Study guide
The Task
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Overview
- Published
- 1785, by Joseph Johnson of St Paul's Churchyard, London, in a volume that also contained 'Tirocinium' and 'John Gilpin'; written mainly between the summer of 1783 and the autumn of 1784
- Genre
- Long discursive or meditative poem, mixing mock-heroic, georgic, satire, landscape description, devotional verse and autobiography
- Metre
- Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), in a deliberately relaxed, conversational register
- Length
- Six books, about 5,200 lines
- Setting
- Olney and its neighbourhood in north Buckinghamshire, the valley of the Ouse, Cowper's garden, greenhouse and fireside, in the winter of a single imagined year; London and the wider world appear at a distance
- Speaker
- The poet himself, a retired, devout and melancholy gentleman who walks, gardens, reads the newspaper and moralises
- Occasion
- Lady Austen's challenge that Cowper should write a poem in blank verse on the sofa
- Structure
- Each book loosely follows a walk, a season or a time of day, but the poem moves by association and digression rather than by plot
- Key themes
- Country against town; retirement and domestic happiness; luxury and its corruptions; slavery, empire and liberty; nature as the work of God; melancholy and grace; the hope of a renewed creation
- Influence
- The most popular long poem of its generation; a model for Wordsworth's and Coleridge's blank verse and for the Romantic 'conversation poem', and a favourite of Jane Austen
Context
William Cowper was born in 1731 at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, where his father was rector. His mother died when he was six, a loss he still mourned in a famous poem written fifty years later on receiving her portrait. He was educated at Westminster School and trained for the law at the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple, and as a young man in London he belonged to a circle of witty literary friends that included Bonnell Thornton and George Colman, editors of the Connoisseur. His early life and the crisis that ended it are documented in Ryskamp's study (Ryskamp 1959) and in King's biography (King 1986).
In 1763, faced with a public examination for a clerkship in the House of Lords that a relative had secured for him, Cowper suffered a breakdown and made several attempts at suicide. He was taken to the asylum at St Albans kept by Dr Nathaniel Cotton, a physician and minor poet, and there experienced an evangelical conversion. On his release he lived at Huntingdon with the family of the Reverend Morley Unwin, and after Unwin's death in 1767 he moved with Mary Unwin to Olney in Buckinghamshire to be near the evangelical curate John Newton, a former slave-ship captain. With Newton he wrote the Olney Hymns (1779), including 'God moves in a mysterious way'. In 1773 a second collapse left him convinced, for the rest of his life, that God had singled him out for damnation (King 1986) (Cecil 1929).
Writing poetry began for Cowper partly as therapy. His first volume, Poems (1782), consisted chiefly of moral satires in couplets, among them 'Truth', 'Hope' and 'Charity', which the opening of The Task recalls. In 1781 he met Lady Austen, a lively widow who settled near Olney, and her company drew him into lighter writing: she told him the story that became 'John Gilpin'. When Cowper protested that he had no subject for a poem in blank verse, she told him to write about the sofa. The Task is the result of that playful command, and its title names both the imposed exercise and the larger 'task' of living well that the poem gradually takes up (King 1986) (Priestman 1983).
The poem was published by Joseph Johnson in 1785 and was at once a success, establishing Cowper as the leading poet of the age. Its six books join several eighteenth-century traditions: the Miltonic blank verse of James Thomson's The Seasons, the georgic of instruction in rural work, the mock-heroic of John Philips's The Splendid Shilling (praised in Book 3), the satire of manners, and the devotional meditation (Terry 2005) (Sambrook 1994). What made it new was its voice. Cowper speaks as a private man, in an unhurried, intimate tone, describing his walks, his garden and his evenings, and moving freely between them and the great public questions of the day.
Those questions were urgent. The Task was written in the aftermath of the American war, during debates about the government of India under Warren Hastings, and on the eve of the organised campaign against the slave trade. It attacks luxury, the corruption of the clergy, the spread of fashionable London manners into the country, war, absolute monarchy, slavery and the treatment of animals, while also praising England and its liberty. Cowper later moved to Weston Underwood (1786), translated Homer (1791) and, after the death of Mary Unwin in 1796, sank into his final illness; he died at East Dereham in Norfolk in 1800. The standard text is Baird and Ryskamp's Oxford edition (Baird 1995); the letters, essential for the composition of the poem, are edited by King and Ryskamp (King 1986).
Plot overview
The Task has no story in the ordinary sense. Its unity lies in the speaker and in the rhythm of his days. Book 1 begins as a mock-heroic history of seating, from the stool to the sofa, and then rejects the sofa for the healthier pleasure of a country walk taken with a beloved companion. The landscape of the Ouse valley leads to praise of rural life, sketches of country figures, and an attack on London, closing with the claim that 'God made the country, and man made the town'.
Book 2, 'The Time-Piece', turns from description to judgement. It opens with a cry against slavery, war and cruelty, interprets recent earthquakes as divine warnings, praises England despite its faults, and satirises fashionable clergymen, decadent universities and an age devoted to novelty. Book 3, 'The Garden', begins with the poet's confession that he is 'a stricken deer' healed by Christ, celebrates domestic happiness and the quiet life, and then turns into a mock-georgic on growing cucumbers and on the greenhouse, before condemning the landscape improvers and the vices of the city.
