence of man and his achievements will come to seem more and more important as the book proceeds; here, on the other hand, the poet's verbal attempt to assert his own transience is immediately counteracted by the enduring reality of nature, which seems infinitely more significant. The transience of man is almost a joke; recognition of it coincides with awareness of the visual grotesqueness of the shadow's transformation of well-proportioned limb to lean shank.

Mine, spindling into longitude immense,
In spite of gravity, and sage remark
That I myself am but a fleeting shade,
Provokes me to a smile. With eye askance
I view the muscular proportion'd limb
Transform'd to a lean shank.

(ll. 11-16)

The observer, perceiving the natural world sharply, feels himself essentially a part of that world; his abstract awareness that he is “but a fleeting shade” is far less compelling than the comic visual reality of distorting shadow, and the pleasure derived from perception of that reality.

The revelatory power of nature is important throughout this description.

          the bents,
And coarser grass, upspearing o'er the rest,
Of late unsightly and unseen, now shine
Conspicuous, and, in bright apparel clad
And fledg'd with icy feathers, nod superb.

(ll. 22-26)

Frost makes the unseen seeable, the unsightly beautiful. This natural power is meaningful not, as in Thomson, primarily for the kind of energy it manifests, but for the transformed world it displays. The display implies the great kinships of nature—weeds metaphorically unite with men by being “clad” in “apparel,” with birds by being “fledged with … feathers”—but its chief impact is visual. Similarly, as the vignette continues, it directs our attention chiefly to the visual effect of mourning cattle, working man, scampering dog, and only secondarily to the implications of order and permanence in the description of the haystack, for example, or even of the woodman moving “right toward the mark” (l. 53).

Reflection about what happens to various kinds of animals and insects in winter leads Cowper to the two central images of Book V: the frozen surroundings of the waterfall and the ice palace of Empress Anna of Russia. The waterfall itself is too forceful to be “bound” by frost, but the mist it throws off freezes into fantastic and compelling forms. “See,” the poet commands, with Thomsonian emphasis,

          where it [the frost] has hung th' embroider'd banks
With forms so various, that no pow'rs of art,
The pencil or the pen, may trace the same!

(ll. 107-109)

Once more the specific “scene” raises the issue of nature's relation to art; once more Cowper insists that neither the painter nor the poet can capture the beauty of natural reality. Art is clearly inadequate as the “mirror” of nature; if it aspires to mirror, it must fail. (Elsewhere in the poem, Cowper explains that the mind of the artist is a mirror, and that the responsibility of the poet is

T'arrest the fleeting images that fill
The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast,
And force them sit till he has pencil'd off
A faithful likeness of the forms he views.

[II, 290-293]

Art—specifically poetry—may provide a mirror for nature, but in a moral, not an aesthetic sense; Cowper describes his “stream” of poetry as “reflecting clear, / If not the virtues, yet the worth, of brutes” [VI, 723-724].) Continuing to describe the wonders of the frozen landscape, Cowper concentrates on suggestion more than precise visual detail: “Here grotto within grotto safe defies / The sunbeam” (ll. 117-118). The reader is invited to consider the significance, the mystery of the frost's achievement as well as to “see” its manifestations. And the poet concludes his treatment of this magical creation with yet another extended and emphatic statement of nature's superiority to art:

Thus nature works as if to mock at art,
And in defiance of her rival pow'rs;
By these fortuitous and random strokes
Performing such inimitable feats
As she with all her rules can never reach.

(ll. 122-126)

Gone is Pope's sense of the essential, inevitable harmony between art and nature; now the two are “rival powers,” with nature clearly the victor. Nature's aesthetic superiority to art is clearly explained:

The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes
Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain
The likeness of some object seen before.

(ll. 119-121)

The fancy, the human creative power which produces art, is limited, Locke had explained, to forming new combinations or interpretations of objects (or parts of objects) previously perceived. It cannot create anything entirely new, completely unrelated to earlier perception. Nature as artist, on the other hand, suffers from no such limitation: its creations bear no likeness to any object seen before. Only nature can provide new material for fancy to work upon. The perceptual grounds for its aesthetic superiority to art are perfectly apparent.

The man-made ice palace contrasted with the nature-created grottoes also offers aesthetic appeals—despite the fact that it is “less worthy of applause, though more admir'd” (l. 126). Its attractiveness, however, derives largely from the illusion it creates of permanence and accordingly of man's dominance over nature.

          though smooth
And slipp'ry the materials, yet frost-bound
Firm as a rock. Nor wanted aught within,
That royal residence might well befit,
For grandeur or for use.

