Trees in William Cowper’s Poetry
Résumés
Cet article aborde la manière dont William Cowper (1731-1800) fait usage des arbres dans The Task (1783-1784), “The Poplar Field” (1783-1784?), et “Yardley Oak”, un poème inachevé de 1791, en tant que figures de l’expressif et de l’emblématique. Le poète britannique a recours à un ensemble de caractéristiques artistiques empruntées à la peinture, l’architecture et la musique pour faire des arbres un pivot de ses descriptions de paysages. Les mélanges de couleurs, ainsi que les contrastes entre ombre et lumière, sont deux des techniques qu’il emploie afin de capturer les variations de teintes et de formes, tout en exprimant son admiration pour la beauté des arbres. Pour autant, il n’en exprime pas moins une forme de regret en constatant la transformation du paysage qu’il aime tant à la suite d’interventions humaines (la coupe des peupliers en est la principale illustration), de même que la distance grandissante entre les arbres et les gens, qui ne profitent plus de l’ombre que les premiers leur procurent. De plus, les arbres illustrent une réflexion menée par Cowper à propos de la signification de la vie et du temps, ce qui lui donne l’occasion de conférer à sa poésie une dimension méditative : le chêne et le peuplier, auxquels il consacre des poèmes, représentent l’état du poète, tout en reflétant la fragilité et la mortalité de l’Homme, comme le montre son analogie entre le corps humain et les branches et le tronc d’un arbre, qui se développent avant de décliner.
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- 1 It is in Wales (Carmarthenshire).
- 2 For more details, see Alain Corbin, La Douceur de l’ombre. L’arbre, source d’émotions, de l’Antiqui (...)
- 3 The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume II, Letters 1782-1786, ed. James King and (...)
- 4 Henry Stacy Marks (1829-1898) painted an undated oil on canvas entitled Cowper Walking in the Garde (...)
- 5 Geoffrey Keynes, “The Library of William Cowper”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc (...)
- 6 One of the six functions of language described by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), (...)
1Isaac Newton’s discoveries in physics and optics changed the way the world was perceived, prompting a keener interest in landscapes, both in visual arts and literature. Many poets dedicated texts to descriptions of real and imaginary locations. In Britain, John Philips (1676-1709), with Cyder (1708), was one of the first to write what became known as topographical poetry. There were also hill poems, as with “Grongar Hill” by John Dyer (1699-1757),1 who spent his time writing poetry and painting, placing emphasis on movement and perspective. In the first edition of The Seasons (1730), James Thomson (1700-1748) played with colour effects and visual contrasts. In the age of sensitivity, the British landscape took pride of place in poems, and trees were no exception. Since the Antiquity they have been described as vectors for human emotions, used as confidants, or silent witnesses to centuries of events.2 Their beauty was not lost on generations of poets, including the British poet William Cowper (1731-1800), who wrote in a letter from 10 November 1783 addressed to Reverend William Unwin: “Every thing I see in the fields is to me an Object; and I can look at the same rivulet, or at a handsome tree, every day of my life with new pleasure.”3 While marvelling at natural elements, Cowper shows how he made use of his sense of observation during his daily walks to record his impressions of nature, including trees, which are mentioned frequently in some of his poems, particularly in sections from The Task (1783-1784), “The Poplar Field” (1783-1784?), and “Yardley Oak,” an unfinished poem from 1791. Those poems contain an autobiographical dimension, and several passages point to the integration of the poet’s voice into a more universal reflection about what life means. To understand how he conceived of them, it is first necessary to go back over some episodes of his life. Cowper fell into depression and had to be institutionalised between 1763 and 1765. It was then that he met Reverend Morley Unwin (1703-1767), an evangelical pastor, and his wife Mary (1724-1796). When her husband died, Mary Unwin, alongside William Cowper, moved to Olney (Buckinghamshire), in a house called Orchard Side, with a garden. He experienced another nervous collapse in 1773, a period after which he felt guilt for the rest of his life. Gardening and the proximity of animals gave him comfort and helped him recover.4 Cowper held a few books on gardening in his library, including William Marshall’s Planting and Ornamental Gardening (1785) and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791),5 a set of poems about botany and scientific evolution that played a role in his description of an oak in “Yardley Oak.” Close attention to animals and natural elements was a key part of the rendering of his environment in his poetical works. Thereafter Cowper wanted to lead a quiet life, isolated from urban turmoil, and nature became a refuge for him. How do trees serve his aesthetics of nature, and what symbolism do they convey? The answer to those questions lies at the intersection of the notions of the expressive,6 and the emblematical. I would like to show that Cowper went from the expressive in The Task – borrowing from arts, especially painting – to a conflation of the expressive and the emblematical in his other poems about trees to offer a more personal and philosophical reflection about himself and the meaning of life.