Book 4, 'The Winter Evening', opens with the arrival of the post-boy and the reading of the newspaper by the fireside. Safe from the noisy world he reads about, the poet addresses Winter, describes reveries in the fire and the twilight, considers the honest poor and the drunkenness of the village alehouse, and reflects on the corruption of country innocence. Book 5, 'The Winter Morning Walk', describes a frosty morning, contrasts natural frost-work with the ice palace of the Russian empress, and moves into a meditation on kings, war and political liberty, including the hope that the Bastille will fall, before arguing that true freedom is spiritual, the liberty of the soul made free by grace.
Book 6, 'The Winter Walk at Noon', begins with the sound of village bells and the memories of the dead it awakens, contrasts knowledge with wisdom, and finds in the coming of spring evidence of God's continuous action in nature. After condemning cruelty to animals, it rises to a visionary account of the millennium, the promised age in which creation will be restored and all nations will praise God. The poem ends by returning to its occasion: the poet who was asked to dress a sofa with flowers has instead roved far and gathered fruit, and he leaves his work in God's hands.
Book by book
Book 1: The Sofa
Summary
The poet announces that, having lately sung of Truth, Hope and Charity, he now takes a humbler theme at the command of 'the Fair': the sofa. In a parody of epic narration he traces the history of seating, from the bare rock of the ancient Britons through the joint-stool and the elbow-chair to the upholstered sofa, the final achievement of luxury. He then confesses that he would rather not need a sofa at all, recalling the boyhood rambles that needed no rest.
The poem turns into a walk. Addressing his 'dear companion' (Mary Unwin), whose arm has been locked in his for twenty winters, the poet describes the view over the Ouse: the slow river, the distant ploughman, the elms, the church tower. He praises the sounds of nature, mourns the felling of an avenue of trees, and sketches figures met on the way, among them the thresher, a gang of gypsies, and Crazy Kate, a girl driven mad when her sailor lover was drowned.
From these scenes he draws a moral contrast between the country and the town. The South Sea islander Omai, brought to London and sent home, becomes an image of the innocent spoiled by civilisation. Cities are the home of the arts and of power, but also of vice, luxury and contempt for religion; health and virtue grow best in the fields. The book ends with its most famous line and with a warning that the fashionable town is spreading its corruption into the countryside.
Analysis
The opening is a joke with a serious edge. By beginning 'I sing the Sofa', Cowper borrows the formula of Virgil's 'arma virumque cano' and of Milton's invocation, and applies it to a piece of furniture. The mock-heroic history of the chair is a satire on luxury, but it also allows the poet to acknowledge his own invalid's need for repose. The sofa is never quite rejected: it returns at the fireside in Book 4. The poem thus starts by placing the private, comfortable, domestic world at the centre of a genre that once belonged to heroes (Terry 2005) (Priestman 1983).
The walk introduces the poem's method. Description is never merely pictorial; it is shared, remembered and moralised. The address to Mary Unwin makes the landscape a scene of companionship, and the poet insists that his raptures are 'not conjured up / To serve occasions of poetic pomp'. The sketches of country people show Cowper's sympathy and his limits: the poor are admired for patience and pitied, but rarely given voices. Crazy Kate, a figure of sentimental pathos, became one of the most reproduced images of the poem.
The contrast of country and town is old (it goes back to Horace and Virgil), but Cowper gives it an evangelical charge. The town is not just noisy and expensive; it is where fashion usurps the place of God's law. The famous line 1.749 is therefore not a piece of nature-worship but a theological claim: the country is closer to the order God made, the town to the order men have invented. Later readers, especially Romantic ones, would detach the line from its religious frame and read it as a manifesto of nature poetry (Newey 1982) (Spacks 1967).
I sing the Sofa. I, who lately sang Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touched with awe The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand, Escaped with pain from that advent'rous flight, Now seek repose upon a humbler theme: The theme though humble, yet august and proud The occasion--for the Fair commands the song.
The mock-epic opening. 'The Fair' is Lady Austen, who set the subject; the poem begins as a lady's commission and a parody of epic.
Thus first necessity invented stools, Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs, And luxury the accomplished Sofa last.
The history of seating in three lines: necessity, convenience and luxury, the stages of a civilisation's decline as well as its progress.
God made the country, and man made the town.
The book's conclusion and the poem's most quoted line, a contrast between divine and human making.
Book 2: The Time-Piece
Summary
The book opens with the poet's wish for 'a lodge in some vast wilderness' where the reports of war, oppression and cruelty could no longer reach him. He condemns the enslavement of Africans, declares that he would never own a slave, and praises the legal principle that a slave becomes free on touching English soil, urging that the same mercy be extended throughout the empire.
He then reads recent natural disasters, especially the earthquakes that devastated Calabria and Sicily in 1783, as warnings from God to a nation grown proud and irreligious. A celebrated digression declares his love for England, 'with all thy faults', and his scorn for those who betray its liberty and honour. The poet distinguishes between a just patriotism and the national vanity that leads to luxury and military display.
The second half of the book is a satire on the age. Cowper attacks preachers who are vain and theatrical, contrasting them with the true pastor in the mould of St Paul; he mocks the fashion for novelty in dress and manners ('Variety's the very spice of life'), the decay of discipline in the universities, and the loss of serious religion among the governing classes. The 'time-piece' of the title is the poem itself, which tells the hour of a corrupted time.
