Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 1.
Quotes from work
The Task
The Task: A Poem, in Six Books is a poem in blank verse by William Cowper published in 1785, usually seen as his supreme achievement. Its six books are called "The Sofa", "The Timepiece", "The Garden", "The Winter Evening", "The Winter Morning Walk" and "The Winter Walk at Noon". Beginning with a mock-Miltonic passage on the origins of the sofa, it develops into a discursive meditation on the blessings of nature, the retired life and religious faith, with attacks on slavery, blood sports, fashionable frivolity, lukewarm clergy and French despotism among other things. Cowper's subjects are those that occur to him naturally in the course of his reflections rather than being suggested by poetic convention, and the diction throughout is, for an 18th-century poem, unusually conversational and unartificial. As the poet himself writes,
Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 206.
“Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 92.
Context: Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.
“Silently as a dream the fabric rose —
No sound of hammer or of saw was there.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book V, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 144.
Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 161.
Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 127.
Source: The Task (1785), Book I, The Sofa, Line 506.
Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 40.
“Gloriously drunk, obey the important call.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book IV, The Winter Evening, Line 510.
“Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 223.
“What is it but a map of busy life,
Its fluctuations, and its vast concerns?”
Source: The Task (1785), Book IV, The Winter Evening, Line 55.
“Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall!”
Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 41.
“Doing good,
Disinterested good, is not our trade.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book I, The Sofa, Line 673.
“Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor;
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book V, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 905.
Source: The Task (1785), Book V, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 745.
Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 88.
“Detested sport,
That owes its pleasures to another's pain.”
Of fox-hunting.
Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 326
“The still small voice is wanted.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book V, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 685.
“Praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man,
That Chatham's language was his mother tongue.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 235.
“But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book V, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 187.