(ll. 154-158)

But it is, after all, a “brittle prodigy” (l. 154); the moral satisfaction of considering its “evanescent glory, once a stream, / And soon to slide into a stream again” (ll. 167-168) counteracts the aesthetic satisfaction of contemplating its apparent permanence and order. “In such a palace Poetry might place / The armory of Winter” (ll. 138-139), Cowper observes; this idea causes him to consider the power of winter, which produces “snow, that often blinds the trav'ler's course, And wraps him in an unexpected tomb” (ll. 142-143). No human structure adequately contains the menace of winter; if the lamps within the palace seem “Another moon new risen, or meteor fall'n / From heav'n to earth, of lambent flame serene” (ll. 152-153), it is only by an illusion of human perception. The apparently successful manipulation of nature by man is temporary, soon to vanish, offering but the pretence of permanence.

The complex combination of immediately perceived solidity with intellectually recognized evanescence makes the ice palace the type of all human achievement; for this reason it provides an underlying metaphor throughout the rest of Book V. Its metaphoric value is underlined at the end of the description:

Alas; 'twas but a mortifying stroke
Of undesign'd serenity, that glanc'd
(Made by a monarch) on her own estate,
On human grandeur and the courts of kings.
'Twas transient in its nature, as in show
'Twas durable.

(ll. 169-174)

The “mortifying stroke” is the palace's sliding back into a stream. The palace is the emblem of princely endeavor, which may struggle for dominance “by pyramids and mausolean pomp” (l. 182), by building; or by destroying, provoking wars in which kings make “the sorrows of mankind their sport” (l. 186). The desire of kings to assert their power in tangible form causes war, but war originated, Cowper explains, in man's attempt to extend his dominance over nature, when he “had begun to call / These meadows and that range of hills his own” (ll. 222-223). Continuing his discussion of warfare and of the presumption of kings, the poet defines the king's pride: it consists in thinking “the world was made in vain, if not for him” (l. 271). Man persists in believing that he is in some real sense master of the natural world; it is an odd corollary that he should believe that some are fit to be masters of others, even though a king is a man

Compounded and made up like other men
Of elements tumultuous, in whom lust
And folly in as ample measure meet
As in the bosoms of the slaves he rules.

(ll. 307-310)

So it is that man loses his freedom in his political institutions: through a misinterpretation of his own humble position in the universe which remotely parallels the misinterpretation involved in believing an ice palace to be permanent or its lights to be equivalent to the moon.

We are not directly reminded of the ice palace, however, until the very end of the discussion of political liberty, when Cowper returns to the metaphor of building:

We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works
Die too: …
We build with what we deem eternal rock:
A distant age asks where the fabric stood.

(ll. 531-532, 534-535)

The state itself can be described as an “old castle” (l. 525); the entire issue of political liberty is evanescent as the ice palace in comparison with the far more fundamental problem of spiritual liberty which Cowper next considers.

The essence of spiritual liberty is its permanence, in comparison with which nature itself seems transient. In His visible works, God,

          finding an interminable space
Unoccupied, has fill'd the void so well,
And made so sparkling what was dark before.
But these are not his glory.

(ll. 556-559)

On aesthetic grounds, man supposes that “so fair a scene” (l. 560) must be eternal—as he supposes the permanence of the ice palace on the basis of visual evidence (the adjective sparkling, like glitter in the lines quoted below, may remind one of the connection between the two phenomena). Yet nature, considered in terms of the divine plan, is merely another sort of artifice, the product of an “artificer divine” (l. 561) who has Himself “pronounc'd it transient, glorious as it is” (l. 563) because He values spiritual, not physical, permanence. Cowper's values are similar; he elaborates for almost two hundred lines on the value, the essentiality, of spiritual liberty. Yet the resolution of the discussion of spiritual freedom accepts once more the profound aesthetic value of nature, and makes the ability to perceive this value a touchstone of one's spiritual state.

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside. …
He looks abroad into the varied field
Of nature, and, though poor perhaps compar'd
With those whose mansions glitter in his sight,
Calls the delightful scen'ry all his own. …
Are they not his by a peculiar right,
And by an emphasis of int'rest his,
Whose eye they fill with tears of holy joy,
Whose heart with praise, and whose exalted mind
With worthy thoughts of that unwearied love
That plann'd, and built, and still upholds, a world
So cloth'd with beauty for rebellious man?

(ll. 733-734, 738-741, 748-754)

The beauty of the world is God's special gift to man; visual “possession” of “delightful scenery” is more valuable than wealth. Moreover, true aesthetic response to nature depends on a proper relation with God:

Acquaint thyself with God, if thou would'st taste
His works. Admitted once to his embrace,
Thou shalt perceive that thou wast blind before:
Thine eye shall be instructed; and thine heart,
Made pure, shall relish, with divine delight
Till then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought.