Analysis
The anti-slavery passage at the start of Book 2 is one of the most important texts in the literature of abolition. Written several years before the founding of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787), it was quoted by campaigners for decades. Its argument moves from feeling (the blush of shame at being a man) to principle (the freedom granted by English law after the Somerset case of 1772) to policy (the extension of that freedom to the empire). Cowper's rhetoric of sensibility shaped the language in which the abolition campaign appealed to the public (Carey 2005) (Hartley 1938).
The reading of earthquakes as divine judgement may strike modern readers as superstitious, but it shows how Cowper's politics are inseparable from his theology. National sins (slavery, luxury, irreligion) invite national punishment; the natural world is a system of signs through which God speaks. The same logic governs the praise of England. Cowper loves his country because it has been the home of liberty and true religion, and he fears for it precisely for that reason.
The satire on the clergy and on fashion links the book to Cowper's earlier moral satires, but the blank verse gives it a different texture: argument and portrait alternate with sudden personal outbursts. Brunström reads this mixture of satire and sociability as central to Cowper's achievement, an attempt to correct society while speaking from outside it (Brunström 2004). The line about variety, often quoted as a cheerful proverb, is in context ironic: it describes the restless appetite for change that the poet condemns.
Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more! My ear is pained, My soul is sick with every day's report Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
The famous opening wish for escape from news of 'wrong and outrage', which the rest of the poem cannot honour: the world keeps breaking in.
I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep, And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold have ever earned.
The personal refusal at the heart of the anti-slavery passage, stated in the first person and in moral, not economic, terms.
England, with all thy faults, I love thee still-- My country! and while yet a nook is left,
Patriotism with reservations: love of country survives knowledge of its faults.
Book 3: The Garden
Summary
The poet compares himself to a traveller lost in thickets and bogs who suddenly finds a smooth path: having rambled far from the sofa, he returns gladly to the quiet theme of retirement. He praises domestic happiness as the 'only bliss / Of Paradise that has survived the fall' and confesses his own history: he was 'a stricken deer that left the herd', wounded and seeking to die, until he was found and healed by one who bore wounds in his hands and side.
From this vantage he looks back at the world and finds all its pursuits vain: the ambitions of politicians, the speculations of natural philosophers who measure the stars but ignore their Maker, the historian and the scholar. He celebrates the life of the man who retires to the country, reads, gardens and serves God, and describes his own pets, including the tame hare that he rescued and kept.
The middle of the book is a practical georgic of the garden. With mock-epic gravity the poet explains how to raise cucumbers in a hotbed of fermenting manure, and then describes the greenhouse with its exotic plants. He turns to satirise the fashionable landscape gardeners, especially Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 'the omnipotent magician', who sweep away old houses and trees to make artificial prospects, and the ruinous expense of country estates, before closing with a renewed attack on London and its crimes.
Analysis
The 'stricken deer' passage is the autobiographical heart of the poem. It condenses Cowper's breakdown, his attempted suicide and his conversion into a single allegory, drawing on the wounded deer of Virgil's Aeneid (Book 4, where Dido is compared to a hind struck by a shepherd's arrow) and on the iconography of Christ's wounds. The healer who has 'himself / Been hurt by the archers' is Christ. The passage gave Cowper's first great biographer, David Cecil, his title, and it has shaped the image of Cowper as a tender, damaged recluse ever since (Cecil 1929) (King 1986).
Domestic happiness is presented as a fragment of Eden that survives the Fall. This is a large claim for small things, and it is typical of the poem. The garden, the hearth and the companion are not escapes from moral life but its proper sphere. Critics have debated whether this ideal of retirement is a quietist withdrawal or a positive social programme; Newey stresses the anxious, defensive quality of Cowper's retreat, while Priestman sees the garden as the point where the poem's competing impulses are held together (Newey 1982) (Priestman 1983).
The cucumber passage is the poem's most daring mixture of styles. Cowper apologises to the 'sage dispensers of poetic fame' for treating a dung-heap in Miltonic verse, and his technical instructions parody the georgic tradition from Virgil to John Philips. Yet the comedy is affectionate. Gardening is a model of patient, humble work that cooperates with nature, and it stands against the destructive grandeur of the improvers. Hutchings shows how such scenes of human activity give the poem its moral texture (Hutchings 1983) (Goodman 2004).
Domestic happiness, thou only bliss Of Paradise that has survived the fall!
Domestic happiness as the one remnant of Paradise, the poem's central claim for private life.
I was a stricken deer that left the herd Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt My panting side was charged, when I withdrew To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
The 'stricken deer': Cowper's breakdown and withdrawal from the world, in the image that came to define him.
There was I found by one who had himself Been hurt by the archers. In his side he bore, And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars. With gentle force soliciting the darts He drew them forth, and healed and bade me live.
The healer is Christ, wounded in hands, feet and side; the conversion is told as an act of tender surgery.
Book 4: The Winter Evening
Summary
The book opens with the sound of the post-horn on the bridge over the frozen Ouse. The post-boy, 'the herald of a noisy world', rides in carelessly with his bag of letters and newspapers, indifferent to the joys and griefs he carries. The poet longs to know the news: the progress of the war, the state of India, the debates in Parliament. Then the shutters are closed, the curtains drawn, the sofa wheeled round, and tea is made: 'the cups, / That cheer but not inebriate'.