Cowper’s Expressive Description of Trees: Borrowing from Different Art Forms
- 7 Cowper took to landscape-drawing, as indicated in the following extract from a letter written on 8 (...)
2When it comes to the expressive, Cowper describes trees through a multisensory experience, drawing parallels with painting, architecture and music. His descriptions have a lot in common with pictorial techniques – in that respect, he followed in the footsteps of many other poets who fell within the tradition of ut pictura poesis.7
- 8 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, Oxford, C (...)
3In the first book of The Task, he alternates between the general and the specific, detaching elements of the landscape while keeping an overall perspective. Reminding the reader that he loves the “rural walk,”8 he takes the time to describe what he sees, as reflected in this excerpt:
- 9 Ibid., p. 121, l. 163-171.
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in his bank
Stand, never overlook’d, our fav’rite elms
That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut;
While far beyond and overthwart the stream
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds[.]9
- 10 The River Great Ouse runs through Northamptonshire all the way to Norfolk.
- 11 “[…] the serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye (...)
- 12 Alain Mérot, Du paysage en peinture dans l’Occident moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 2009, p. 112.
- 13 Claude Gellée, better known as Claude Lorrain in Britain, was a French artist who specialised in la (...)
4In this georgic scene, the Ouse10 acts as a connecting point that is close to William Hogarth’s serpentine line, associated with the idea of variety that will please the eye.11 The importance of movement is enhanced through alliterations (“slow winding”, “sinuous course”) which helps the poet consider each element one after the other, while contemplating the larger ensemble, thus building a scenography. The format plays on depth, which enables Cowper to create an organised ensemble with smooth transitions.12 He divides space into three parts, with a foreground, middle ground and background, replicating the composition of seventeenth-century classical landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain (c. 1600-1682),13 by using a regular pattern, placing spatial adverbs (“Here”, “There”, “far beyond and overthwart”) following a ternary structure. The elms, the only element of verticality in the middle ground, appear as a point of stability in an otherwise constantly moving landscape between the river in the foreground and the vale in the background, and surround the “herdman’s solitary hut,” the only reference to the human world, acting as a sort of protection. Moreover, the trees are the sole natural element connected to the poet expressing his subjectivity through his feelings of attachment towards them (“our fav’rite”, l. 167).
5Later in the same book, he keeps resorting to painting-like descriptions:
- 14 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 124-125, l. 300-320.
Nor less attractive is the woodland scene
Diversified with trees of ev’ry growth,
Alike yet various. Here the gray smooth trunks
Of ash or lime, or beech, distinctly shine,
Within the twilight of their distant shades;
There lost behind a rising ground, the wood
Seems sunk, and shorten’d to its topmost boughs.
No tree in all the grove but has its charms,
Though each its hue peculiar; paler some,
And of a wannish gray; the willow such
And poplar that with silver lines his leaf,
And ash far-stretching his umbrageous arm.
Of deeper green the elm; and deeper still,
Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak.
Some glossy-leav’d and shining in the sun,
The maple, and the beech of oily nuts
Prolific, and the lime at dewy eve
Diffusing odors; nor unnoted pass
The sycamore, capricious in attire,
Now green, now tawny, and ’ere autumn yet
Have changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright.14
- 15 Joseph F. Musser, Jr., “William Cowper’s Rhetoric: The Picturesque and the Personal”, Studies in En (...)
- 16 Other poets did, like John Dyer in “Grongar Hill:” “Now, I gain the mountain’s brow,/What a landski (...)
- 17 That approach echoes what churchman Joseph Holden Pott (1759-1847) wrote about some trees: “The elm (...)
- 18 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 124, l. 288.
- 19 Cowper wrote the following sentence about painting in a letter to Mrs. King on 1 August 1789: “I am (...)
- 20 In his correspondence Cowper talks about his admiration for the Scottish poet and philosopher James (...)
- 21 These elements are reminiscent of the visual construction of the landscapes produced by Thomas Gain (...)
- 22 That stands in contrast to what the first president of the Royal Academy Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792 (...)
- 23 Cowper’s descriptions also echo the work of eighteenth-century landscape designers, some of whom us (...)