(ll. 779-784)

Understanding of God's dominance over nature (in contrast to the false belief in man's control of nature) produces the perception which distinguishes men from brutes (see ll. 785-790), gives the soul “new faculties” (l. 806) which enable it to discern “in all things, what, with stupid gaze / Of ignorance, till then she overlook'd” (ll. 808-809). When man holds converse with the stars, the special significance of the “shining hosts” (l. 822) is that they “view / Distinctly scenes invisible to man” (ll. 825-826); heightened perception is a metaphysical goal. The “lamp of truth” enables man to “read” nature (l. 845); and liberty itself “like day, / Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from heav'n / Fires all the faculties with glorious joy” (ll. 883-885).

In that blest moment Nature, throwing wide
Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
The author of her beauties, who, retir'd
Behind his own creation, works unseen
By the impure.

(ll. 891-895)

If God is the source of proper perception, He is also the end of perception: this is the final word of Book V. The fired faculties which liberty creates lead man ultimately to God, healing the potential and sometimes actual split felt between God and nature as objects of contemplation. The poignant story which Cowper tells in his Memoir is well-known: how, exalted and soothed by contemplation of a marine sunset, he was subsequently overwhelmed with guilt at the realization that he had sinfully attributed to the power of nature the psychological healing that could only be due to the power of God. In the logic of Book V of The Task such distinctions virtually disappear—not because nature and God are identical (“Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God” [VI, 223-224]), but because the ability to perceive nature is the result of a proper relation with God, and the heightening of faculties which makes possible an enlightened aesthetic response to nature also produces an awareness of how God expresses Himself through nature. The ability to appreciate the “scenes” which nature provides becomes thus virtually a test of one's spiritual condition; the belief in the aesthetic superiority of nature to art is not a matter merely of personal response, but a product of the realization that nature has intrinsic significance which no work of art can achieve. Elsewhere in The Task, some of the most compelling passages of natural description attempt to define and delineate this significance. The substructure which justifies such attempts is probably most apparent in Book V, itself comparatively bare of description.

For Cowper, then, the act of visual perception, which had provided subject matter and metaphors for poets throughout the eighteenth-century development of the poetry of image rather than action, finally takes on metaphysical importance. Thomson had attempted to “see” significance as well as appearance, Collins had “seen” into a realm of fantasy as well as of reality, Gray had used contrasting “visions” to create a poetry of tension, Smart had seen the natural world and then gone beyond his own seeing to establish connections with a realm of transcendental truth. For Cowper the seeing itself implied the transcendental truth; the physical power of vision became a spiritual reality.

Donald Davie has remarked of Cowper that he is, “after Ben Jonson, … the most neglected of our poets.”²⁷ The neglect is of analysis rather than simply of attention: Cowper has been written about voluminously—as a psychological case, as a representative of piety, as a phenomenon of his century. Few critics, however, have made any serious attempt to examine the source or nature of his poetic effects; those who have tried to describe his poetry often take so large a view that all possibility of accuracy vanishes. Thus we are told, for example, that The Task resembles the conversation of one dowered with no special gifts of intellect; of an interesting quiet man, of humour and austerity with an intensely human hand-grip.²⁸ Alternately, its form, “remarquable par sa simplicité‚ audacieuse,” is that of fragments of a journal.²⁹ “To Cowper,” another critic observes, “nature is simply a background, … essentially a locus in quo—a space in which the work and mirth of life pass and are performed.”³⁰ Or we are informed that “his intuition was comparatively superficial, if disinterested, because he never strove to discipline ideas to facts or to interpret facts ideally, but only to invest them with sentiment or reflect upon them.”³¹ All such statements seem plausible when one considers The Task casually as a whole; all lose their plausibility if closely examined in relation to specific passages, which reveal at least a potential unity far more rigorous than that of a conversation or a journal, demonstrate the fundamental importance of nature not as a locus in quo but as an object of contemplation, and suggest that Cowper at his best characteristically “interpret[s] facts ideally.” It is extremely difficult to generalize accurately about The Task because although, as I have attempted to show, an underlying structure of ideas does in fact unify many of its apparently disparate concerns, it remains a poem of details, details which depend upon varied techniques and apparent preoccupations. The poem's variety is particularly confusing with regard to its language. The diction of The Task ranges from “poetic” to colloquial, from abstract to concrete, apparently depending on many different principles of control. The magnitude of the poet's concerns emerges vividly through examination of his language.