Reading the newspaper, the poet surveys the world 'through the loopholes of retreat': politics, finance, fashion, quack doctors and showmen. He addresses Winter as a king of the 'inverted year' and praises the long evenings it brings. He describes the half-waking reveries of the fireside, when he sees towers and faces in the coals or watches the sooty film on the grate that superstition takes as a sign of a visitor, and the gradual coming of twilight.
The second half of the book looks at the rural poor. The poet praises a cottager's family, honest and frugal in their hardship, and distinguishes them from the idle and vicious poor. He condemns the village alehouse and the corruption of country people by luxury and by the militia, and concludes that the golden age of rural innocence, if it ever existed, is long gone. The book ends with a return to the evening's tranquillity.
Analysis
The post-boy and the newspaper make Book 4 a crucial document of the eighteenth-century public sphere. The retired poet depends on the world he claims to have left: news arrives, is consumed at leisure, and becomes the material of meditation. Kevis Goodman reads this passage as a georgic encounter with the mediated history of the age, in which the sound and noise of the news are felt as a kind of disturbance even within the snug interior (Goodman 2004). The poem's retirement is never sealed off.
The fireside scene is a small masterpiece of domestic poetry. The famous phrase about tea that cheers 'but not inebriate' adapts a line from the philosopher George Berkeley's praise of tar-water, and the whole passage is built from small, warm details: the urn, the curtains, the turned sofa. It establishes the interior as a place of thought, conversation and reading, and it shaped the later poetry of domestic comfort.
The reverie by the fire (4.286ff.) is the passage most directly echoed by Coleridge in 'Frost at Midnight' (1798), where the 'stranger' fluttering on the grate becomes the starting point for a meditation on mind, memory and childhood. Cowper describes the 'indolent vacuity of thought' in which the understanding rests; Coleridge turns that idle state into the medium of imaginative self-reflection. This link is central to the argument that The Task anticipates the Romantic conversation poem (Everest 1979) (Abrams 1984).
He comes, the herald of a noisy world, With spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks, News from all nations lumbering at his back.
The post-boy, bringing the world into the poet's retreat.
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
The fireside ritual, with the famous phrase about tea; the sofa of Book 1 returns in its domestic setting.
Nor less amused have I quiescent watched The sooty films that play upon the bars Pendulous, and foreboding in the view Of superstition, prophesying still, Though still deceived, some stranger's near approach.
The 'stranger' on the grate, the source Coleridge recalled in 'Frost at Midnight'.
Book 5: The Winter Morning Walk
Summary
On a frosty morning the poet walks out and watches his own long shadow on the snow, the cattle waiting at the barn, the woodman and his dog, and the birds and poultry seeking food. He describes the wonderful frost-work of nature, ice hung on the banks where a stream leaps a mill-dam, in shapes no art could match, and contrasts it with the ice palace built in 1740 by the Empress Anna of Russia, a costly, brilliant and short-lived toy of absolute power.
The ice palace leads to a meditation on kingship and war. The poet reflects on how men first submitted to kings, how monarchs make sport of their subjects' lives, and how flattery and luxury corrupt rulers. He praises the English constitution that limits royal power and denounces the absolute monarchy of France, crying out against the Bastille, 'the abode of broken hearts', and declaring that every English heart would leap to hear that it had fallen.
In the last part of the book the political argument becomes spiritual. Political liberty is precious, but there is a higher liberty, that of the soul freed from sin by grace. 'He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, / And all are slaves beside.' The true freeman enjoys the creation as its rightful heir; the poem ends with a prayer that God, who speaks through nature, will speak to the poet's heart.
Analysis
The contrast between natural ice and the empress's palace is a fine example of Cowper's associative method. A detail of the walk (frozen water) generates a political allegory: art that imitates nature in the service of pride melts away, while God's works renew themselves. The palace is both beautiful and absurd, 'Thy most magnificent and mighty freak', and it prepares the attack on despotism that follows.
The Bastille passage (5.379ff.) was written five years before the fortress fell, and after 1789 it was read as a prophecy. Cowper's language of chains and broken hearts belongs to a long English tradition of contrasting British liberty with French tyranny, but his claim that liberty's cause is 'the cause of man', which no 'narrow bounds' can confine, points beyond patriotism to a universal language of rights. The note in which he hopes not to be blamed for 'unnecessary warmth' shows that he knew such sentiments were controversial (Newey 1982) (King 1986).
The move from political to spiritual freedom is characteristic of evangelical thought, and it has been read in opposite ways. To some critics it weakens the political radicalism of the poem, turning attention away from institutions; to others it grounds the critique of tyranny in a conviction that no earthly power owns the soul. The book's conclusion, in which the freeman of grace looks at nature and sees it as his own, also prepares for the visionary ending of Book 6 (Brunström 2004) (Priestman 1983).
Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ, Thy most magnificent and mighty freak, The wonder of the North. No forest fell When thou wouldst build; no quarry sent its stores To enrich thy walls; but thou didst hew the floods, And make thy marble of the glassy wave.
The ice palace of the Empress Anna, the work of despotic pride set against nature's frost-work.