6The different shapes evoke the variety advocated in the picturesque aesthetics.15 This passage provides the reader with an example of prospect view, as the poet stands at the top of a steep slope16 — here what matters is the point of view, depending on how far the poet decides to zoom in on individual trees, to make them appear either one after the other, or on the contrary within a larger frame (“the woodland scene”, l. 300). He insists on the notion of identity — the description begins with an ensemble but Cowper insists on the idea that trees have an identity expressed in the form of a paradoxical phrase (“alike yet various”). Only an individual breakdown can reveal what the woodland scene contains thanks to a colour-based description (“each its hue peculiar”), uncovering the intrinsic qualities of each tree. The sense of perspective is important because the way the poet perceives the characteristics of each tree is based on its position in space: for instance, lines 303 and 304 end with the same alliterative structure (“distinctly shine”/“distant shades”), enhancing an opposition between the poet’s clear perception of trunks, and his reference to the shade. Through an outline of contrasted intensities of light (“in the sun”/“dewy eve”), the poet is recording colour transitions on a given day, as the description suggests nature is composing a picture which changes day after day, depending on each season. The enumeration gives him the opportunity to underscore their visual qualities.17 The species he chose all share a physical characteristic – they reach a height ranging from twenty-five to forty metres high, making them stand out. Yet there is more than meets the eye: each tree has its own individuality, and Cowper borrows from the visual effects of painting to delineate some of their features. This description revolves around an initial movement of the eye (“Now roves the eye”),18 and the poet sets up a hierarchy based on the intensity of tones.19 The long enumeration is filled with categorisations which chart a path through space and colours.20 The semicolons break up those lines into sequences based on groups of trees connected with tonal units (“wannish gray”, “silver lines”, l. 309-310), plays on light and shade (“shine”, “twilight”, l. 303-304), or gradations with comparatives (“paler”, “deeper”, l. 308 and 312 respectively).21 Tones are spread out to accentuate effects of luminosity, mainly with cold colours that highlight the sense of depth.22 By distinguishing the individuality of tree species while simultaneously creating a sense of continuity, he sets out to show how the poet’s gaze can identify their character, and record such changes which reveal that nature is ever-evolving, and has a palette of its own.23
7Other sections of The Task are dedicated to describing the opposition between city and country life, as exemplified in these lines:
- 24 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 123, l. 252-260.
Not distant far, a length of colonade
Invites us. Monument of ancient taste,
Now scorn’d, but worthy of a better fate.
Our fathers knew the value of a screen
From sultry suns, and in their shaded walks
And long-protracted bow’rs, enjoy’d at noon
The gloom and coolness of declining day.
We bear our shades about us; self-depriv’d
Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread[.]24
- 25 See l. 168 from The Task, referenced in footnote 9.
- 26 Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment, Liverpool, Liverpool University (...)
8Here Cowper uses the metaphor of architecture to oppose two types of shade, the natural one offered by the large chestnuts, and that provided by man-made shades and umbrellas. The poet’s wistful phrasing points to a call — these trees should be restored to their old use. A colonnade implies separations at regular intervals, the shadows of trees creating a continuous line. The reference to “bow’rs” (l. 257) brings to mind the image of being surrounded and protected. The alliteration in / s / (“a screen/from sultry suns”, l. 255-256), and the insistence on the dimensions of those chestnuts show how Cowper differentiates what is natural from man-made objects. In other words, nature provides human beings with everything they need – these trees are but an illustration of the simplicity of life Cowper championed. The nostalgic tone of the excerpt is a record of changing times – trees served a purpose, and man seems to be more detached from nature. The contrast between past and present is marked by the shift from one generation (“Our fathers”, l. 255) to the next (“our”, l. 259). Cowper thus has recourse to the recurring motif of trees as protective agents,25 representing a familiarity with the Ouse valley that also symbolizes a form of appropriation on the part of the poet.26
- 27 Cowper wrote many hymns, which are still sung nowadays, making him even more sensitive to the matte (...)
9Cowper’s descriptions are based not just on sight, but also, and in fact often, on sounds.27 In The Task, he hints at the musical aspect of the sound produced by trees:
- 28 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 120-121, l. 183-189. In a letter to (...)
Mighty winds,
That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood
Of ancient growth, make music not unlike
The dash of ocean on his winding shore,
And lull the spirit while they fill the mind;
Unnumber'd branches waving in the blast,
And all their leaves fast flutt'ring, all at once.28
10The nouns “dash” (l. 186) and “blast” (l. 188) are synonymous with power and rapidity. More generally the multiplication of monosyllabic words throughout the passage creates a fast pace that mirrors the rhythm of the wind, while the references to “winding” (l. 186) and “waving” (l. 188) point to the motif of undulation, an aural counterpoint to his visual tree descriptions. Trees are taken as an orchestral ensemble, working synchronously.