The prevailing critical attitude toward the diction of The Task has been that it is remarkable for its “plainness.” In Cowper's own time plainness was thought to be one of his chief poetic merits; thus a reviewer of his first volume observes: “Anxious only to give each image its due prominence and relief, he has wasted no unnecessary attention on grace and embellishment; his language, therefore, though neither strikingly harmonious nor elegant, is plain, forcible, and expressive.”³² Specifically with regard to The Task, another of Cowper's contemporaries, remarking “the familiarity of the diction,”³⁴ observes, “The language may sometimes appear below the poetical standard; but he was such a foe to affectation in any shape, that he seems to have avoided nothing so much as the stiff pomposity so common to blank verse writers.”³³ More modern critics have echoed this view: “the language is of the purest and finest, but it is not strikingly ornamented. It is without anything unusual in poetic diction.”³⁴ And Thomas Quayle singles out “the moral and didactic portions” as characterized by language “as a rule, uniformly simple and direct.”³⁵

Yet these judgments, too, seem perplexing when one examines specific passages of The Task to find Cowper writing, “The verdure of the plain lies buried deep / Beneath the dazzling deluge” (V, 21-22), or—for a more extended example—

Now from the roost, or from the neighb'ring pale,
Where, diligent to catch the first faint gleam
Of smiling day, they gossip'd side by side,
Come trooping at the housewife's well-known call
The feather'd tribes domestic. Half on wing,
And half on foot, they brush the fleecy flood,
Conscious, and fearful of too deep a plunge.
The sparrows peep, and quit the shelt'ring eaves
To seize the fair occasion. Well they eye
The scatter'd grain; and, thievishly resolv'd
T'escape the' impending famine, often scar'd,
As oft return—a pert voracious kind.

(V, 58-69)

This is part of the opening description of man, animals and vegetation in a winter landscape. It is not, in its diction, fully characteristic of Cowper's technique, but it demonstrates the dexterity with which the poet turns varied conventions to personal use.

In language and in sentence structure, these lines seem to come from the mid, not the late, eighteenth century. The pseudo-Miltonic inversions, such Thomsonian formulations as “the feather'd tribes domestic,” the unrealized personification of “smiling day,” the automatic phrase, “the fair occasion,” the periphrases of “fleecy flood,” “feather'd tribes,” “pert voracious kind”: all these belong to well-established poetic patterns—patterns which we might expect Cowper to avoid. They seem to be used for familiar reasons: to establish metaphoric links between man and lower forms of nature which will reinforce the reader's sense of some vast natural harmony. One may note Cowper's accuracy of perception in such phrases as “half on wing / And half on foot,” or the vividness of “brush” (in “they brush the fleecy flood”), the figurative appropriateness of “gossip'd”; still, the impression remains that the passage as a whole is almost pure convention, in language and in concept.

To understand its function in The Task one must turn to its context, which significantly modifies the effect of the lines considered in isolation. A few lines taken from either side of the description of the birds may suggest the nature of that context. The first of these passages focuses on an individual animal, sharply perceived in his separateness; the second, although it too is rich in specific detail, is more general. The first makes emphatic use of inversion, and offers the Thomsonian “wide-scamp'ring”; the second has no striking structural peculiarities and its diction provides no special associations. Yet these two descriptions resemble one another far more than they resemble the description of domestic fowl. The voice that speaks in them, although it is not emphatically distinctive, is none the less individual in comparison to that which speaks of a “fleecy flood.” One sees here the effect of an eye trained steadfastly upon the object, a mind concerned to discriminate and to define not on the basis of relationships or of categories (“kinds”) but in terms of specific individual perceptions.

Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with pointed ears
And tail cropp'd short, half lurcher and half cur—
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow; and now, with many a frisk
Wide-scamp'ring, snatches up the drifted snow
With iv'ry teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powder'd coat, and barks for joy.

(V, 45-51)

The very rooks and daws forsake the fields,
Where neither grub, nor root, nor earth-nut, now
Repays their labour more; and, perch'd aloft
By the wayside, or stalking in the path,
Lean pensioners upon the trav'ler's track,
Pick up their nauseous dole, though sweet to them,
Of voided pulse or half-digested grain.
The streams are lost amid the splendid blank,
O'erwhelming all distinction.

(V, 89-97)

The lines beginning with allusion to the rooks and daws deal with transformations effected by winter, and with the resulting paradoxes: birds forsake their “natural” habitat for traveled roads; the “nauseous dole” voided by the travelers is “sweet to them”; winter creates a “splendid blank, / O'erwhelming all distinction,” while the poet insists precisely on the distinctions of the chill landscape. The passage on the dog, with its emphasis on energetic verbs (snatches, ploughs, shakes, barks; the noun frisk and the participle wide-scamp'ring also suggest the energy of action), dramatizes the way in which the power of winter may inform the animal kingdom: if it immobilizes water, it intensely animates dogs.