Her house of bondage worse than that of old Which God avenged on Pharaoh--the Bastille! Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts, Ye dungeons and ye cages of despair,
The Bastille, written in 1784 and read after 1789 as prophetic.
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves beside. There's not a chain
The turn from political to spiritual liberty, echoing John 8:32.
Book 6: The Winter Walk at Noon
Summary
The sound of village bells carried on the wind opens 'all the cells / Where memory slept': the poet retraces his life and thinks of friends and a father now gone, whose love was not valued enough while they lived. He walks at noon in the winter sun, among the frost-laden trees, and contrasts the pride of knowledge, which books give, with the humility of wisdom, which comes from God. He observes the signs of spring hidden in the winter woods and imagines the season's return in a catalogue of flowering shrubs.
From the annual renewal of nature he argues against those who see nature as an independent machine: 'Nature is but a name for an effect / Whose cause is God.' He condemns cruelty to animals, telling the story of Misagathus, a scoffer who spurs his horse to the edge of a cliff to prove his contempt for death and is later killed by the same horse, and declares that he would not count as a friend anyone 'who needlessly sets foot upon a worm'.
The poem then rises to its climax: a prophecy of the millennium, when six thousand years of sorrow will end and creation will be restored. In language drawn from Isaiah and Revelation he describes a world where the lion grazes with the flock, where all nations sing 'Worthy the Lamb', and where the new Jerusalem shines. Returning to himself, the poet praises the obscure, useful life of the retired Christian and ends by recalling the sofa he was asked to dress with flowers, leaving the fruit he has gathered to the judgement of God.
Analysis
The bells at the opening make Book 6 a book of time and memory. As in the stricken-deer passage, the personal note is brief but deep, and it gives authority to the larger meditations that follow. The distinction between knowledge and wisdom, put in two aphoristic lines, sums up the poem's suspicion of secular learning without despising it.
The account of nature as God's continuous work is the theological foundation of the whole poem. Cowper rejects the idea, common in eighteenth-century deism, of a world machine that runs by itself once created. Every spring is a fresh act of divine power. This sacramental view of nature explains why description in The Task is always also devotion, and it marks the difference between Cowper and the Romantic poets who learned from him but often gave nature its own spiritual life (Spacks 1967) (Newey 1982).
The millennial vision has been seen either as a sudden leap out of the poem's quiet manner or as its natural fulfilment. Priestman argues that the six books are organised around a movement from the fallen present to a redeemed future, so that the vision completes the poem's structure (Priestman 1983). The final lines return, with gentle irony, to Lady Austen's commission: the 'light task' of the sofa has become a serious one. The closing prayer, which breaks off in a dash before 'prosper even mine', places the whole poem under God's judgement rather than the reader's.
Nature is but a name for an effect Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire
The theological centre of the poem: nature as the visible effect of God's continuing action.
I would not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
The humanitarian creed applied to animals, a position for which Cowper became famous.
The groans of Nature in this nether world, Which Heaven has heard for ages, have an end. Foretold by prophets, and by poets sung, Whose fire was kindled at the prophets' lamp, The time of rest, the promised Sabbath, comes.
The opening of the millennial vision: creation's groans (Romans 8:22) are about to end.
Characters
The poet and his circle
- The poet
- The speaker of the poem is William Cowper himself, presented without disguise: a retired gentleman in his fifties, an invalid and a convert, who walks, gardens, reads the papers and keeps pets. He is gentle, humorous and self-deprecating, but also capable of fierce indignation against cruelty and corruption. His melancholy surfaces in the 'stricken deer' passage and his faith shapes every judgement. The poem's unity depends on the consistency and charm of this voice.
- Mary Unwin
- The 'dear companion' of Cowper's walks in Book 1, whose arm has been locked in his for 'this twentieth winter'. The widow of the Reverend Morley Unwin, she cared for Cowper from 1765 until her own disabling strokes in the 1790s; he later addressed her in the poem 'To Mary'. In The Task she embodies the domestic companionship that makes retirement happy.
- Lady Austen
- Ann Austen, a widow who lived near Olney between 1781 and 1784 and befriended Cowper. She is 'the Fair' who 'commands the song' at the opening and who is recalled at the very end. Her challenge to write in blank verse on the sofa set the poem going; the friendship ended shortly before the poem was finished.
- John Newton
- The evangelical curate of Olney and Cowper's spiritual mentor, co-author of the Olney Hymns (1779). He is not named in The Task, but his religion of sin, grace and providence pervades it, and his own past as a slave-trader gives a further edge to the poem's attack on slavery.
Figures of the poem
- The post-boy
- The rider who brings the mail in Book 4, cheerful, frozen and indifferent to the joy or grief he carries. He links the secluded village to the world of news, commerce and politics.
- Crazy Kate
- A girl in Book 1 whose sailor lover drowned and who now wanders the roads, half-clothed and distracted, begging only for pins. She is a classic figure of eighteenth-century sentiment and was often painted and engraved.
- The gypsies
- A band encountered on the walk in Book 1, eating their scavenged meal under a hedge. Cowper describes them with fascination and disapproval as people who choose idleness and theft over honest work.
