William Cowper's The Task

The Task was weird. I read it because I'd skimmed Kevis Goodman's chapter in Georgic Modernity and thought maybe the poem would be useful for thinking about personhood and individuality, which is something I've been interested in for a while. (Basically: are people just themselves, or can they be other people too? Where does one person stop and another one end? Does identity change if other things—money, nation, place—are pretty fungible?) I was especially interested in the part where the poem is sitting at home by the fire, talking about reading the news; that part seems like the poem wants to hide from the world and not talk to anyone, but I want to read it as the poem and its speaker being made part of a community through their remove from it. (I want The Task to be about blogging, more or less.) But now I think The Task is more interested in work, and kinds of silly work. It's called the TASK after all—and as the poem wears on, it gets more and more insistent about weaving that word into the end of lines. It likes to talk about various kinds of effort—moral effort, failed effort, frivolous effort, unrecognized efforts. (This is quite like Virgil's Georgics, too, which are at least vaguely about useful things.) Despite this puritanical impulse, The Task is still willing to make fun of itself, and so its biggest 'task' is the growing of tropical fruits and cucumbers in winter—it details how you have to pile up horse shit inside a glass house, have to make sure that the windows on the house are open sometimes to let out the heat because too much heat will kill the plants, have to refresh the poop sometimes or it'll get too cold, have to go around pollinating the flowers on the plants because of course there are no tropical insects to do it for you. And there's something sweet about the elaboration of all this detail: Cowper knows his project is sort of stupid, and dependent on shitty things (all those horrible passages about earthquakes and the apocalypse and how God is punishing England with effeminate fops and the prevalence of pubs), but he wants it to produce something lovely and rare and pleasure-giving as a crisp cucumber in the middle of February. It's kind of nice.

I just wish it weren't so damn long.