Each of the three passages, then, represents a different way, almost a different principle, of “seeing.” The eye focuses on an individual phenomenon in the lines about the dog, discriminates the details of the animal's appearance (“Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with pointed ears / And tail cropp'd short”), then moves on to contemplate the exact nature of his activity. The language of the description is “plain,” generally direct, heavily Anglo-Saxon. Interpretation is kept to a minimum, suggested only by the adjective shrewd and the phrase “barks for joy”; the scene is self- sufficient, containing its meaning in its details. One sentence is simple, one compound; the coordinate conjunction and, occurring six times in the seven lines, is vital in establishing relationships.

In the passage about rooks and daws, a single, elaborate complex sentence occupies seven of the nine lines; the increased complexity of structure is paralleled by heightened dignity of tone. Although direct, simple description remains important, with the plain diction appropriate to it, Latinate words now assume a more significant rôle. They convey the interpretive judgment of the author in such key terms as labour, pensioners, nauseous, splendid, distinction. Meaning as well as appearance is important here; this fact accounts for the heightened dignity of language and structure. The central paradox that privation and beauty are by winter mysteriously connected, a paradox embodied in the phrase “splendid blank,” is elaborated both through the specificity with which Cowper details the nature of privation and its compensations and through the generality of his final descriptive allusion to the snow which covers everything.

The heavy stress on established poetic diction in the section on domestic fowl does not obscure the clarity of the poet's observation any more than does the complexity of structure or the relative elevation of language in the lines on rooks and daws. Here, though, the principle of “seeing” is to place observed details in the context a tradition, to remind the reader of eternal rather than immediate patterns, to insist on the fundamental kinships of the universe. The descriptive emphasis is on characterization, the special personality of these birds. But unlike the dog's “personality,” which is conceived as his specifically animal nature, the character of the birds is at least analogically human: they “gossip,” “troop,” compose “domestic” tribes, are “conscious, and fearful,” sensitive to the “fair occasion,” capable of being “thievish.” Winter, which increases the dependency of the animal kingdom on man, increases as a consequence human awareness of the links that bind all creation, so that analogies between the look of sheep and of snow, the nature of chickens and of the housewife who feeds them, or between sparrows and children (this barely suggested: but children too might under some circumstances be defined as a “pert voracious kind,” although this was not the typical eighteenth-century view of them), take on true significance.

These three modes of “seeing” the panoramas which winter presents, with the dictions appropriate to each mode, suggest how functional Cowper's varieties of perspective and technique can prove. In the early descriptive section of Book V, the poet demonstrates the nature of that true perception which by the end of the book he will assert to be a product of man's right relationship with God. True perception does not depend on anything so simple as constant assertion of the connections between God and His creation, but it does involve completeness, wholeness of vision. Such wholeness is the sum of many parts, many incomplete visions; in this long descriptive portion of his poem, Cowper isolates and emphasizes various ways of seeing in a fashion that may prepare us to believe in the significance of their combination. His variations of technique reflect quite precisely the shifts in emphasis of his subject matter.

One cannot always believe that Cowper's diction conforms exactly to the meanings it is intended to convey. His verse seems dependably good when its content is descriptive, its subject that perception which Cowper found both emotionally and philosophically so important. Large portions of The Task, however, are moralistic rather than descriptive; nor does the moralizing always resolve itself, as in Book V, in terms of the poet's commitment to the value of perception. Book II, “The Time-Piece,” for example, contains no extended treatment of the external world; it is entirely reflective. Although it includes sections of great vigor and poetic skill, it also displays Cowper at his worst—and his “worst” is characteristically his most rhetorical.

Considering two particularly weak passages, we may find it hard to understand why either of them should be poetry rather than prose. By Coleridge's well-known standard (“whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction”),³⁶ most of these lines are excellent examples of “vicious diction,” in spite of the fact that, with some exceptions, the diction does not call special attention to itself. In the first passage, Cowper considers the institution of preaching; the second deals with an individual exemplar of the institution. Both treatments may be the product of deep conviction, but it is not embodied in any way likely to move a reader. “Men love to be moved, much better than to be instructed,” Joseph Warton pointed out;³⁷ Cowper's calculated rhetoric is only “instructive.” Here are the passages:

The pulpit, therefore (and I name it fill'd
With solemn awe, that bids me well beware
With what intent I touch that holy thing)
The pulpit (when the sat'rist has at last,
Strutting and vap'ring in an empty school,
Spent all his force and made no proselyte)
I say the pulpit (in the sober use
Of its legitimate, peculiar pow'rs)
Must stand acknowledged, while the world
          shall stand,
The most important and effectual guard,
Support, and ornament, of virtue's cause.

