The "Divine Chit-Chat" of Cowper’s The Task

  

William Cowper by George Romney

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; citations of The Task enclose book and line number in parentheses.

 

 

     R. W. had been at the center of the New York City artistic avant-garde since the ‘sixties.  When I knew him decades later, he habitually referred to the ground-breaking work he and others had produced in the most emphatically casual terms.  “We were just playing around.”  “Professors come asking me questions, but the main thing I remember is how drunk we were.”  “We did things just for the hell of it.”  Though earlier versions of Romanticism had exalted the artist as a visionary, a prophet, at least an “unacknowledged legislator,” the hip poets and painters and devisers of “happenings” took a cooler approach, as though art were simply an entertaining game.

     One effect of this pose is to foreground the value of the aesthetic.  If a work of art has no other value, no purpose, other than to be beautiful (or – expressing the same value in  milder terms --  amusing, or stimulating, or simply diverting), all the old excuses, most prominently to instruct, become incidental or irrelevant.  The poem or play or picture is justified if it allows one to pass some time in a pleasant manner.

      This stance is by no means novel.  Catullus calls his verses “nugae,” which Lewis’s dictionary defines as “jests, idle speeches, trifles” and Oscar Wilde ends his preface to Dorian Gray with the assertion “all art is quite useless.”  A few generations later Cage was maintaining “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all” n[1] while Frank O’Hara was touting his Personism, born, according to his account, when he realized a poem of his might just as well have been a telephone call to a friend.

     The eighteenth century is known for neo-Classicism, artificial language, and imitation of the greats of antiquity.  The era celebrated the imitation of Latin models (the Romantics in general favored the Greeks) many of which are highly conventional and structured , but which also include more relaxed occasional pieces and verse letters which prefigure Wordsworth’s advocacy of the “real language of men” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s conversation poems.  The fashion of posing as natural and casual had been growing through the eighteenth century in conjunction with the foregrounding of nature and emotional expression in content and a loosening of form, a trend apparent in the popularity of the ode, conceived since Cowley as allowing irregularity. [2]  The turn away from grand themes and settings is apparent in the popularity of topographical poems, both urban (such as Gay’s “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” and Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower”) and rural (such as Pope’s Windsor-Forest and a number of poems detailing agricultural operations including John Philips’ Cyder and Smart’s The Hop-Garden).  Each of these is structured with a casual colloquialism, as though in conversation. 

     William Cowper’s The Task,  called “the most popular poem of the late eighteenth century,” [3] was described by Burns as “glorious” [4] and by an admiring Coleridge as “divine Chit-Chat” [5], a term that highlights its wandering informality, and indeed the poem slips from one topic to another as freely as subjects might over a dinner table.  The poem’s occasion is social and its subject arbitrary as the poet explains in a prefatory note. 

 

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

 

The Task is then a kind of courtly display, brought off with sprezzatura to impress a lady, much as one might display elegant dress or a competence at dancing, music, or witty repartee.  While Cowper’s assigned “task,” indeed, as he says, turned somewhat “serious,” for instance when he started pitching his evangelical Anglicanism [6] and ventured on political topics such as opposition to slavery, imperialism, and France, its structure remains assertively casual, wandering from one subject to the next with no appearance of design. 

     The author’s intentionality is evident in the prominent use of the word “wandering” and words of similar import in the poem [7].  For instance, apart from calling himself a “wand’rer (I, 761) and describing himself as “wand’ring” (III, 692), Cowper says he is taking a “ramble” (I, 115) and speaks of “roaming” (IV, 232) and having “stray’d” (IV, 697).  So, apart from the arbitrary challenge that set the poet to composing, he developed the entire poem as an extended ad libitum discourse meant to give the impression that the poet is freestyling, to use a contemporary term.

    in a maneuver that recalls Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella ("’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’"), Cowper’s construction of what seems like spontaneity is, he asserts, the proof of his sincerity, directly expressing thoughts and feelings. 

 

Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere,

And that my raptures are not conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,

But genuine, and art partner of them all.

 (I, 150-153) 

.     The first transition following the opening history of sofas is as playful and arbitrary as its selection of  topic.  The only link is negative. why, in fact, the writer is not associated with sofas.  That article of furniture, the poet says, is for the indolent, whereas he and the woman he addresses are physically active. 

