SOURCE: “Cowper's Task and the Anxieties of Femininity,” in Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 13, No. 3, Nov. 1989, pp. 1-17.

[In the following essay, Elfenbein analyzes Cowper's treatment of femininity in The Task.]

The poetry of William Cowper, especially his most famous poem, The Task, both encapsulates the developments of eighteenth-century poetry from Popean satire to the doctrine of sensibility and anticipates the achievements of the early romantics. The Task, more than any other poem of the later eighteenth century, functions as a turning point in literary history because of its radical redefinition of possibilities for the poetic subject. Critics, however, have rarely paid close attention to Cowper's powerful manipulation of ideology, and locating precisely his innovations can help us comprehend the peculiar complexities of the position of the poet in relation to society during this era.

I will argue that Cowper's particular power reveals itself most strikingly in his treatment of femininity, a quality that nineteenth-century critics persistently associated with him. Lord Jeffrey, for instance, mentions Cowper's “feminine gentleness and delicacy of nature, that shrank from all that was boisterous, presumptuous, or rude.”¹ Hazlitt condemns the “effeminacy about him, which shrinks from and repels common and hearty sympathy.”² Sainte-Beuve associates him with the private, feminine world of the home.³ Metaphors of femininity underlie much modern commentary on Cowper as well: “Discounting his innate modesty and a tendency to apologize for his authorship, such remarks [about the necessity of amusement] seem appropriate to the leisurely pace and comparatively mild emotional drive of much of his verse.”⁴ Though commonplace now, this association was not made by his earliest reviewers.⁵ Rather, it appeared after his poetry was published in editions that contained his biography, such as those of Hayley, Southey, and Grimshawe. When his poetry was read in a biographical light, critics saw the femininity of his life reflected in his poetry and vice versa. Some, like Hazlitt, claimed that Cowper's femininity lessened the value of his poetry. For Evangelists like Grimshawe, who associated the feminine with moral virtue, the femininity of Cowper's life reinforced the exemplary character of his poetry.⁶ Sainte-Beuve found him to be the supreme poet of family life (p. 182). For these early critics, Cowper's femininity was a central issue in reading and evaluating him.

The trap that Cowper's femininity has posed so often for his critics is that of condescension, and more recent critics like Martin Priestman and Bill Hutchings have tried to divorce Cowper's art and life to escape the trap.⁷ Yet the earlier critics sensed an issue of vital importance to his poetry, and The Task in particular, when they discussed his femininity. Cowper's femininity must be understood in relation to the attitudes, expectations, and activities that were associated, either literally or figuratively, with women in eighteenth-century England.⁸ As is now familiar, the opposition between the social categories of masculine and feminine was expressed through polarities that implied the subordination of the feminine to the masculine, such as passive-active, weak-strong, private-public, leisure-work, dependent-independent, feeling-reason, beautiful-sublime, child-adult, and chastity-sexuality. Katherine Rogers has noted that

the qualities considered feminine were those appropriate to a subordinate class. Steele casually remarked that modesty is “the chief Ornament” of women, integrity of men. Both are virtues, of course, but the first is self-effacing; the second, self-assertive. Women were credited with wit, but this quality was supposed to predispose them to vanity and in any case was constantly made subordinate to the masculine faculty of judgment. Men argued, in a neat circle, that since men are the lawgivers, God must have qualified them with greater strength and reason than women; being better endowed, they should of course rule.⁹

The construction of polarized masculine and feminine attributes was hardly unique to eighteenth-century England. Then, as today, perceptions of the validity of these polarities varied widely, and writers such as Sterne, Wollstonecraft, and Richardson were constantly manipulating, reformulating, and challenging them. Nevertheless, the fundamental separation of masculine and feminine was well established and pervasive enough in eighteenth-century England to permit us to evaluate Cowper's life and art in terms of it.

Before his first breakdown in 1763, Cowper tried to cope with the pressures of the public, masculine world of London. His breakdown stemmed largely from his terror of the public; he wrote in his memoir Adelphi that he was among those “to whom a public examination of themselves on any occasion is mortal poison” (Letters, 1:15). In 1765 when he chose not to return to London after having left St. Alban's hospital, where he had stayed while recovering from his insanity, he signified his inability to sustain himself in a traditional masculine role as a money-earner. Specifically, he resigned his position as Commissioner of Bankrupts:

I had still one piece of preferment left which seemed to bind me under a necessity of returning thither [to London] again. But I resolved to break the band, and chiefly because my peace of conscience was in question. I had for some years held the office of Commissioner of Bankrupts worth about £60 per annum. Conscious of my ignorance in the law I could now no longer be contented to swear that I would do my duty faithfully in every commission, according to my ability, while I knew that I had no ability to perform it at all. I resigned it therefore and by so doing released myself from an occasion of great sin, and from every obligation to return to London. By this means, indeed, I reduced myself to an income scarcely sufficient for my maintenance, but I would rather have been starved in reality than have deliberately offended against my Saviour.

