Cowper’s Pauses

Abstract

Abstract This essay is about the status and significance of pauses in the poetry of William Cowper. The pause, it argues, is not only a formal feature of that poetry, manifest in caesurae and line-endings, but a human experience with which Cowper displays a richly vexed fascination. Consideration of Cowper’s prose writings reveals his sense that the proper management of pauses is a crucial and distinguishing characteristic of blank verse as against rhyming couplets. Attending to Cowper’s pauses, it is argued, can help us better to understand the distinctive mode of attention that his verse demands of its readers, especially in the long poem The Task (1785). Cowper’s complicated and ambivalent sense of the value of pausing is related, on the one hand, to a Protestant tradition of temporal improvement, and, on the other, to eighteenth-century debates about the nature of blank verse. Cowper’s sense of religious experience, the essay suggests, cannot properly be separated from the way in which he chose to write poetry. At their ambiguous best, Cowper’s pauses place the reader in a position akin to that in which the poet found himself as a Christian believer, doubtfully poised between election and reprobation, between salvation and damnation, and uncertain of what the future holds.