11This use of sight and sound carries into other poems of Cowper’s, for instance at the onset of “The Poplar-Field”, which features condensed versions of images already present in the extracts from The Task analysed above. The first pentasyllable initiates a three-stanza movement where the poet focuses on small details:
- 29 Ibid., p. 25, l. 1-12.
The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
The black-bird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charm’d me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more [.]29
12The last two lines of the third stanza end on a temporal note that evokes an indelible cut from the past. Trees are not only useful to humans, but are also companions to animals, here the blackbird. Cowper plays on the antagonism between presence and absence, the poplars felled symbolizing the remnants of a bygone world. Sight is connected not so much with sound, but rather with the absence of sound, which triggers a nostalgic recollection in the first quatrain (“farewell […] to the whispering sound/The winds play no longer”) where the wind is assimilated to a form of instrumentation and harmony. The expression of regret is reinforced by the succession of “fell’d” and “farewell” at the hemistich of the first line. The felling of the trees has a knock-on effect, as the blackbird is driven away, transforming the poet’s perception of the field: the repetition of the word “shade” at the end of the inaugural line and the last line of the second quatrain, connected to the adverbs “farewell” and “once”, suggests a sense of the irreversible.
- 30 Marius Golden, In Search of Stability: The Poetry of William Cowper [1960], New Haven, College & Un (...)
13Overall, Cowper singles out some of the visual qualities of trees to bring out an expressive effect. The lexical fields he resorts to, and the images he conjures up, with colours as well as light-and-shade effects, all originate from the realm of arts and architecture, to point out their aesthetic dimension. On a personal note, they also betray his deep-rooted attachment to a specific location, the Ouse valley, which has been subjected to alterations stemming from human intervention, which accounts for the nostalgic tone that permeates his descriptions. To him, trees are living beings and protective agents, hence his particular emphasis on the shade they provide.30 A harmonious relationship seems extinct, replaced by a new epoch exemplified in “The Poplar-Field” which marks a source of loss, as the poem marks a shift in his perception of the relationship between humans and trees. However, Cowper is not concerned only with trees as aesthetic natural elements, he also uses them to think at length about the meaning of time and life. The passages show how he deals with trees both at the individual level to show their idiosyncrasies, and as a collective, for the production of melodies, or the disappearance of familiar sounds.
Trees, Time and the Meaning of Life
- 31 “[…] and the stock-dove unalarmed/Sits cooing in the pine-tree, nor suspends/His long love-ditty fo (...)
- 32 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, Oxford, (...)
- 33 Ibid., p. 78, l. 15-16.
- 34 After tasting the forbidden fruit, Adam exclaims: “O might I here/In solitude live savage, in some (...)
- 35 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 79, l. 63-64.
- 36 Ibid., p. 79, l. 50-52.
- 37 Ibid., p. 81, l. 125.
- 38 “(Since which I number threescore winters past).” Ibid., p. 77, l. 3.
14The Task concludes with a sixth and last book which is less about aesthetics and more about time. Humans and nature live according to different time frames, with the latter having its own rhythm. The animal world lies undisturbed, and Cowper gives some examples of animals dwelling in trees: the birds, and the squirrel.31 Trees are shown as living creatures which are useful to others, as they harbour life. However, this image of trees can be qualified as he also connects trees to the idea that they may have known a glorious existence before falling into oblivion, as is the case in “Yardley Oak.” In this poem, one can follow the progression of a living, growing tree, witnessing its physical development in phases. The poet directly addresses the oak, which is a different point of view from the descriptive approach he chose in the other poems. He starts off with words referring to its genesis (“cradle”),32 doubling this description with a reference to the Tree of Knowledge: “like Adam after taste/Of fruit proscribed, as to a refuge, fled,”33 a direct echo to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with which he was familiar as he planned to translate it into Latin.34 Cowper cut the biblical episode short in his poem to focus on the Fall and underscore the idea of fallibility. He then moves on to show how mighty the oak has become “a giant bulk/Of girth enormous with moss-cushion’d root,”35 before concluding with how it has been affected by the passage of time with a change of status reflecting the image of the refuge of animals used in The Task, but without the admirative tone: “Time made thee what thou wast, king of the woods./And Time hath made thee what thou art, a cave/For owls to roost in.”36 Using a network of antonyms, he goes back and forth between past and present to show a transformational process which impacts not only the tree, through its gradual and cyclical process of disintegration (“Thine arms have left thee”),37 but also himself,38 and, by extension, humankind. Moreover, the oak is presented as a witness of history:
- 39 Ibid., p. 78, l. 40-49.