(Letters, 1:41)

He portrays the position of a money-earner as a prison, emphasized in the imagery of bondage, and it seems an overdetermined coincidence that his position should be that of a Commissioner of Bankrupts. In escaping this prison, he left the aggressive, public, masculine world for a private, feminine one of retreat. His characteristic diffidence took over to the point where he was completely dependent. Cowper wrote that he could not be left alone without feeling utterly helpless:

My brother who attended me hither [to Huntingdon] had no sooner left me than, finding myself surrounded by strangers in a place with which I was utterly unacquainted, my spirits began to sink and I felt … like a traveller in the midst of an inhospitable desert, without a friend to comfort or a guide to direct him.

(Letters, 1:43)

His most recent biographer emphasizes his “habitual shyness” and “extraordinary passivity,” both feminine attributes (King, pp. 32, 84). All his life and particularly after his first breakdown he needed mother and father surrogates to care for him: Mrs. Unwin, his brother, Dr. Cotton, John Newton, Lady Hesketh, and Margaret Perowne. Constantly, he put himself into the feminine position of submissiveness, passivity, and dependence. His madness only increased the degree to which he needed the support of others to live. Such attitudes related him to real and fictional eighteenth-century “men of feeling,” such as Sterne's Yorick, Mackenzie's Harley, and James Boswell, who thought Cowper's melancholy even worse than his own.¹⁰ What distinguished Cowper from them was his chastity, a trait that further reinforced his femininity. His early courtship of his cousin Theadora led to nothing, his semiflirtatious relation with Lady Austen ended in a complete separation, and the prospect of marrying Mrs. Unwin brought on another mental breakdown. Whether his sexual dysfunction was physical, mental, or both is still unknown; he almost certainly did not have sex after his first breakdown, whether or not he had had it before.¹¹

Not only his inner psyche but also his external daily existence was femininized. In the 1780s, when he wrote The Task, he lived far from the glare of London in retirement at Olney and spent most of his time in the company of Mrs. Unwin and Lady Austen. The Evangelism he devoutly followed was associated with women, partly because Evangelists valued women as upholders of morality and partly because the movement opened up new opportunities for women in the public sphere. His daily activities, gardening, tending pets, writing letters, were all stereotypically associated with women, as Reynolds's paintings suggest.¹² Although Hutchings has emphasized Cowper's skill as a poetic craftsman, Cowper often presented himself as an amateur (Quinlan, p. 113). He described his poetry as a whim, a therapy to escape painful feelings, and women's writing was associated with amateurism in the eighteenth century (Rogers, p. 23). While none of these traits individually would be distinctively feminine, together they suggest that Cowper not only followed but also intensified patterns of behavior associated with femininity.

Yet Cowper was not comfortable with his position, and his personal conflicts appear as textual ones in his poetry. His simultaneous identification with and struggle against femininity surface most powerfully in his masterpiece, The Task. Sexual distinctions are fundamental to the poem because Cowper imagines moral issues in these terms. The town, specifically London, is the bad woman. Her crimes are laxness and profusion:

It is not seemly, nor of good report,
That she is slack in discipline; more prompt
T’avenge than to prevent the breach of law:
That she is rigid in denouncing death
On petty robbers, and indulges life
And liberty, and oft-times honour too,
To peculators of the public gold.

(1.729-35)¹³

Cowper has some praise for London, particularly for her artists Reynolds and Bacon (both male), but, as Patricia Spacks notes, his condemnation of her is more powerful than his praise.¹⁴ He recalls the biblical tradition of the town as the bad woman, a painted Whore of Babylon who hides her corruption underneath a beautiful exterior. The hypocritical hostess and her friends provide a concrete example of the town's wicked superficiality:

                                                                                          She, that asks
Her dear five hundred friends, contemns them all,
And hates their coming. They (what can they less?)
Make just reprisals; and, with cringe and shrug,
And bow obsequious, hide their hate of her.

(2.642-46)

The hyperbole of her “five hundred friends” suggests how profusion collapses into emptiness. The hostess surrounds herself with friends as hypocritical as she. The conventions of the town do not govern amicable human relations, but replace them. Related to the town as bad woman is the university as bad nurse:

Now, blame we most the nurslings or the nurse?
.....The nurse no doubt. Regardless of her charge,
She needs herself correction; needs to learn,
That it is dang’rous sporting with the world,
With things so sacred as a nation's trust,
The nurture of her youth, her dearest pledge.

(2.771, 775-79)

The university is an extension of the town because both share the same faults, laxness and profusion. As a nurse, the university seems to offer education and discipline, but really promotes idleness. The wicked students are like bad children, “nurslings,” who ruin themselves because they do not have a mother on whom they can depend for correction.

