Eratosphere - William Cowper

Porridgeface’s recent posting on "The Deep End" of his poem-in-progress, "Bedtime Story", which concerns the feeding of a flock of sheep in the winter fields, reminded me of these lines by the eighteenth-century English poet, William Cowper (1731-1800), reproduced below. They come from "The Winter Morning Walk", Book 5 of his long and digressive "conversation poem" in six books, "The Task", published in London in 1785.

Cowper is remembered these days (if at all) for his "Olney Hymns" and for such anthology pieces as "The Diverting History of John Gilpin", "Epitaph on a Hare" and "The Poplar-Field", but he was a much more various and interesting writer than such selections suggest.

For me, the peculiar savour of this passage - and of others like it - lies in the way in which Cowper, while writing from within a style that to us may seem self-consciously literary, nonetheless finds a personal kind of eloquence in describing the countryside and the countrymen he knew well: vivid detail shines through the conventional locutions which encrust it. In particular, his description of the woodman’s dog at the end of this passage is a little tour de force, combining imaginative observation with a skilful management of syntax and blank verse.

The scene is a frosty morning; snow lies on the ground (the "dazzling deluge" of the second line quoted).

The verdure of the plain lies buried deep
Beneath the dazzling deluge; and the bents,
And coarser grass, upspearing o'er the rest,
Of late unsightly and unseen, now shine
Conspicuous, and, in bright apparel clad
And fledg'd with icy feathers, nod superb.
The cattle mourn in corners where the fence
Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep
In unrecumbent sadness. There they wait
Their wonted fodder; not like hung'ring man,
Fretful if unsupply'd; but silent, meek,
And patient of the slow-pac'd swain's delay.
He from the stack carves out th' accustom'd load,
Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft,
His broad keen knife into the solid mass:
Smooth as a wall the upright remnant stands,
With such undeviating and even force
He severs it away: no needless care,
Lest storms should overset the leaning pile
Deciduous, or its own unbalanc'd weight.
Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcern’d
The cheerful haunts of man; to wield the axe
And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,
From morn to eve his solitary task.
Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with pointed ears
And tail cropp’d short, half lurcher and half cur -
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow; and now with many a frisk
Wide-scamp’ring, snatches up the drifted snow
With iv’ry teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powder’d coat, and barks for joy.

Clive Watkins