Who lived when thou wast such? Oh could’st thou speak
As in Dodona once thy kindred trees
Oracular, I would not curious ask
The Future, best unknown, but at thy mouth
Inquisitive, the less ambiguous Past.
By thee I might correct, erroneous oft,
The Clock of History, facts and events
Timing more punctual, unrecorded facts
Recov'ring, and mis-stated setting right.
Desp'rate attempt,till Trees shall speak again!39
- 40 The Poetical Works of William Cowper [1870], ed. William Benham, London, Macmillan and Co., 1889, f (...)
- 41 More details on the subject can be found in Herbert William Parke, The Oracles of Zeus: Dodona, Oly (...)
15It is a question that sets off a meditation about the relationship between the oak and time, as the former stood witness to centuries of historical figures and events. When addressing the oak, the poet introduces a modulation from the auxiliary modal “could’st” to “shall” in connection with speech, conjuring up the idea that the tree is a mediator more trustworthy than human eyes that can be prone to inaccuracies (“unrecorded”, “mis-stated”). As far as history is concerned, the oak is linked to two references: first a legend surrounding it (the tree was supposedly planted by Judith, a niece of William the Conqueror),40 secondly allusions to two oracles, Dodona to start with, the oracle of Zeus,41 then the poet himself. That choice gives Cowper the opportunity to offer a richer, more polysemic representation of the tree, at the crossroads of mythology, history and philosophy. The oak is presented as a silent witness of historical events, but the poet, in a regretful tone, expresses his inability to access that knowledge: he would like to become a historian able to unlock secrets from the oak, revealing hidden dimensions of human history that would transcend time, an idea underlined by the use of capital letters for the words referring to the divisions of time: “Past” (l. 44), “Clock of History” (l. 45), and “Future” (l. 47). The line “(Unless verse rescue thee awhile)” (l. 58) adds a meta-literary dimension, showing poetry can perpetuate its memory.
16His musing on the matter is further set against an activity, tree-logging, that he criticises:
- 42 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 80-81, l. 93-109. This sets a cont (...)
At thy firmest age
Thou hadst within thy bole solid contents
That might have ribb’d the sides or plank’d the deck
Of some flagg’d Admiral, and tortuous arms,
The shipwright's darling treasure, didst present
To the four-quarter’d winds, robust and bold,
Warp’d into tough knee-timber, many a load.
But the axe spared thee; in those thriftier days
Oaks fell not, hewn by thousands, to supply
The bottomless demands of contest waged
For senatorial honours. Thus to Time
The task was left to whittle thee away
With his sly scythe, whose ever-nibbling edge
Noiseless, an atom and an atom more
Disjoining from the rest, has unobserved
Atchieved [sic] a labour, which had far and wide,
(By man perform’d) made all the forest ring.42
- 43 Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens & Society in Eighteenth-Century England [1995], Baltimor (...)
- 44 Tom Williamson, Gerry Barnes and Toby Pillatt, Trees in England: Management and Disease since 1600, (...)
- 45 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 80-81, l. 93-109.
- 46 Ibid., p. 80, l. 89-90.
- 47 Those lines may be construed as an underlying portrait of the poet. Sébastien Scarpa elaborates on (...)
17This description is set within the larger context of tree-felling, which accelerated as a consequence of Britain’s industrial development and increase in naval requirements – large proportions of timber were used for the construction of ships.43 In some areas, like East Anglia or Norfolk, tree density steadily declined between the 1770s and the last decades of the nineteenth century.44 Cowper uses that backdrop as a way to offer a wider reflection about forms of duality (life and death, maturation and decline) through the concept of alteration, as evidenced by the reference to change through a polyptoton: “Change is the diet on which all subsist/Created changeable, and Change at last/Destroys them.”45 (l. 72-74) He describes two movements which are intertwined – on the one hand growth and decay (“matchless grandeur to dissolution thence/Slow into such magnificent decay”, l. 88-89),46 on the other a gradual process of dismemberment, through a reference to the infinitely small, which leads the oak’s parts to wither away (“an atom and an atom more/Disjoining from the rest,” l. 106-107). Cowper describes an oscillation between expansion and retraction, typifying a constant process common to all forms of life.47
18Cowper further ponders on time in “The Poplar-Field”:
- 48 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 26, l. 13-20.