The bad woman appears both as personification, the town and the university, and as particular human type, the hypocritical hostess. Effeminate men are another type of the feminine gone awry. Throughout The Task, Cowper manifests anxiety about possible deviations from a feminine ideal. Although he lived a life of leisure, did not have sex, and conformed to feminine modes of behavior, no one could condemn more harshly than he effeminate soldiers and preachers:

But, loose in morals, and in manners vain,
In conversation frivolous, in dress
Extreme, at once rapacious and profuse;
Frequent in park with lady at his side,
Ambling and prattling scandal as he goes;
But rare at home, and never at his books,
Or with his pen, save when he scrawls a card;
Constant at routs, familiar with a round
Of ladyships—a stranger to the poor;
Ambitious of preferment for its gold,
And well-prepar’d, by ignorance and sloth,
By infidelity and love of world,
To make God's work a sinecure; a slave
To his own pleasures and his patron's pride:
From such apostles, oh, ye mitred heads,
Preserve the church!

(2.378-93)

These effeminates exhibit the same laxness and profusion as London and the university; they are “rapacious and profuse” and Cowper emphasizes their association with feminine company. He was hardly the only author to inveigh against effeminacy in the eighteenth century, but the unusual length and indignation of this passage and a previous one on effeminate soldiers (2.221-32) indicate his deep uneasiness about this type and almost hysterical need to distinguish himself from it. He lingers in mixed fascination and revulsion over a type that suggests the dangers for a male taking on feminine characteristics. One goal of his poem is to convince us and himself that his femininity is not theirs.

Though “man” for Cowper is a far less concrete concept than “woman,” he often associates at least one aspect of “man” with abuse of power and insensitivity to emotional ties; the slave trade epitomizes this facet of Cowper's “man”:

There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the nat’ral bond
Of brotherhood is sever’d as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colour’d like his own; and, having pow’r
T’enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.

(2.8-15)

The imagery of bondage, in which the natural bond of brotherhood is replaced by the man-made bond of slavery, recalls both Cowper's memoir and the poem's earlier simile of the “unwholesome dungeon” (1.437) as an image of the town; it looks forward to his pessimistic presentation of “this prison-house the world” (2.661), where “the world” is the public world. His abhorrence of slavery is fired by his description in the poem of his own past as an escape from the bondage of public life. Only once he is safely away from the masculine domination of the town has he the courage to write, “I had much rather be myself the slave, / And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him” (2.35-36).

Not all men in the poem are wicked. Cowper pays tribute to artists, but his personal ideal is the good preacher:

He ’stablishes the strong, restores the weak,
Reclaims the wand’rer, binds the broken heart,
And, arm’d himself in panoply complete
Of heav’nly temper, furnishes with arms,
Bright as his own, and trains, by ev’ry rule
Of holy discipline, to glorious war,
The sacramental host of God's elect!

(2.343-49)

He elevates preaching to a superhuman office and transfers to the preacher Christ's attributes as doctor and warrior. The preacher is a specifically masculine ideal, one who can be powerful and active because he is sustained by divine authority. The other good man of The Task is his brother John at Cambridge. John is a perfect combination of feminine ideals, “manners sweet” and “gay good-nature,” and masculine discipline; while he was at Cambridge, “order yet / Was sacred” (2.783-86). Like the preacher, he uses his power for benevolent ends. Yet this exemplary figure is dead, inaccessible in the hostile present. Cowper monumentalizes both the good preacher and his brother until the ideals they represent appear hopelessly unattainable. In the context of the poem, both are overwhelmed by concrete, present evils, effeminate preachers and lax students. Cowper's good man is in an imaginative limbo, powerless against the combined forces of the bad woman and the bad man.

In contrast, Cowper pictures the good woman vividly when he personifies nature and the rural life. For him, nature is never a sublime, masculine force, but a civil woman, “nature in her cultivated trim” (3.357). He opposes art, associated here and elsewhere with man, to the superior, nurturing beauty of female nature:

The air salubrious of her lofty hills,
The cheering fragrance of her dewy vales,
And music of her woods—no works of man
May rival these; these all bespeak a pow’r
Peculiar, and exclusively her own.
Beneath the open sky she spreads the feast;
’Tis free to all—’tis ev’ry day renew’d;
Who scorns it starves deservedly at home.

(1.428-35)

The metaphor of the feast suggests that nature is always mother nature; the good woman is the good mother. Nature is an extension of his peaceful, domestic life in the country. Her mere presence creates a superior moral atmosphere:

          The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns;
The low’ring eye, the petulance, the frown,
And sullen sadness, that o’ershade, distort,
And mar the face of beauty, when no cause
For such immeasurable woe appears,
These Flora banishes, and gives the fair
Sweet smiles, and bloom less transient than her own.