- Omai
- The Pacific islander brought to England on Captain Cook's second voyage and returned home on the third. In Book 1 Cowper imagines him back on his island, longing for England and disappointed, a sympathetic figure who also shows how contact with civilisation unsettles innocence.
- The cottager and his family
- The honest poor of Book 4, who endure cold and hunger with patience and dignity, set against the idle poor and the drinkers of the alehouse.
Others
- Capability Brown
- The landscape gardener Lancelot Brown, named in Book 3 as 'The omnipotent magician, Brown', whose improvements destroy old houses and trees to create fashionable prospects at ruinous cost.
- The Empress Anna
- Anna Ivanovna, Empress of Russia, who in 1740 had a palace built of ice on the Neva. In Book 5 she is the 'Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ', and her palace is an emblem of despotic vanity.
- The fashionable preacher
- The vain, theatrical clergyman satirised in Book 2, who performs in the pulpit for applause. He is contrasted with the true pastor, modelled on St Paul, who preaches with simplicity and conviction.
Themes
Country and town
The opposition between rural and urban life runs through the whole poem. The country is associated with health, honest labour, natural beauty and closeness to God; the town with luxury, fashion, crime and irreligion. The contrast is summed up in the claim that God made the country and man made the town.
Cowper does not idealise the countryside without qualification. Book 4 admits that rural innocence has been corrupted by drink, poverty and the influence of London, and the poor are not always virtuous. The opposition is moral more than geographical: the country stands for a way of living according to God's order, which can be lost anywhere.
Retirement and domestic happiness
The Task is the great poem of the retired life. It values the small world of the garden, the fireside, the companion and the pet, and it claims that domestic happiness is the only part of Paradise that survives the Fall. Retirement is not idleness: it involves reading, gardening, charity and prayer.
Yet the poem also shows the limits of retreat. The newspaper, the reports of war and slavery, and the poet's own conscience keep pulling him back to the world. The ideal of retirement is constantly tested by the poet's sense of public duty, which he fulfils by writing (Priestman 1983) (Newey 1982).
Luxury and corruption
From the mock-history of the sofa onwards, the poem attacks luxury as the source of moral and national decay. Fashion, extravagance in dress and estates, the restless desire for novelty and the decline of serious religion are signs of a society that has forgotten God.
This critique draws on classical moralists, on the civic tradition that saw luxury as the enemy of liberty, and on evangelical preaching. It links the sofa to the empire: the comforts of the rich depend on trade, war and slavery.
Slavery, empire and liberty
Cowper is a passionate defender of liberty, both political and personal. He condemns the slave trade, criticises British conduct in India and the waste of war, and attacks absolute monarchy and the Bastille. At the same time he praises England as the home of freedom and urges it to live up to that reputation throughout its empire (Carey 2005).
The poem's highest liberty, however, is spiritual. In Book 5 Cowper argues that political freedom, precious as it is, is less than the freedom of a soul released from sin. This double idea of liberty connects his humanitarianism to his faith.
Nature as the work of God
Nature in The Task is not a self-sufficient power but the continuing work of its Creator. The changes of the seasons, the frost-work of winter and the return of spring are signs of God's presence and providence. Descriptions of landscape therefore become acts of praise.
This view underlies the poem's humanitarianism towards animals. Because the creatures belong to God, needless cruelty to them is a sin, and the poet's tenderness to his hares and to worms is part of his religion (Hartley 1938).
Melancholy and grace
The poem is written by a man who believed himself damned, yet it is full of cheerfulness, humour and hope. The 'stricken deer' passage tells of a wound healed by Christ, and the ending looks forward to the healing of the whole creation.
Many readers have sensed the shadow of Cowper's despair beneath the poem's calm surface: the need for routine, the fear of the noisy world, the self-protective quality of retirement. The tension between melancholy and consolation is one of the poem's deepest sources of feeling (King 1986) (Newey 1982).
Motifs
Walks
Books 1, 5 and 6 are organised around walks, and the movement of the walker gives the poem its rhythm of observation and reflection. The walk allows the poet to pass from landscape to people to moral meditation and back again, and it became a model for the Romantic poetry of walking.
The newspaper and the post
News from the outside world arrives through the post-boy, the newspaper and rumour. These intrusions remind the reader that the poet's retreat depends on the wider world, and they give the poem much of its political material (Goodman 2004).
Mock-heroic
From 'I sing the Sofa' to the cucumber frame, Cowper repeatedly treats humble subjects in the elevated style of epic. The mock-heroic both mocks and dignifies everyday life, and it keeps the poem's moral seriousness from becoming solemn (Terry 2005).
Winter
The last three books are set in winter, the season of shelter, firesides and reflection. Winter is addressed as a king in Book 4, its frost described in Book 5, and its end anticipated in Book 6, where the coming spring becomes an image of the final renewal of the world.
Symbols
The sofa
The poem's starting point stands for luxury and ease, but also for domestic comfort and the poet's need for rest. It reappears at the fireside in Book 4 and in the closing lines, so that the commissioned object frames the whole poem.
The stricken deer
The wounded deer that leaves the herd symbolises Cowper's breakdown and withdrawal from society, and his healing by Christ. It has become the emblem of his life and work (Cecil 1929).
The garden and the greenhouse
The garden represents cultivated, humble work in harmony with nature, a small Eden. The greenhouse, protecting exotic plants from the English winter, is an image of careful shelter and of the poet's own protected life.