(II. 326-336)

The second selection describes the bad pastor,

Perverting often, by the stress of lewd
And loose example, whom he should instruct;
[he] Exposes, and holds up to broad disgrace
The noblest function, and discredits much
The brightest truths that man has ever seen.
For ghostly counsel; if it either fall
Below the exigence, or be not back'd
With show of love, at least with hopeful proof
Of some sincerity on th' giver's part;
Or be dishonour'd, in th'exterior form
And mode of its conveyance, by such tricks
As move derision, or by foppish airs
And histrionic mumm'ry, that let down
The pulpit to the level of the stage;
Drops from the lips a disregarded thing.

(II. 551-565)

The repeated, self-conscious parentheses of the first passage, the artifice of the reiterated phrase “the pulpit,” which produces an inadvertent comic effect, the factitious-seeming indignation in the denunciation of the satirist, the padding in such phrases as “solemn awe” and “well beware,” even the relatively skillful play on stand—all these contribute to one's sense that the poet as contriver has here superseded the poet as expresser of felt, perceived or imagined reality. The passage has almost the effect of parody. One believes in the existence of the felt reality, but not that Cowper is committed to it; his obvious concern with the proper mode of expression seems strangely isolated from what he has to say, seems not a concern for the best way to convey emotion or meaning so much as for the moral posture appropriate to a man of his convictions. In the second passage, the moral posture itself seems suspect: is “show of love,” with its conceivable implication of hypocrisy, really adequate for the “good” pastor? Or is merely “hopeful proof / Of some sincerity”? The poet concerns himself almost entirely with appearances, with what he himself calls “th' exterior form / And mode of … conveyance” of divine truths; yet he appears to make a distinction between exterior forms and what he evidently considers inner reality—reality demonstrated by “show of love” of “proof / Of some sincerity.” In the actual concerns of the passage, then, form and content blur, and exterior forms assume disproportionate importance—just such importance as they seem to assume in the poetic rendering of the ideas, which itself has some aspect of “histrionic mumm'ry.” The language of the passage, with the possible exception of the word exigence, is quite ordinary and straightforward; its structure, with its deliberate slowness and suspension, moving with measured pace toward the calculated anticlimax of “disregarded thing,” seems anything but straight forward, and its contrived complexity reflects no corresponding complexity of thought.

One striking fact about the relatively weak moralistic sections of The Task is that they are so radically different in technique from the worst of Cowper's hymns. If the special talent manifested in the hymns is the ability to turn the perceptive faculty inward, to define and render directly certain sorts of psychic activity and psychic stasis without significant recourse to visual metaphor, the talent which created The Task seems adept at rending inner states by suggestion, through reference to and reliance on imagery of the external world. Conversely, the hymns at their worst depend most heavily on metaphor;The Task,whose central subject is concrete reality in its spiritual context, is at its worst often almost bare of imagery, lapsing into concern only with abstractions. There is a kind of metaphor (although a weak and sketchy one) in “ghostly counsel” dropping, a “disregarded thing” ; aside from that, and the vague metaphoric possibilities of touch in line 328, empty school in line 330, the only metaphor in the two passages is “The brightest truth that man has ever seen,” a reference characteristic of Cowper's conventional interest in light as an emblem of spiritual reality, but hardly more than a reference

But if these passages manifest little distinct visual awareness, they also demonstrate little psychic awareness. What “perception” they display seems theoretical (“philosophical,” Cowper might say) rather than direct, the product of what the poet has been told, not what he has himself “seen.” Cut off from his deepest sources of feeling, he produces impoverished language; the more barren sections of The Task, which by implication deny the validity of that very perception that the poem at its best strongly affirms, are boring. “Where the Idea is accurate, the terms will be so too; and wherever you find the words hobble, you may conclude the notion was lame; otherwise they wou'd both have bad an equal and graceful pace.” So wrote John Constable,³⁸ and his terms suggest an appropriate vocabulary to indict Cowper at his worst.