(1.455-61)

His desire to portray the healing powers of mother nature draws him to identify himself with a woman; he, like “the fair,” is cheered by Flora out of “immeasurable woe.” His decision to describe a woman cheered by nature rather than a man suggests that his sensitivity to nature is a feminine rather than a masculine trait. Life surrounded by nature is not uncivilized, but civilization freed from the dangers of the town. Although Cowper seems at times to praise all society, he has a limited ideal of virtuous, rural society in mind. Spacks notes that “Cowper insists on a distinction between the ‘civilization’ of cities—characterized by ‘refinement’—and that of the country” (p. 185). This distinction surfaces in the passage, ostensibly about Omai, that describes Cowper's move from the bad civilization of the city, a refined barbarism, to the good civilization of country:

          Blest he, though undistinguish’d from the crowd
By wealth or dignity, who dwells secure,
Where man, by nature fierce, has laid aside
His fierceness, having learnt, though slow to learn,
The manners and the arts of civil life.
His wants, indeed, are many; but supply
Is obvious, plac’d within the easy reach
Of temp’rate wishes and industrious hands.
Here virtue thrives as in her proper soil;
Not rude and surly, and beset with thorns,
And terrible to sight, as when she springs
(If e’er she spring spontaneous) in remote
And barb’rous climes, where violence prevails,
And strength is lord of all; but gentle, kind,
By culture tam’d, by liberty refresh’d,
And all her fruits by radiant truth matur’d.

(1.592-607)

Cowper's move from London to Olney was a move from a place where violence prevailed to one that was “gentle, kind / By culture tam’d.” The civilization praised here is another aspect of the nourishing mother, the rural life. In his essay “Mother, Memory, Muse, and Poetry after Pope,” John E. Sitter has noted “the tendency through much of the century to associate the muse with the mother and the poet with the faithful son”; here, the rural life has become the muse.¹⁵ In relation to this mother, Cowper is a feminized good child.

Having associated the town with the bad woman and man, and the country with the good woman, he turns in Book 3 to develop his self-portrait more concretely. As in his memoir, he describes himself in feminine terms as a powerless, ineffectual, solitary being:

          Since pulpits fail, and sounding-boards reflect
Most part an empty ineffectual sound,
What chance that I, to fame so little known,
Nor conversant with men or manners much,
Should speak to purpose, or with better hope
Crack the satiric thong? ’Twere wiser far
For me, enamour’d of sequester’d scenes,
And charm’d with rural beauty, to repose,
Where chance may throw me. …

(3.21-29)

He refuses a major voice for a minor one by claiming that all his earlier social satire in the poem is as much “empty ineffectual sound” as that reflected by the sounding boards. Faced with his powerlessness to affect society, he concludes that “to fly is safe” (3.688) because he believes emphatically in a fugitive and cloistered virtue. In the famous “stricken deer” passage, he again pictures himself as a weak creature utterly dependent on the male “one,” Christ, who rescues him. As Hutchings notes, “[The passage] gives his own retirement a personal force, to add to the moral force accorded by his reaction to evil in Book 2” (p. 214). The male sex of his rescuer implicitly puts him in a feminine position, and the arrows “deep infixt” are tinged with phallic overtones. Identifications with feminine powerlessness continue throughout Book 3. His gardening does not require “robust tough sinews, bred to toil” because it is only an amateur employment, work “such as may amuse, / Not tire, demanding rather skill than force” (3.405-07). Later, he describes the need to sweep leaves from the floor “with a woman's neatness” (3.616). His description of crazy Kate in Book 1 assumes a retrospective significance from these passages. It is puzzling there because it does not fit comfortably with the book's predominant theme of distinguishing the town from the country. In light of Book 3, Kate comes to represent a dark side of the feminine, one more threatening to Cowper than the bad woman of the town because her insanity in some measure figures his own. Because her powerlessness and dependence lead to her madness, she raises the haunting fear that femininity may not be an escape from madness but a path to it. Like the effeminate soldiers and preachers, Kate suggests potential dangers in femininity that Cowper must exorcise.

He quiets the threat of crazy Kate by locating his feminized persona firmly in a space governed by the good woman. Books 3 and 4 present in concrete detail what the “blest he” passage presented figuratively. They contain many vignettes of happy rural life, but his most sustained portrait of “domestic happiness, thou only bliss / Of Paradise that has surviv’d the fall” (3.41-42) occurs near the opening of Book 4:

But here the needle plies its busy task,
The pattern grows, the well-depicted flow’r,
Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn,
Unfolds its bosom; buds, and leaves, and sprigs,
And curling tendrils, gracefully dispos’d,
Follow the nimble finger of the fair;
A wreath that cannot fade, of flow’rs that blow
With most success when all besides decay.
The poet's or historian's page, by one
Made vocal for th’amusement of the rest;
The sprightly lyre, whose treasure of sweet sounds
The touch from many a trembling chord shakes out;
And the clear voice symphonious, yet distinct,
And in the charming strife triumphant still;
Beguile the night, and set a keener edge
On female industry: the threaded steel
Flies swifly, and, unfelt, the task proceeds.