My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.
’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can
To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a Being less durable even than he.48
- 49 In lines written a few years after “The Poplar-Field,” Cowper returned to that subject matter: “Lik (...)
- 50 The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 1787-1791, op. cit., p. 531-5 (...)
19The structure of the poem progresses from the vegetal to the animal world symbolised by the blackbird, before the poet finally turns his attention to the human sphere to express the results of a meditation on life which reveals his vision of an inescapable fate. The shift from the plural (“The Poplars,” l. 1) to the singular (“the tree,” l. 8) signals an identification between the poet’s own life and the tree’s. The line “And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they” (l. 14) reminds the reader that the tree and the poet will undergo the same fate, an evocation of mortality.49 Thereafter Cowper insists on a personal relationship with trees through memories and sensations and natural life carrying on, far from the vicissitudes of human existence: the continuity of natural life collides with the sense of irrevocable loss Cowper experienced when looking at the empty field, as he wrote to Lady Hesketh in May 1786: “There was, indeed, some time since, in a neighouring parish called Lavendon, a field, one side of which formed a terrace, and the other was planted with poplars, at whose foot ran the Ouse, that I used to account a little paradise: but the poplars have been felled, and the scene has suffered so much by the loss, that though still in point of prospect beautiful, it has no charm sufficient to attract me now.”50
20In “Yardley Oak,” Cowper penned a section he later deleted where one can see how he apprehends time, as the tree and the poet have different life expectancies symbolised by the opposition between the quantifiers “many” and “few”:
- 51 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 82, footnote.
Thou, like myself hast stage by stage attain’d
Life’s wintry bourn; thou, after many years,
I after few; but few or many prove
A span in retrospect; for touch
With my least finger’s end my own decease
And, with extended thumb
My natal hour,
And hadst thou also skill in measurement
As I, the Past would seem as short to thee.51
21The two different scales, expressed in a longer hexasyllabic pattern for the tree (“thou, after many years”), compared to the shorter tetrasyllabic one (“I after few”) applying to the poet, merge into the same inexorable fate both will eventually face. This passage is based on the lexicon of limits, exemplified by the “bourn,” pointing to their final destination. The last two lines feature an anthropomorphic description, as if the branches and fingers were but one. The beginning and the end of his life are contained within the palm of his hand, underlining the brevity of an individual existence. The oak might be interpreted as an evocation of what he went through – the pronouns “I” and “thou” become almost one and the same, as the tree offers up a mirror image of the poet.
22To conclude, trees are one of the elements from the natural world which Cowper uses to build a series of contrasts to promote a way of life based on a daily contact with what nature gives us, both in practical and aesthetic terms. The way Cowper describes trees in The Task matches the work of a painter using colours and contrasts. This connection between man and trees is tackled through specific aspects, such as their protective shade, although the poet regrets that humans are growing more and more distant from them. Cowper sets the stage for an experience which engages not just sight, but other senses, hearing in particular, with associations to music and oceans as sources of harmony and pleasure. The Task is replete with references to a great variety of tree species, but Cowper selected the oak and the poplar in specific poems to illustrate the influence of time and fate on natural and human life. In “The Poplar Field” and “Yardley Oak,” Cowper adopts a more nostalgic, sometimes sombre tone. He does not recognise the places he considered as peaceful and comforting spots, as they no longer represent stability and refuge in his eyes. The trees which are getting old, or felled, are triggers for a broader reflection about life. Their branches and trunks are compared to the human body to muse about the ephemeral and transient. Trees and humans follow a similar trajectory, albeit on two different time scales. In those two poems, trees are part of the natural elements that define Cowper’s aesthetics to help him ponder about what life and mortality signify. In the shorter poems, the poet offers a deeper meditation on what life signifies, as he draws parallels between what the trees go through, and what he experienced on a personal level, a constant alternation between strength and fragility.
Notes
1 It is in Wales (Carmarthenshire).
2 For more details, see Alain Corbin, La Douceur de l’ombre. L’arbre, source d’émotions, de l’Antiquité à nos jours, Paris, Fayard, 2013.
3 The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume II, Letters 1782-1786, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, p. 178.
4 Henry Stacy Marks (1829-1898) painted an undated oil on canvas entitled Cowper Walking in the Garden at Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire (c. 1866, 51 x 72 cm), kept at the Cowper and Newton Museum in Olney.