But Cowper also had at his disposal strikingly individual language. Trying to describe the writer characterized by “simplicity” (a term which in his usage as in Collins's has rather complex implications), Hugh Blair observes, “There are no marks of art in his expression; it seems the very language of nature; you see in the Style, not the writer and his labour, but the man, in his own natural character.”³⁹ The distinction he makes is difficult to enforce, but it seems appropriate to one of Cowper's characteristic modes, a mode which defines his most personal ways of perceiving. “All we behold is miracle,” Cowper points out, “but, seen / So duly, all is miracle in vain” (VI, 132-133). The statement might serve as text for The Task, which at its best uncovers the miracle of the commonplace, sometimes employing a distinctive rhetoric to emphasize its revelations. Divine power operates “all in sight of inattentive man” (VI, 120); the poet's responsibility is to make man more attentive, so that his “sight” will be more significant. Man sees the dearth of winter; he should be conscious simultaneously of the richness it foretells.

But let the months go by, a few short months,
And all shall be restor'd. These naked shoots,
Barren as lances, among which the wind
Makes wintry music, sighing as it goes,
Shall put their graceful foliage on again,
And, more aspiring, and with ampler spread,
Shall boast new charms, and more than they have lost.

(VI, 140-146)

Both the lines about miracle and the first line of this description employ rhetorical repetition. Unlike the reiteration of “the pulpit” in the moralizing passage, this duplication is a device of progression rather than of suspension. It intensifies an atmosphere of calm assurance (defined particularly by the grand inclusiveness of “all shall be restor'd”) instead of creating, like the other repetitive pattern, merely a sense of dogged determination. Now Cowper relies heavily on metaphoric suggestion, both the conventional associations of aspiring and boast, and a more complex and personal effect in the description of “naked shoots, / Barren as lances.” The defencelessness implied by naked is immediately denied when the nakedness becomes that of an aggressive weapon. But the implications of lances are in turn opposed by the further transformation of lances into musical instruments; and the fact that the music derives from the “sighing” of the wind adds a final degree of perceptual and emotional complexity. The beauty of winter is as real as that of spring, although it is beauty of an entirely different order. Nature embodies the Christian sequence of death and resurrection. The poem directs one's attention to the beauties of winter as well as those of spring, to the beauty of apparent death and that of rebirth, reinforcing the aesthetic contrast by the opposition between the conventional language of personalization applied to spring and the more direct, personal language through which winter is evoked.

This passage continues with one of the catalogues so characteristic of Cowper, introduced by a generalization couched entirely in “poetic diction,” in a form which reminds one of the associations of that diction with the language of science.

Then, each in its peculiar honours clad,
Shall publish, even to the distant eye,
Its family and tribe. Laburnum, rich In streaming gold; syringa, iv'ry pure;
The scentless and the scented rose; this red
And of an humbler growth, the other tall,
And throwing up into the darkest gloom
Of neighb'ring cypress, or more sable yew,
Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf
That the wind severs from the broken wave;
The lilac, various in array, now white,
Now sanguine, and her beauteous head now set
With purple spikes pyramidal, as if,
Studious of ornament, yet unresolv'd
Which hue she most approv'd, she chose
          them all …

(VI,147-161)

This is slightly less than half the full catalogue, but it suggests the technique and quality of the whole. The imagined conjunction of flowers is complexly perceived, with reference to form (streaming, globes, pyramidal), color, balance and contrast (“The scentless and the scented rose,” tall and short, dark and light, white and purple), and metaphor, Metaphors of richness (gold, iv'ry, silver, ornament) dominate the scene, and two key images insist on relationships among the parts of the created universe: the emphatic association of the “silver globes” of the rose with the bits of surf “severed” from the wave, and the description of the lilac as a human belle.

The powerful effect of this catalogue depends heavily on the relationship between the directness of the diction (only sable, sanguine, possibly beauteous and gloom, have predominantly poetic associations; the adjectives and nouns which carry the weight of the description are on the whole precise and limited in their individual meanings) and the elaboration of the picture and meaning created by the simple language. As Cowper saw in the naked branches of winter a rapidly shifting range of meanings, he perceives in a static panorama of spring and summer flowers so many sorts of meaning and relationship—visual and “philosophic”—that his presentation of the scene pulses with energy. The source of that energy, and its significance, become explicit at the end:

From dearth to plenty, and from death to life,
Is Nature's progress when she lectures man
In heav'nly truth; evincing, as she makes
The grand transition, that there lives and works
A soul in all things, and that soul is God.
The beauties of the wilderness are his,
That makes so gay the solitary place
Where no eye sees them.