(4.150-66)

This passage has many implications for Cowper, but his equation between “female industry” and “the task”-The Task is particularly striking. “Nature in her cultivated trim” is brought indoors through the embroidery, and the power struggles of the town are tamed to “charming strife” and “threaded steel.” This female industry is Cowper's ideal, not a paradise within, but a paradise within doors. While his earlier self-presentation emphasized the weakness of the feminine, the domestic scenes suggest its sustained bliss. If he cannot have masculine power and assertiveness, he can at least have feminine virtue and industry.

He goes on to disrupt the town-country polarity, somewhat surprisingly since it has been the major structural principle organizing the poem. The country is not as pure as we thought: “The town has ting’d the country” (4.553). Cowper predictably images the country's corruption as a change from the good woman to the bad:

                                                                                The rural lass,
Whom once her virgin modesty and grace,
Her artless manners, and her neat attire,
So dignified, that she was hardly less
Than the fair shepherdess of old romance,
Is seen no more. The character is lost!
Her head, adorn’d with lappets pinn’d aloft,
And ribbands streaming gay, superbly rais’d,
And magnified beyond all human size,
Indebted to some smart wig-weaver's hand
For more than half the tresses it sustains.

(4.534-44)

The transformation of her wardrobe reverses the decay of crazy Kate's clothes. The profusion and laxness of the bad woman, the town, has ruined the type of the virtuous good woman of rural life. The male version of this decline is the peasant who becomes a soldier and returns having “lost / His ignorance and harmless manners too” (4.650-51). Like the university students, he has given up discipline and become a bad child, “crook’d, and twisted, and deform’d” (2.772), as opposed to Cowper, the good child. The falls of the rural lass and peasant bring out Cowper's distrust of sexuality: the lass loses her “virgin modesty” and the soldier is ready “to break some maiden's and his mother's heart” (4.656). His condemnation of their sexuality reflects how he associates chastity with virtue to bolster his moral character. Unlike them, he remains immune to the sexual temptations of the town, which are synecdoches for all its vices.

Surprising as the breakdown of the town-country polarity at first seems, it concludes a subtle but decisive shift in the middle books. If virtue versus vice cannot correspond to country versus town, then it must correspond to William Cowper versus everyone else. His little domestic paradise is not typical of rural life; it is unique. His solitary, feminine existence is the only bastion of virtue in a world rank with corruption. He is no longer just a type of the happy domestic man, but a special, privileged being whose superior virtue allows him to comment authoritatively on the rest of humanity. The difference between two passages about his authority as a poet dramatizes this shift:

                                                            What’s the world to you?—
Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk,
As sweet as charity, from human breasts.
I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,
And exercise all functions of a man.
How then should I and any man that lives
Be strangers to each other?
I cannot analyse the air, nor catch
The parallax of yonder luminous point,
That seems half quench’d in the immense abyss:
Such pow’rs I boast not—neither can I rest
A silent witness of the headlong rage
Or heedless folly by which thousands die,
Bone of my bone, and kindred souls to mine.

(3.195-201, 214-20)

Thus sitting, and surveying thus at ease
The globe and its concerns, I seem advanc’d
To some secure and more than mortal height,
That lib’rates and exempts me from them all.
It turns submitted to my view, turns round
With all its generations; I behold
The tumult, and am still.

(4.94-100)

In the first passage, Cowper justifies himself, as does Pope in “Dialogue II” of the Epilogue to the Satires, by claiming that he is typical, no different from other men. This stance dominates the early books, in which he writes satire as a concerned individual, but not one who is necessarily special. In the second passage, he has become special and superior. His position is the same as Johnson's “observation” in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a superhuman, prophetic stance. It has authority because the observer distanced from society can see its flaws better than those enmeshed in it. As Cowper knows, his stance is more rhetorical fiction than truth, and he treats his claim to it with some irony in Book 4. Nevertheless, to occupy a superior moral position is more powerful than to be in the same position as everyone else. In the last two books, Cowper grows more serious about his right to this position, and the authoritative power of his voice increases dramatically.

He licenses this increase by seeing himself in relation to God rather than to society. In relation to God, his marginalized, feminized existence is not a proof of ineffectuality but of prophetic power. He becomes the voice of one crying in the wilderness, the prophet in exile. Like Milton, because he is cut off from an ordinary vision, he claims he has access to a divine vision; because he is isolated from the power of man, he becomes a vessel for the power of God. Satire, which he admits is ineffectual, is the major poetic stance available to him when he sees himself in relation to society. When he sees himself in relation to God, satire fades before the superior force of religious indignation:

          But there is yet a liberty, unsung
By poets, and by senators unprais’d,
Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the pow’rs
Of earth and hell confed’rate take away:
A liberty, which persecution, fraud,
Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind;
Which whoso tastes can be enslav’d no more.
’Tis liberty of heart, deriv’d from heav’n;
Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind,
And seal’d with the same token!