The ice palace and the Bastille
The ice palace in Book 5 stands for the beautiful but transient works of despotic pride; the Bastille for the cruelty of absolute power. Both are set against the enduring works of God and the liberty of the free soul.
Critical debates
Unity and digression
Is The Task a unified poem or a collection of loosely connected passages? Cowper himself described it in his letters as having no regular plan, and many readers have enjoyed it as a sequence of fine moments. Its title seems to concede that it began as an exercise rather than a design.
Martin Priestman's study argued that the poem has a genuine structure: each book moves through a pattern of retreat, survey and return, and the whole poem advances from the fallen world of luxury towards the vision of a redeemed creation (Priestman 1983). Others locate the unity in the speaking voice and in the habit of associative thought, which makes digression itself the method (Newey 1982) (Hutchings 1983).
Retirement, domesticity and the private man
The poem celebrates retirement from public life, but critics disagree about what this retreat means. Is it a withdrawal born of illness and fear, an evasion of social responsibility, or a positive ethic of private virtue that criticises public corruption from a position of independence?
Vincent Newey emphasises the anxieties and contradictions in Cowper's retreat, the sense that the secluded self is always threatened (Newey 1982). Priestman and Brunström see retirement as a vantage point from which the poet can engage with society on his own terms (Priestman 1983) (Brunström 2004). The poem's domestic interiors have also been read as part of the larger eighteenth-century making of a middle-class ideal of home.
Evangelical religion and melancholy
How far does Cowper's evangelical faith, and his conviction of his own damnation, shape the poem? Older biographers, notably David Cecil, saw his religion largely as a cause of suffering, a harsh Calvinism that deepened his madness (Cecil 1929).
More recent scholars take his faith more seriously as an intellectual and imaginative system: the poem's view of nature, its politics and its hope for the millennium all derive from evangelical theology (King 1986) (Brunström 2004). The question remains how a man who believed himself excluded from salvation could write so confidently of grace, and whether the poem's calm is achieved in spite of, or through, his despair.
Politics: slavery, empire and the prelude to Revolution
The Task contains some of the most influential anti-slavery verse in English and sharp criticism of empire, war and absolute monarchy. Its Bastille passage was read after 1789 as a prophecy of revolution. Was Cowper a radical, a Whig patriot or a conservative moralist?
Scholars of abolition have shown how Cowper's language of sensibility shaped the campaign against the slave trade (Carey 2005) (Hartley 1938). Others note that his politics are rooted in religion and in a traditional English patriotism, and that he later distanced himself from the French Revolution as it turned violent (King 1986). Goodman reads the poem's sensitivity to the 'noise' of public events as a new way of registering history in verse (Goodman 2004).
A precursor of Romanticism
The Task was widely read by the Romantic generation, and literary histories have long presented Cowper as a 'pre-Romantic' who anticipated Wordsworth's love of nature and plain diction. Coleridge praised Cowper in Biographia Literaria as one of the first to combine natural thoughts with natural diction, and 'Frost at Midnight' echoes the fireside reverie of Book 4.
M. H. Abrams traced the 'greater Romantic lyric' to eighteenth-century descriptive-meditative poetry, and Kelvin Everest's study of Coleridge's conversation poems examines their roots in the intimate blank verse that Cowper made popular (Abrams 1984) (Everest 1979). Other critics warn that the label 'pre-Romantic' distorts Cowper, whose religious and Augustan commitments are very different from Wordsworth's (Spacks 1967) (Sambrook 1994).
Genre and the mock-heroic
What kind of poem is The Task? It mixes mock-epic, georgic, satire, description and hymn, and it often shifts register within a few lines. Some readers have found this uneven; others see it as a deliberate experiment.
Richard Terry places Cowper at the end of the English mock-heroic tradition that began with Butler, showing how the mock-heroic became a way of dignifying the domestic and the trivial rather than simply mocking it (Terry 2005). Goodman reads the poem as a modern georgic, in which instruction about work becomes a means of mediating history (Goodman 2004).
Gender and domestic sentiment
The poem was begun at a woman's command, is addressed in part to a female companion, and celebrates the domestic interior, a sphere often associated with women. Its tenderness, its sentiment and its attention to small things were sometimes described by nineteenth-century critics as feminine.
Recent critics have asked how The Task helps to construct a new model of masculinity, the man of feeling at home, and how its domestic ideal relates to the growing culture of sensibility (Carey 2005). Its popularity with women readers, including Jane Austen, whose characters in Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park read and quote Cowper, suggests how closely it was bound up with the literary culture of the home (Le Faye 1995).
Key passages
I sing the Sofa. I, who lately sang Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touched with awe The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand,
The mock-epic opening. Cowper recalls his earlier satires and turns to a domestic object, parodying the epic formula 'I sing'. The playfulness hides a serious claim: the poem will find its matter in private life. The opening also points to the poem's origin in Lady Austen's challenge.
God made the country, and man made the town.
The most famous line of the poem, concluding Book 1. It contrasts the divinely made order of the country with the humanly made town, where fashion replaces God's law. Often read as a slogan of nature poetry, it is in context a religious and moral judgement.
Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more! My ear is pained,
The opening of Book 2 expresses a longing to escape the news of war and cruelty. It introduces the anti-slavery passage and the poem's recurrent tension between retirement and engagement: the poet wishes not to hear, but the rest of the book is a response to what he hears.
Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free, They touch our country and their shackles fall.
These lines celebrate the principle, confirmed in the Somerset case of 1772, that slavery had no legal basis in England. Cowper uses it to shame the nation into extending freedom to its colonies. The lines were widely quoted by abolitionists.
I was a stricken deer that left the herd Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt My panting side was charged, when I withdrew To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
Cowper's allegory of his breakdown and withdrawal from society. The image of the stricken deer, drawn from Virgil and from the religious emblem tradition, became the defining image of the poet. The next lines tell of his healing by Christ.
Domestic happiness, thou only bliss Of Paradise that has survived the fall!
Cowper's praise of domestic happiness as the only part of Eden to survive the Fall. The line sums up the value the poem places on private, family life, and it was much quoted in the nineteenth century as an ideal of home.
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
The tea-table at the fireside, with the famous phrase about cups that cheer without intoxicating. The scene captures the poem's idea of the warm, sociable interior, set against the noise of the world brought by the newspaper.
The sooty films that play upon the bars Pendulous, and foreboding in the view Of superstition, prophesying still, Though still deceived, some stranger's near approach.
The sooty film on the grate, believed by the superstitious to foretell a visitor. Coleridge took up this image in 'Frost at Midnight', where the 'stranger' becomes a symbol of the mind's restless search for companionship. The passage shows Cowper's interest in idle, dreamlike states of mind.
For he that values liberty, confines His zeal for her predominance within No narrow bounds; her cause engages him Wherever pleaded. 'Tis the cause of man.
Following the denunciation of the Bastille, Cowper argues that the love of liberty cannot be limited to one nation. The claim that liberty's cause is 'the cause of man' anticipates the universal language of rights of the revolutionary decade.
It shall not grieve me, then, that once, when called To dress a Sofa with the flowers of verse, I played awhile, obedient to the fair, With that light task, but soon to please her more, Whom flowers alone I knew would little please, Let fall the unfinished wreath, and roved for fruit;
In the closing lines the poet recalls the poem's origin as a light task set by Lady Austen and describes how he left the 'unfinished wreath' of flowers to rove for fruit. The image explains the poem's development from playful exercise into moral and religious meditation.
Questions for study
How does Cowper turn a joking commission to write about the sofa into a serious poem?
Look at the mock-heroic opening and the closing lines of Book 6. Consider how the sofa returns in Book 4 and how the 'task' of the title changes meaning.
What does Cowper mean by 'God made the country, and man made the town'?
Read the lines that precede it in Book 1. Is the contrast aesthetic, moral or theological? How do later books complicate the idealisation of the country?
Is The Task a unified poem? What holds it together?
Consider the speaking voice, the walks and times of day, the seasonal movement of Books 4 to 6, and Priestman's argument about structure. Is digression a weakness or a method?
How does the 'stricken deer' passage shape our understanding of the speaker?
Think about its allusions to Virgil and to the wounds of Christ, and about how Cowper's personal history colours the poem's praise of retirement.
How does Cowper connect luxury at home with slavery and empire abroad?
Compare the history of the sofa in Book 1, the opening of Book 2 and the questions about India in Book 4.
Does the poem's ideal of retirement amount to a withdrawal from social responsibility?
Weigh the praise of the garden and the fireside against the newspaper scene, the political passages and the poet's claim to correct the age.
How does Book 5 move from political to spiritual liberty, and what is gained or lost by that move?
Trace the sequence from the ice palace to the Bastille to 'He is the freeman whom the truth makes free'.
How does Cowper's view of nature differ from that of later Romantic poets?
Consider 'Nature is but a name for an effect / Whose cause is God' in Book 6, and compare a Wordsworth or Coleridge poem you know.
In what ways does The Task anticipate the Romantic 'conversation poem'?
Compare the fireside reverie in Book 4 with Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight'. Think about tone, blank verse, domestic setting and the movement of thought.
What is the function of the millennial vision at the end of the poem?
Consider the theme of winter and spring, the poem's religious framework, and whether the vision fits the conversational manner of the rest of the poem.
Further reading
- Abrams, M. H. The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism. New York: Norton, 1984.
- Baird, John D., and Charles Ryskamp, eds. The Poems of William Cowper. Vol. 2, 1782–1785. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
- Brunström, Conrad. William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004.
- Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
- Cecil, David. The Stricken Deer; or, The Life of Cowper. London: Constable, 1929.
- Everest, Kelvin. Coleridge's Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems, 1795–1798. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979.
- Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Hartley, Lodwick. William Cowper, Humanitarian. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938.
- Hutchings, Bill. The Poetry of William Cowper. London: Croom Helm, 1983.
- King, James. William Cowper: A Biography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986.
- King, James, and Charles Ryskamp, eds. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–1986.
- Le Faye, Deirdre, ed. Jane Austen's Letters. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
- Newey, Vincent. Cowper's Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982.
- Priestman, Martin. Cowper's Task: Structure and Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
- Ryskamp, Charles. William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq.: A Study of His Life and Works to the Year 1768. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.
- Sambrook, James, ed. William Cowper: The Task and Selected Other Poems. London: Longman, 1994.
- Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
- Terry, Richard. Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.