 

The SOFA suits

The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb

Though on a SOFA, may I never feel:

For I have loved the rural walk through lanes . . .

(I, 106-110)

 

     After a lengthy survey of the pleasures of hiking in the countryside “where peace for ever reigns,” (208) he pivots then on the excuse of the single word to wish “Peace” to the artist who fashioned a certain “ingenious” (I, 210) weather toy, in which the male figure (presumably triggered by low air pressure) is “an emblem of myself,” (I, 213) willing to venture out in harsher weather than his more “tim’rous” (I, 214) friend.  Though it is unclear how the discovery is linked to bad weather, he describes then a locus amoenus, a cottage he calls “the peasant’s nest” (I, 227), remote, wild, and beautiful, where he  might find “the poet’s treasure, silence” (I, 235) and cultivate “the dreams of fancy” (I, 236). 

     This particular dream is short-lived, however, for the poet realizing that the home belongs to a poor

“wretch” (I, 239) whose hardships would outbalance his pleasures, turns on his praise of nature and exclaims “Society for me!” (I, 249).  Returning then to his country surroundings, he notes a nearby allée or “colonade” of chestnuts and the verbs shift from past to present only for the verse paragraph to conclude with and obscure reference to the landowner John Courtney Throckmorton of Weston Underwood and a line so tangled its very syntactical knottiness becomes ornamental.

 

Thanks to Benevolus — he spares me yet

These chesnuts ranged in corresponding lines,

And though himself so polish'd, still reprieves

The obsolete prolixity of shade.

 (262-265)

 

The final line is surely justifiable only as a kind of jeu d’esprit, a delight in words themselves as all-but-palpable objects, a pleasure to handle for their own sake prior to any consideration of meaning, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens.

     Rambling on in the present tense, he then happens upon a molehill which suggest people’s mines in that it “disfigures earth” (I, 275), leaving a visual record of “the mischief he has done.”  (I, 277)  This he then associates with the vandalism of some “clown” (I, 288) who carved his names on a tree motivated by “the zeal t’immortalize himself” (I, 284).  The faintly self-mocking parallel with the poet himself, recording his own bucolic strolls in words he might hope would be remembered is unmistakable.

     Still, Cowper’s pleasure in rural rambles as well as in words is displayed.  The joy he expresses when seeing the light scattered by tree branches anticipates the dance of Wordsworth’s daffodils. 

 

So sportive is the light

Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,

Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,

And darkning and enlightning, as the leaves

Play wanton, ev'ry moment, ev'ry spot.

                                                            (345-349)

 

      Though this survey has covered only half the first book of The Task, the pattern is clear and does not change.  To continue detailing his divagations would be to belabor the point.  Cowper goes on to consider wide range of aesthetic, political, and religious ideas in the same desultory manner, reproducing his rural strolls in equally meandering mental associative streams.  Like a scintillating conversationalist, he has an observation for every occasion, and he drifts freely from one to the next.  His many serious opinions are stated in an entirely unstructured manner. 

     This offhand procedure is not itself vacant of meaning.  By suggesting that anything, even a sofa, can be made an aesthetic object, Cowper allows for the possibility of a generally illuminated consciousness in which every experience is equally profound.  If he risks the appearance of a slovenly formlessness, he also opens the potential for all life to be poetry.  His assertively non-functional discourse foregrounds the value of signification itself, that distinctly human trait, and its purely recreational value.  Cowper does have preferences and values, and he never shrinks from expressing them, but after doing so he moves on to another topic, and his path remains a self-justifying promenade.

 

  

 

1.  Silence.

 

2.  Cowley was followed in this practice by Dryden Behn, and Pope, later by Gray, Collins, Thomson, and Cowper and then by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.  Aiming for the sublime, many of these authors adopted an excited tone to dramatize their release from rigorous formal conventions. 

 

3.  Peter Leithart “The Task” Presidential essays, Theopolis Institute, available online at https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/the-task/.

 

4. Letter to Mrs. Dunlop of December 25, 1795.

 

5.  Rosemary Ashton in The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (p. 30) quotes Lamb’s repetition of Coleridge’s phrase.