(5.538-47)

Cowper now inveighs against slavery not because he feels compassion for slaves but because he possesses special insight, “unsung / By poets, and by senators unprais’d.” His use of Christian imagery might seem to imply a larger Christian community, but he never imagines himself in such a community; he speaks as the only virtuous Christian in the world. As a result, he infuses conventional Christian images with considerable personal passion:

          Chains are the portion of revolted man,
Stripes and a dungeon; and his body serves
The triple purpose. In that sickly, foul,
Opprobrious residence, he finds them all.
Propense his heart to idols, he is held
In silly dotage on created things,
Careless of their Creator.

(5.581-87)

Cowper's prophetic stance here leads him to transform the prison images that before expressed his terrified view of the town into a divine vision of original sin. He reveals that his passions have been throughout the poem in the service of a voice greater than his:

The still small voice is wanted. He must speak,
Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect;
Who calls for things that are not, and they come.

(5.685-87)

While he imagines that Deists obfuscate their prose with “poetic trappings,” Cowper hears and to an extent reproduces the biblical “still small voice” of God's grace. His poetry becomes more than mere trappings. The capital letters suggest the power latent in the voice that seems feeble and powerless; they are a paradigm for the poet.

The “still small voice” is a feminine image given masculine authority, and it underlines how radically Cowper has revalorized his feminine position. The man who earlier presented himself as passive and feeble, incapable “from heights sublime / Of patriot eloquence to flash down fire” (2.216-17), now flashes down from his “more than mortal height” the fires of religion. Because Cowper has left the prison-house of the world and ascended to religious heights, he claims that his vision is purer than that of those who cannot see beyond the everyday:

                                                                                Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smooth’d and squar’d and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems t’enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learn’d so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

(6.89-97)

Knowledge is masculine, proud, and public; wisdom is feminine, humble, and private. The stricken deer, made wise through solitude, turns to judge those who cast him out. He never doubts his religious voice the way he doubts his satiric one; as a prophet, he can be sure of the power of his words.

His revalorization of femininity becomes more pronounced in the final book when he recalls the activities and affections that earlier associated him with domesticity and re-presents them in a prophetic light. Nature and gardening now become pathways to God. He is no longer like “the fair” whom Flora coaxed out of immeasurable woe. Rather, by perceiving nature, he worships the divine: “Nature is but a name for an effect, / Whose cause is God” (6.223-24). As Spacks notes, “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” (p. 205). His closeness to nature is transformed from a relation to a benevolent mother to one with a powerful father, God. He is still the child, but one bolstered by masculine rather than feminine authority. The contrast between his physical walk through nature in Books 1 and 6 plays out in miniature his growth in spiritual power:

          Descending now (but cautious, lest too fast)
A sudden steep, upon a rustic bridge,
We pass a gulph, in which the willows dip
Their pendent boughs, stooping as if to drink.
Hence, ancle deep in moss and flow’ry thyme,
We mount again, and feel at ev’ry step
Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft,
Raised by the mole, the miner of the soil.

(1.266-73)

          Here, unmolested, through whatever sign
The sun proceeds, I wander. Neither mist,
Nor freezing sky nor sultry, checking me,
Nor stranger intermeddling with my joy.

(6.295-98)

In his joyous wandering he comes upon “the tim’rous hare” and “the stock-dove, unalarm’d.” His love for them is no longer a feminine indentification with “harmless nature, dumb” (3.329) but a proof of his ability to share his “universal Father's love” (6.449). Those critics who poke fun at Cowper for attacking cruelty to animals twice, in Books 3 and 6, have missed the point. The difference between the two passages demonstrates how the power of Cowper's voice has grown through his relation to God. Even his chastity is no longer a sign of virtuous femininity or mere unmanliness, but an indication of ostracized yet enduring truth:

Oh for a world in principle as chaste
As this is gross and selfish! over which
Custom and prejudice shall bear no sway,
That govern all things here, should’ring aside
The meek and modest truth, and forcing her
To seek a refuge from the tongue of strife
In nooks obscure, far from the ways of men.

(6.836-42)

Triumphantly, he pictures himself not as unfit for society but as too good for it. Cowper draws on the femininity of Christ to justify his prophetic position; the “meek and modest truth” describes them both. This passage is perhaps the clearest example of how, by using his femininity as a pathway to the divine, he guarantees his prophetic authority. Having brought himself into a loving relation with God the Father, he can see in himself attributes of God the Son. He also pointedly omits Eve from his version of the Fall story to avoid the traditional association of the feminine with original sin. The good child has taken on divine dimensions.

