Richard Adelman Idle Thought in Wordsworth ’ s Lucy Cycle

William Cowper’s ‘fearless’ ‘confession’ is situated, in The Task (1784), as an introduction to the free operations of the fancy that make up the poem’s influential ‘brown study’ episode. Having ‘a soul that does not always think’ serves, in the passage that follows, not as an inhibition so much as an opportunity for the poet’s mind to do much more than think. The ‘ludicrous and wild’ conjurings and imaginings, a ‘waking dream’ of ‘strange visages’ (Task, IV. 286–8) and other objects inspired by the movements of the poet’s fire, hold a position of intense creativity in the poem, offering a model of activity more powerful and more interesting than the abundance of rural ‘tasks’ that punctuate Cowper’s narrative. The speaker of Wordsworth’s ‘Strange fits of passion’ (1800) might be described in similar terms. Daring to disclose a style of thought distinct from everyday understanding, the narrator of the poem uses this confession in order to lead into an account of a mental experience both ‘ludicrous’ and resonant. The selection of the term ‘fits’, to the reader who has read both poems, recalls the language with which Cowper connects his fire and his state of mind, the former casting its ‘shadow to the ceiling’ and ‘there by fits / Dancing uncouthly to the quivering flame’ (Task, IV. 285–6). Cowper’s ‘waking dream’, and his later classification of the experience of the brown study as taking place during the understanding’s ‘sleep’ (Task, IV. 298), also anticipates Wordsworth’s narrator’s description of such an experience as ‘one of those sweet dreams’, ‘Kind Nature’s gentlest boon’ (‘Strange fits’, 17 & 18). And beyond such similarities of the language in which these two episodes proceed, it is also worth pointing out the ambivalence with which both texts deal with such experiences. Not only is Cowper problematically ‘restore[d]’ to himself at the scene’s close, that event’s fragility being signalled by the image of fancy’s ‘glassy threads’ being ‘snapp[ed] short’ (Task, IV. 305–7), but the tone of the scene is also instigated by its ‘pendulous and foreboding’ fire (Task, IV. 293) and the patterns it generates. It