Touch’d with a coal from heav’n

“In [William] Cowper’s verse, the poet is a discoverer of truth, not a creator. Although he laments the lack of originality in contemporary poetry — ‘whate’er we write, we bring forth nothing new’ — Cowper’s goal is to find new language for known religious truths: ‘Twere new indeed, to see the bard all fire, / Touch’d with a coal from heav’n assume the lyre.’ As much a nature poet as Wordsworth, Cowper’s poems even give a ‘pre-intimation of immortality,’ according to [John] Newton — a phrase that may have lodged in Wordsworth’s imagination. Nevertheless, Cowper is hardly the poet to claim that his language or imagination are, in themselves, creative tools. ‘I might have preached more Sermons than ever [Archbishop] Tillotson did, and better,’ he wrote his cousin in 1786, ‘and the world has been still fast asleep. But a Volume of Verse is a fiddle that puts the Universe in motion.’ Verse puts the universe in motion, but it neither supplants nor competes with the truths of the sermon or the scientific treatise. His practice is completely opposed to that of an Enlightenment thinker like the Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827), who believed that knowing the forces and positions of all entities at a given time could theoretically produce certain knowledge of their past and future positions. Although his emphasis on beauty implies a unified vision of truth, Cowper recommends no single mode of inquiry for obtaining it. His verse in the 1780s makes use of many fields of knowledge. Even theology yields to botany, history, moral philosophy, political science, and psychology, when appropriate.

“In rejecting the Enlightenment attempt to detach the personal realm from the scientific one, Cowper’s Task emphasizes the role that intuition plays in acquiring knowledge. This intuitive, reciprocal relationship between the observer and the natural world gives fullness to the experience of ‘nature’ in the final book of that poem:

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds,
And as the mind is pitch’d the ear is pleas’d
With melting airs or martial, brisk or grave.
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touched within us, and the heart replies.

“Even more broadly, the poem finds truth when natural observation, morality, and beauty are reconciled in one’s inner life and outward experience.

“The accumulation of observable facts may have a connection with wisdom and truth, Cowper writes, but only under certain conditions. The detached intelligence that knows all universal forces and positions in Laplace’s theory could never achieve wisdom. True knowledge must be internalized. It must pass through serious reflection. As an example, consider this winter scene where Cowper rises from a description of a late robin to a broader reflection on observation itself:

The red-breast warbles still, but is content
With slender notes and more than half supress’d.
Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light
From spray to spray, where’r he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendent drops of ice,
That tinkle in the wither’d leaves below.
Stillness accompanied with sounds so soft
Charms more than silence. Meditation here
May think down hours to moments. Here the heart
May give an useful lesson to the head,
And learning wiser grow without his books.
Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,
Have oft times no connexion. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men,
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

“The mere accumulation of knowledge is trivial beside a wise apprehension of nature, Cowper maintains. The wise observer, whether poet or scientist, does more than merely locate, identify, describe, and analyze what he or she observes. Instead, he or she ‘dwells’ in observations meditatively over so long a period that hours seem to be mere moments. Only by establishing such a personal connection does the observer have the possibility of discovering a language for nature that will, over time, command broad intellectual assent.”

— from Daniel E. Ritchie, The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer (Baylor University Press, 2010)