“From reveries so airy, from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up.”

Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 188.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "From reveries so airy, from the toil Of dropping buckets into empty wells, And growing old in drawing nothing up." by William Cowper?

William Cowper174

(1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist 1731–1800

Related quotes

“He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket,
The moss-covered bucket, which hung in the well.”

Samuel Woodworth The Old Oaken Bucket

The Old Oaken Bucket (1817)

“Every day the bucket a-go a well, one day the bottom a-go drop out.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

I Shot The Sheriff, from the album Burnin (1973)
Song lyrics

“In a population of hundreds of millions, such a small number of people is a mere drop in the bucket… but enough drops can make any bucket overflow”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnDivided

“It still felt like hauling buckets from a well of memory with a rope that burned his hands.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book The Hallowed Hunt

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Hallowed Hunt (2005), Chapter 2 (p. 35)

“I intended all of that. And this is what I like about this, and drawings like draw, like the gunman. I call this the shoot out, the high noon draw. That was also my intent as well as drawings; draw a bucket back to the cables and the whole idea about drawings…”

Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954) American writer

On how drawings are used in all of its forms as a recurrent theme in From the Cables of Genocide in “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes” https://opencourses.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/ENL9/Instructional%20Package/Texts//Readings/Chicana%20Movement-%20Further%20Reading/An%20Interview%20with%20Lorna%20Dee%20Cervantes.pdf (Spring 2007)