The sun’s meridian disk, and at the back
Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge
Impervious to the wind.
Having further prepared the ground:
Th’ uplifted frame, compact at every joint,
And overlaid with clear translucent glass,
He settles next upon the sloping mount,
Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure
From the dash’d pane the deluge as it falls.
The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test. Had The Task been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it is, he is merely ponderous—a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence. In the fragment called Yardley Oak he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet. He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write it. “I reckon it,” he wrote in 1781, “among my principal advantages, as a composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one these thirteen years.” So mild was his interest in his contemporaries that he had never heard Collins’s name till he read about him in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Though descended from Donne—his mother was Anne Donne—he was apparently more interested in Churchill and Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton, Johnson’s disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He was probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. He described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later years, as “a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother Chester’s.” The passages I have quoted give, no doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper’s indifference to literature. His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters. But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman’s Homer. Though Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical reservations. “I should not have chosen to have been the original author of such a business,” he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth book of the Iliad, “even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time has wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should send a modern bard to Bedlam.” It is hardly to be wondered at that his translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of Vincent Bourne’s Jackdaw has.