 

6.  Cowper was a close friend of John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace.”

 

7.  For details, see Raymond Bentman, “Robert Burns's Declining Fame,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1972).  Bentman traces a similar use of “wandering” in Thomson’s The Seasons.

Poetry's Long Memory

     The lesser poems of a master can sometimes bear more information about a culture’s deepest assumptions than more original and idiosyncratic works. Such an expectation is all the more likely in the case of a piece like Horace’s ode beginning “Dianam tenerae” (I.21) which is apparently, like the grand “Carmen Saeculare,” composed to order for a public occasion. To me this poem, for all its sophistication and polish, suggests far more archaic liturgies, reaching back to the Palaeolithic.
     The persona addresses a troupe of adolescent boys and girls, dancing and singing praises to the gods and to a range of wilderness locations, with the express hope that their performance will ward off the chief sources of collective suffering: war, want, and sickness. As maidens the girls are asked to address Diana, and the boys the youthful Apollo (with long hair), and these deities also provide a transition to the wild and holy places catalogued through the poem.
     The dancers are asked also to celebrate Latona, mother of Diana and Apollo by Jupiter. She (known in Greek as Leto) was born of Titans [1] and is in a sense backward-looking, as she plays little role in mythology other than as parent to this important pair. She, like earlier archaic Near Eastern fertility goddesses is a mistress of animal figures, associated with wild beasts. [2] Her ancient generative power is split in two in her children. [3]
     Each child is then associated with specific localities. As the primary projection of the mother goddess, Diana is treated first. She is identified with three mountains: Algidus, Erymanthus, and Cragus. Each is chosen in part for reasons of cult. Algidus in Latium was known as a center of worship of Diana and of Fortuna; Erymanthus in Arcadia is considered a site for Artemis’ hunts [5] as is Cragus in Lycia. Next Tempe and Delos are mentioned as haunts of Apollo. The mention of these wild places, important for hunting and for signifying earth’s generative powers altogether independent of human agency, reinforces the élan vital as the generalized object of the poet’s (and the young performers’) praise.
     Yet the specific place names, while serving this exceedingly ancient purpose, are also chosen as sophisticated literary ornament, to produce the maximum intertextual effect. The Vale of Tempe, for instance, in Thessaly, anciently associated with Apollo and the Muses as a cult center, is mentioned as well by Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid. [5]
     The address to Diana and Apollo to constitute a fertility charm through the powers of art in both poetry and dance is not peculiar to this ode alone. Indeed the magic in the service of fecundity is more explicit in other of Horace’s works. In the last four stanzas of his ode beginning “Dive, quem proles Niobae” (IV.6) after paying homage to Apollo for his literary gift, Horace asks the young people to dance, keeping strict time to his Sapphic meters, in order that the moon might bless the harvest. [5] He then foresees the dancers later in life, in marriage, presumably with children. Then, he says, they may boast of having pleased the gods with Horace’s meters. Again, his petition to Latona and her children Diana and Apollo employs the power of words, of poetry, to obtain life through food-crops and children.
     Horace’s “Carmen Saeculare” is a sort of restarting of time at the conclusion of an era of the sort most familiar from Central American ceremonies. Written for the national games, which included dance and song, this text includes again in the reader finds the same elements as in “Dianam tenerae”: Apollo the sun and Diana the moon, a troupe of young virgins, both male and female. Diana is here identified with Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, and the poet explicitly asks for the birth of many children as well as for rich harvests and prospering herds. Here, however, the concern is national, as befits the ritual occasion and the poet’s commission from the emperor. The poet recalls Aeneas and asks for Rome’s protection and for military victories as well as plenty.
     Such passages as these bring the reader back to the dawn of art and religion alike. Such rituals, at once hopeful for the favor of a gracious deity and fearful of the many calamities that bring suffering to mortals, surely resemble in essence the rituals enacted in Palaeolithic caves and yet today in scattered regions all about the earth. The basic human prayer is simply for life, both increase of the human community and of those plants and animals, both wild and domestic, on which people rely for their sustenance. World-wide, the technology for obtaining such blessings has regularly involved prayerful petition and sacrifice. Often, people reassured themselves with the principle of “do ut des,” assuming that their rewards should be assured if the verbal formulae and sacrificial offerings conform to prescribed requirements.
     But what is being offered in Horace’s poems? It is the dancing and melodious poetry the gods are understood to relish. The formal beauty of art which mimics the order of the phenomenal world thereby guarantees to the community that all is well and even, almost, under control. Though the Romans were not at this point practicing human sacrifice [6], the beauty of the young dancers is clearly part of the excellence of the offering. Perhaps we retain remote echoes of such practices not only in Broadway choruses, but also in our culture’s exaltation of young actors and athletes. Furthermore, many people today who have little faith in either institutional religion or modern philosophy receive an extraordinary comfort from the beauty of works of art. The chorus in Oedipus the King knows that the very existence of their dance is a sign that the world is well, that all is functioning as it should. [7]
     These poems represent an attempt at magic, the familiar ambition to influence through symbols the decisions of fate. The question of whether Horace in fact believed in the literal efficacy of such a verbal formula need not arise. Though even from early times, the modern reader often wonders in what way, if at all, the intelligent and spiritually cultivated thinkers of the ancient world accepted the pantheon of gods and the marvelous interlocking tales of their doings. One need not expect the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to come galloping across the sky to recognize the poignant power of the identification of humankind’s most dread enemies: war, pestilence, famine, and death, all very real threats. [8]
     In Horace’s poem the yea-saying implied by the delight in young bodies, in nature, and in art is primarily affective. Supportable by a number of ideologies or by none, it is in itself a sufficient strategy for dealing with existence. Horace’s assumption of an entire community feeling the same emotions in the context of a public performance adds a love of community to that of form itself, of individuals, of new life manifested in both people and wilderness. Even a wholly inefficacious petition to the gods is an eloquent outcry of human desire. If the horrors of life are not eliminated by the poet’s song, they are held at bay as the singer and the dancers and the audience join in a melodious and rhythmic statement of desire, the elaboration of which will, if nothing else, beguile a festive afternoon. Informative as a digital photograph, it is a snapshot of consciousness that perfectly and precisely preserves emotions and ritual responses from the very earliest human era. How much of modern art is likewise a worried attempt to impose order on the unpredictable chaos of reality? How many modern poems seek, like Horace, to overcome the anxiety of existence with beauty?


