POETRY // This Strange Order
by Joshua Mehigan • “Christag” illustration by Christopher Clark Spencer
EXCERPT //
It’s a good thing for William Cowper’s deer that when it was looking around for a nice place to die, it stayed away from Mary Meriam’s woods. The odds seem small that any fellow creature encountered there would ever have thought of saving a solitary wounded deer unless it was to save it in a cache of wormy meat scraps stuffed in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree. But then it isn’t easy to find a lot of shared ground between the serene and silent woods that form the moral landscape of Cowper’s airily beautiful blank-verse lines, and the cold, rank, blood-smeared region pictured in Meriam’s darkly glowing sonnet “Dictionary of Owl.”
Cowper’s lines are excerpted from Book III of his long poem The Task, published in 1785. If you find The Task in an edition with no introductory note and start from the beginning, you might get the idea that it is either an attempt at humor or the work of someone morbidly obsessed with furniture. This is because The Task starts, like The Aeneid and Paradise Lost, with an epic proposition—“I sing the sofa!”—then proceeds with a brief history of stools, chairs, settees, etc. Cowper’s prefatory ADVERTISEMENT to the poem explains that “A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author.” Cowper’s contemporaneous biographer William Hayley further explains that the poet asked the lady what she wanted him to write about: “‘O’ she replied ‘you can never be in want of a subject: — you can write upon any: — write upon this Sofa!’” Cowper, in his ADVERTISEMENT, reports (in the third-person) that he obeyed; and, having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the trains of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length . . . a serious affair—a Volume.
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