The poetry that results from his revalorization falls into two modes. The first is the paradoxical feminized sublime of the holy city:

Behold the measure of the promise fill’d;
See Salem built, the labour of a God!
Bright as a sun the sacred city shines;
All kingdoms and all princes of the earth
Flock to that light; the glory of all lands
Flows into her; unbounded is her joy,
And endless her increase.

(6.798-804)

Cowper's rhetoric stems from the Bible, but the role of the feminine in his poem underlines the climactic significance of personifying Salem as a good woman, the antitype of London or of Sicily, whose devastation by an earthquake he vividly describes in Book 2 as an evil that “sin has wrought” (2.133). Martin Price describes the status of the poet in Cowper's feminine sublime: “The poet has transcended the world. He must struggle constantly to regain that transcendence, but he disdains any show of power. His unsuspected mildness is as much instinct with energy as the lark's song; it serves only to protect the other self within.”¹⁶ Unfortunately, “unsuspected mildness” is not always aesthetically compelling. The vision of Salem is disappointingly feeble after the vigor his voice has attained in the poem's second half. It fails because the holy city as good woman is too easy a solution to the problematic of the feminine that Cowper develops. He does not infuse the description with the personal tensions peculiar to The Task, only with millenialist verbiage.

He takes a much greater risk in the passage immediately following, the only time in the poem he approaches a deeper sublimity:

Perhaps the self-approving haughty world,
That as she sweeps him with her whistling silks
Scarce deigns to notice him, or, if she see,
Deems him a cypher in the works of God,
Receives advantage from his noiseless hours,
Of which she little dreams. Perhaps she owes
Her sunshine and her rain, her blooming spring
And plenteous harvest, to the pray’r he makes,
When, Isaac like, the solitary saint
Walks forth to mediate at even tide,
And think on her, who thinks not for herself.

(6.940-50)

Cowper's “unsuspected mildness” becomes heroic. In these extraordinary lines, the man who presented himself in his memoir as being so dependent on others that he could not be left alone for a few hours imagines that the lives of thousands depend on him because he influences the weather. The moment of greatest sublimity is the moment of greatest silliness. Johnson's mad astronomer is reborn and taken with absolute seriousness. Cowper ventures briefly to imagine himself in a position of power and his poetic triumph is that we want to believe him.

Even in this moment of egotistical sublimity, his “perhaps” signals a reluctance to commit himself fully. As if repenting having given himself too much power, he afterwards presents himself with none:

So glide my life away! and so at last,
My share of duties decently fulfill’d,
May some disease, not tardy to perform
Its destin’d office, yet with gentle stroke,
Dismiss me, weary, to a safe retreat,
Beneath the turf that I have often trod.

(6.1000-05)

His fear of having transgressed is so great that he strikes himself down before God can. But the moment of sublimity is not entirely without effect, because it confirms a conviction of his adult masculinity that has been hinted at in images throughout the last two books, such as that of the free man who casts off his chains “with as much ease as Samson his green wyths” (5.737). He imagines the female “haughty world” to be dependent on him, and he differentiates himself from the bad woman:

She judges of refinement by the eye,
He by the test of conscience, and a heart
Not soon deceiv’d; aware that what is base
No polish can make sterling; and that vice,
Though well perfum’d and elegantly dress’d,
Like an unburied carcase trick’d with flow’rs,
Is but a garnish’d nuisance, fitter far
For cleanly riddance than for fair attire.

(6.987-94)

He has distinguished himself from the bad woman throughout the poem, but he distinguishes between “he” and “she” more resolutely here than anywhere else. In criticizing the bad woman, he takes on an uncompromisingly masculine role. In his closing tribute to Lady Austen, he proudly says that he was “obedient to the fair” only as long as he pleased before asserting his own poetic will to “please her more” (6.1008-09). God, not Lady Austen, is his chosen audience. Cowper has recuperated his masculine ego ideal of the preacher outlined in Book 2 by becoming the “messenger of truth” and “legate of the skies” (2.337-38). The preacher is the most acceptable masculine role he can imagine, and it is as such that he ends The Task.

For clarity's sake, I have presented as a linear progression what is actually a complex and dialectical development. Nonetheless, it is accurate to say that the revalorization of the feminine is an overall goal in this notoriously circular poem, and much of the greatness of The Task comes from Cowper's ability to manipulate the cultural commonplaces of sexual distinction into a source of poetic strength. The poem is difficult for modern readers because it has few passages of radiant poetic beauty; much of the verse, particularly when seen out of context, is second rate. Its power does not reveal itself in short excerpts (as it is often read) but in the movement of the whole, in which Cowper discards the Popean satiric vein that he knows to be ineffectual and re-invents the Miltonic stance of the inspired prophet.