(VI,181-188)

The “lecture” nature offers is the revelation that there is no separation, finally, between the visual glory (or, for that matter, the visual barrenness) of the natural world and its theological meaning. The vibrant “soul in all things” need only be recognized; perception of its energy is part of Cowper's direct relation-seeking poetic perception of the imagined scene itself. The force of that perception, expressed through unpretentious but intricately organized language, leads the poet finally to the realization that meaning and beauty are inherent in the natural world independently of the perceiver—“Where no eye sees them.” The perceiver, even at the beginning of this passage, is only a “distant eye” ; the splendor of the scene does not depend on human perception. In this pageant of inanimate nature, the vegetative world finally embodies full richness, dignity, even hints of eroticism (“her beauteous head”). God's plenty is here; religious, aesthetic, emotional meaning fuse. The greatest achievement of The Task (not only here; in other “passages as well) is this fusion. In the hymns, Cowper conveyed his fear that man must move inevitably from an infantile state of pure dependence and complete comfort to an anguished awareness of conflict and the loss of peace, comfort. Elsewhere in The Task he reminds us that the eye is” guiltless”: no blame can attach to aesthetic contemplation; passivity is associated with lack of vice. In the flower passage, contemplation is not merely guiltless; it becomes essentially an act of worship, of such total worship that it involves the poet's entire sensibility—his desire for peace, for beauty, for piety; his emotional and religious yearnings, his intellectual convictions. The act of visual perception has finally become fully inclusive as it leads Cowper back to his ideal state of faith and ease.

Notes

1. Lodwick Hartley, “The Worm and the Thorn: A Study of Cowper's Olney Hymns,” The Journal of Religion, XXIX (1949), 224.

2. Kenneth MacLean, “William Cowper,” The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949) p. 260.

3. Maurice Quinlan, “Cowper's Imagery,” JEGP, XLVII (1948), 285.

4. See Quinlan, “Cowper's Imagery,” pp. 276-285; Hartley, “The Worm and the Thorn,” pp. 220-229.

5. Norman Nicholson, William Cowper, Writers and their Work No. 121 (London: Longmans, Green, 1960), p. 16.

6. Hugh Fausset, William Cowper (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), p. 79.

7. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), I, 45.

8. Ibid., I, 20.

9. Fausset, William Cowper, p. 35.

10. 27 November 1784; The Correspondence of William Cowper, ed. Thomas Wright, 4 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), II, 272.

11. 10 October 1784; Correspondence, II, 251.

12. 17 December 1781; Correspondence, I, 411.

13. 19 March 1784; Correspondence, II, 176-177.

14. To the Rev. William Unwin, 17 January 1782; Correspondence, I, 430.

15. Donald Davie, “The Critical Principles of William Cowper,” The Cambridge Journal, VII (1953), 182.

16. To the Rev. William Unwin, 20 October 1784; Correspondence, II 257.

17. To John Johnson, 28 February 1790; Correspondence, III, 439.

18. François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, Dialogues Concerning Eloquence, tr. William Stevenson (London, 1722), p. 252.

19. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 6th ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1785), II, 19.

20. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols. (London, 1783), I, 185.

21. Ibid., I, 217-218.

22. No date [1784]; Correspondence, II, 287.

23. Daniel Webb, Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry (London, 1762), p. 56.

24. 10 October 1784; Correspondence, II, 252-253.

25. Scene is one of the nouns Josephine Miles finds occurring ten times in a hundred lines of The Task. The only other of Cowper's favorite nouns directly associated with visual perception is eye. More characteristic are abstract or generalized terms: art, beauty, god, life, nature, world. Cowper's typical verbs include both see and seem. His vocabulary, as statistically recorded, seems closer to Johnson's poetic vocabulary than to that of any of his other contemporaries. See Josephine Miles, Renaissance, Eighteenth-Century, and Modern Language in English Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 23.

26. 30 October 1784; Correspondence, II, 258-259.

27. Davie, “The Critical Principles of William Cowper,” p. 182

28. James A. Ray, Cowper and His Poetry (London: George G. Harrap, [1914]), p. 84.

29. Leon Boucher, William Cowper, Sa Correspondance et ses Poésies (Paris, 1874) p. 186.

30. Walter Bagehot, “William Cowper,” Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen (London, 1858), p. 89.

31. Hugh Fausset, William Cowper, p. 235.

32. Monthly Review, LXVII (October, 1782), 265; quoted in Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper, A Critical Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953) p. 117.

33. John Aikin Letters to a Young Lady on a Course of English Poetry (London, 1804), p. 292.

34. W. P. Ker, Form and Style in Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 170

35. Thomas Quayle, Poetic Diction (London: Methuen, 1924), p. 49.

36. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols. (London, 1817) I, 22.

37. Warton, “Three Essays on Pastoral, Didactic, and Epic Poetry,” in The Works of Virgil, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1778), I, 401. [First edition 1753].

38. John Constable, Reflections Upon Accuracy of Style, 2nd ed. (London 1738), p. 59. [First edition 1731.]

39. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, I, 390.