5 Geoffrey Keynes, “The Library of William Cowper”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 3.1, 1959, p. 60 and 55 respectively.
6 One of the six functions of language described by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), which he defines as “a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about.” See Roman Jakobson, “Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”, Style and Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1960, p. 354.
7 Cowper took to landscape-drawing, as indicated in the following extract from a letter written on 8 May 1780 – before setting about composing The Task – to William Unwin: “My Scribbling Humour has of late been entirely absorbed in the Passion of Landsckape drawing. It is a most Amusing Art, and, like every other Art, requires much Practise & Attention.” The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume I, Adelphi and Letters 1750-1781, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1979, p. 338. The original spelling has been kept.
8 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 120, l. 112.
9 Ibid., p. 121, l. 163-171.
10 The River Great Ouse runs through Northamptonshire all the way to Norfolk.
11 “[…] the serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety […].” William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste, London, 1753, p. 38-39.
12 Alain Mérot, Du paysage en peinture dans l’Occident moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 2009, p. 112.
13 Claude Gellée, better known as Claude Lorrain in Britain, was a French artist who specialised in landscapes and spent most of his life in Italy. He was much admired in eighteenth-century Britain: the book Liber Veritatis, recording his paintings in the form of drawings, appeared in print form in the 1770s. Further information can be found in Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700–1800, New York, Oxford University Press, 1925; Andrew Brink, Ink and Light: The Influence of Claude Lorrain's Etchings on England, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.
14 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 124-125, l. 300-320.
15 Joseph F. Musser, Jr., “William Cowper’s Rhetoric: The Picturesque and the Personal”, Studies in English Literature, 19.3, Summer 1979, p. 515-531.
16 Other poets did, like John Dyer in “Grongar Hill:” “Now, I gain the mountain’s brow,/What a landskip lies below! […]/Below me trees unnumber’d rise,/Beautiful in various dyes:/The yellow beech, the sable yew,/The slender fir, that taper grows,/The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs.” Robert Dodsley, A Collection of Poems. By Several Hands. In Three Volumes, vol. 1, London, 1748, p. 73-74. On the topic of prospect views, see Cecil Victor Deane, Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1935, p. 100-109.
17 That approach echoes what churchman Joseph Holden Pott (1759-1847) wrote about some trees: “The elm is a rich fine tree, and often grows to a most gigantic size, in which state it is wonderfully majestic, finely proportioned in its figure, and has a beautiful massly roundness; which, with its sober hue and the crispness of its foliage, renders it a noble object for the painter. The beech is a very tall and majestic tree, the silvery colour of its stem, and the graceful sweep of its branches, are very beautiful circumstances.” Joseph Holden Pott, An Essay on Landscape Painting. With Remarks General and Critical, on the Different Schools and Masters, Ancient or Modern, London, 1782, p. 87-88.
18 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 124, l. 288.
19 Cowper wrote the following sentence about painting in a letter to Mrs. King on 1 August 1789: “I am a great lover of good paintings, but no connoisseur, having never had an opportunity to become one.” The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 1787-1791, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 307.
20 In his correspondence Cowper talks about his admiration for the Scottish poet and philosopher James Beattie (1735-1803) quite a few times in 1782-1784, while he was writing The Task. In a chapter entitled “On the Sound of Poetical Language,” Beattie explains: “A painter might display great genius, and draw masterly figures with chalk or ink; but if he intend [sic] a perfect picture, he must employ in his work as many colours as are seen in the object he imitates.” James Beattie, Essays. On Poetry and Music, as they Affect the Mind. On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition. On the Utility of Classical Learning, Edinburgh, 1776, p. 296.
21 These elements are reminiscent of the visual construction of the landscapes produced by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), with the same transition from green to tawny, conveying an autumnal feel to them.
22 That stands in contrast to what the first president of the Royal Academy Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) explained in one his discourses on art: “It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed, that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish-white; and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support and set off these warm colours; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold colours will be sufficient.” The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knt., Late President of the Royal Academy, volume I, London, 1797, p. 182.
23 Cowper’s descriptions also echo the work of eighteenth-century landscape designers, some of whom used trees as an aesthetic tool in their creation of parks. For instance, George Clarke studies how Charles Bridgeman (1690-1738) did so at Stowe in “Where Did All the Trees Come From? An Analysis of Bridgeman’s Planting at Stowe”, The Journal of Garden History, 5.1, 1985, p. 72-83.