For the romantics, The Task opened up new possibilities for the poetic voice. Cowper is not a romantic; he never asserted the value of his own personality apart from God and his prophecy is conservative, not radical. Instead, he empowered the figure of the recluse by developing the progress of the inner life into a prophetic subject. The challenge he posed for Blake and Wordsworth was how to achieve such power without paying the terrible price of isolation and madness. Rather than revalorizing femininity as Cowper had, they need to transform it. Blake's conception of mental fight and the banners militant of Wordsworth's Imagination hearken back to Cowper's belief that the true prophet's “warfare is within” (6.935). Yet even as the romantics make the prophetic position more masculine and powerful, they are haunted by the ideal of Cowperian femininity. Wordsworth's Prelude is indebted throughout to Cowper, and the lines in which Wordsworth epitomizes his ideal of the loving man suggest his deep awareness of what had Cowper accomplished in The Task:

                                                  And he whose soul hath risen
Up to the height of feeling intellect
Shall want no humbler tenderness, his heart
Be tender as a nursing mother's heart;
Of female softness shall his life be full,
Of little loves and delicate desires,
Mild interests and gentlest sympathies.(17)

Notes

1. Quoted in the intro. to James Robert Boyd's edn. of The Task, Table Talk, and Other Poems of William Cowper (N.Y.: A. S. Barnes, 1857), p. 12.

2. Lectures on the English Poets, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (N.Y.: AMS, 1967), 5:91.

3. “William Cowper ou de la poésie domestique,” Causeries du lundi 11 (1854): 139-97.

4. D. J. Enright, “William Cowper,” in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford, 7 vols. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), 4:392.

5. See the comments of James King in his William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ., 1986), pp. 154-55.

6. See his comments on Cowper's character in Boyd, pp. 7-20. For a discussion of the relation of Evangelism to women, see Barbara B. Schnorrenberg and Jean E. Hunter, “The Eighteenth-Century Englishwoman,” in The Women of England: From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present, ed. Barbara Kanner (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979), pp. 199-201. Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (N.Y.: Avon, 1977) provides an interesting parallel to some of the issues raised by Cowper's Task.

7. See Priestman, Cowper's Task: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1983) and Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper (London: Croom Helm, 1983).

8. Cowper himself rarely, if ever, used the words “feminine” or “femininity” to describe himself; the terms themselves are mine, not his. He often did just the opposite by insisting on his masculinity, as in his letter to Mrs. King: “There was a time … when I amused myself in a way somewhat similar to yours; allowing, I mean, for the difference between masculine and female operations” (The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King & Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1979-86], 3:221; subsequent refs. in text). His anxiety about femininity surfaces as early as 1756 in his essay for The Connoiseur, no. 111, about the mamma's boy Billy Suckling (Letters, 5:4-7).

9. Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1982), p. 38. Rogers's book, particularly the 1st chap., is the source of most of the information in this paragraph. Wollstonecraft still provides the best overview of the typical 18th-c. idea of the feminine in chap. 5, “Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt,” of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a chap. in which she quotes Cowper. Schnorrenberg and Hunter have an excellent bibliography of works concerning women in 18th-c. England.

10. See Boswell's comment, “I was quite shocked to hear of such a state of mind. My own was good by comparison” (Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789-1795, ed. Marlies K. Danziger & Frank Brady [N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1989], p. 129).

11. On Cowper's problematic sexuality, see King, p. 28, and Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1953), pp. 42-44.

12. There are many such paintings by Reynolds, but a sample would include Elizabeth (Widdrington), Mrs. Thomas Riddell (41), Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons (70), The Honorable Mary Monckton (77), Mrs. Pelham Feeding Poultry (91), Master Henry Hoare as The Young Gardener (112), and The Cottagers: Mrs. and Miss Macklin and Miss Potts (118); numbers refer to plates in Ellis Waterhouse's Reynolds (London: Phaidon, 1973).

13. All quotations from The Task are from Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 4th edn. (London: Oxford, 1971). Refs. refer to book and line numbers.

14. “William Cowper: The Heightened Perception,” in The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ., 1967), p. 185.

15. ELH 44 (1977): 331. Even when Cowper describes the pleasures of leaving behind for brief periods the familiar, feminine “shelter’d vale” for “forests, or the savage rock” (1.513, 518), he somewhat tames what could have been a move into a more masculine view of the wild by describing the “savage rock” as a place that “hides the sea-mew in his hollow clefts / Above the reach of man” (1.518-19). The rock becomes a protection for the sea-mew against the intrusion of man, and the rock's “hollow clefts” have feminine overtones.

16. “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review 58 (1969): 212.

17. 1805 Prelude, 13.204-10; quoted from The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth et al. (N.Y.: Norton, 1979).