1. Today most accept the derivation of Leto from the Lycian word for wife, emphasizing her essential generative character. Some regard Latona as representative of the human mind as her parents were Phoebe, associated with prophetic wisdom and Coeus, governing rational inquiry.

2. See Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses and Aelian, On the Nature of Animals.

3. Indeed, according to Callimachus’ “Hymn to Artemis,” Leto’s daughter was born without labor, as a natural doubling of the mother, while Apollo’s birth according to the “Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo,” took nine days. The displacement of the prehistoric goddess resulting in the mastery of the sky-god Zeus/Jupiter took, apparently, considerable time and effort.

4. Odyssey 6.103 ff. Leto is observing her daughter with pride. In a striking example of the complexly interwoven mythological system, Erymanthus is also a son of Apollo, who watched Aphrodite making love to Adonis (or bathing)and was inconsequence blinded. Apollo took revenge on Aphrodite by changing himself into a boar and killing Adonis. (The Erymanthian boar is, of course, also the one killed by Heracles.)

5. Diana as the moon complements Apollo as the sun, which one might think has the greater influence on crops. The stress here on the beneficent effect of Diana’s lunar nature is a reminder of the primary mother goddess historically underlying the earliest cults of farmers and pastoralists.

6. Livy and Plutarch record instances of human sacrifice in archaic Rome. Prohibited only in 97 BCE, human sacrifice thereafter persisted only in such vestiges as the Vestal Virgins tossing of puppets from the Pons Suplicius and the suspension of dolls in trees as part of the Feriae Latinatae.

7. Oedipus the King, ll. 895-6.

8. In a suggestive variation of the motif, the Buddha set out upon his quest for enlightenment after encountering an old man, a diseased one, a corpse, and an ascetic, thus enclosing one solution (though not the one the Buddha ultimately adopted) with the problem.