24 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 123, l. 252-260.
25 See l. 168 from The Task, referenced in footnote 9.
26 Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1982, p. 108.
27 Cowper wrote many hymns, which are still sung nowadays, making him even more sensitive to the matter of sound. On the subject matter, see Andrew J. Newell, “Cowper’s Olney Hymns: Usefulness, Locality, and the Puritan Context”, PhD, Oxford, 2022, available online: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f6360621-0fe7-499a-92aa-febfcda5fa70/files/dgf06g319f (all web references last accessed 05/01/2026)
28 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 120-121, l. 183-189. In a letter to John Newton from 16 August 1781, he wrote: “but here we spend all the rest of our time, and find that the sound of the wind in the trees and the singing of birds are much more agreeable to our ears than the incessant barking of dogs and screaming of children.” (my italics) Letters of William Cowper, ed. William Benham, London, Macmillan and Co, 1907, p. 61.
29 Ibid., p. 25, l. 1-12.
30 Marius Golden, In Search of Stability: The Poetry of William Cowper [1960], New Haven, College & University Press, 1964, p. 122.
31 “[…] and the stock-dove unalarmed/Sits cooing in the pine-tree, nor suspends/His long love-ditty for my near approach./Drawn from his refuge in some lonely elm/That age or injury has hollowed deep,/Where on his bed of wool and matted leaves/He has outslept the winter, ventures forth/To frisk awhile, and bask in the warm sun,/The squirrel, flippant, pert, and full of play./He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird,/Ascends the neighbouring beech […]. ” The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 244-245, l. 307-317.
32 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 78, l. 25.
33 Ibid., p. 78, l. 15-16.
34 After tasting the forbidden fruit, Adam exclaims: “O might I here/In solitude live savage, in some glade/Obscur’d, where highest woods, impenetrable/To star or sunlight, spread their umbrage broad,/And brown as evening! Cover me, ye pines!/Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs/Hide me, where I may never see them more!” John Milton, Paradise Lost [1674 edition], ed. Gordon Teskey, New York and London, W. W. Norton, 2005, Book IX, p. 226, l. 1084-1090.
35 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 79, l. 63-64.
36 Ibid., p. 79, l. 50-52.
37 Ibid., p. 81, l. 125.
38 “(Since which I number threescore winters past).” Ibid., p. 77, l. 3.
39 Ibid., p. 78, l. 40-49.
40 The Poetical Works of William Cowper [1870], ed. William Benham, London, Macmillan and Co., 1889, footnote in association with p. 380, mentioned p. 527. The footnote mistakenly states Judith was William the Conqueror’s daughter.
41 More details on the subject can be found in Herbert William Parke, The Oracles of Zeus: Dodona, Olympia, Ammon, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1967; Éric Lhôte, Les Lamelles oraculaires de Dodone, Geneva, Droz, 2006.
42 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 80-81, l. 93-109. This sets a contrast with Alexander Pope (1688-1744), who believed it was necessary to fell trees for what he saw as a higher national purpose: “Thy Trees, fair Windsor! now shall leave their Woods,/And half thy Forests rush into my Floods,/Bear Britain’s Thunder.” Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest, London, 1713, p. 16-17, l. 383-385.
43 Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens & Society in Eighteenth-Century England [1995], Baltimore, Sutton Publishing, 1998, p. 124.
44 Tom Williamson, Gerry Barnes and Toby Pillatt, Trees in England: Management and Disease since 1600, Hatfield, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2017, p. 139-140.
45 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 80-81, l. 93-109.
46 Ibid., p. 80, l. 89-90.
47 Those lines may be construed as an underlying portrait of the poet. Sébastien Scarpa elaborates on the topic in “William Cowper, l’homme-tronc”, Études anglaises, 72.1, 2019, p. 58-59.
48 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782-1785, op. cit., p. 26, l. 13-20.
49 In lines written a few years after “The Poplar-Field,” Cowper returned to that subject matter: “Like crowded forest-trees we stand,/And some are mark’d to fall ;/The axe will smite at God’s command, /And soon shall smite us all.” William Cowper, “Verses Subjoined to the Bill of Mortality for the Town of Northampton, 1787,” in The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 7, l. 13-16.
50 The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 1787-1791, op. cit., p. 531-532.
51 The Poems of William Cowper, Volume III: 1785-1800, op. cit., p. 82, footnote.
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Nicolas Bourgès, « Trees in William Cowper’s Poetry », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 48 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 mars 2026, consulté le 20 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/22478 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/160fu
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