Named source · 1785

The Task Quotes by William Cowper: Context & Meanings

1 quotation linked to The Task by or associated with William Cowper, with source notes, explanations and related topics.

More by William Cowper

Read the source

Open a public or archival text connected with these quotations

Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.

Primary / edition source · gutenberg.org ↗

Represented passages

1 quotations with source context and meaning

Source identified1

God made the country, and man made the town.

Image design Linen

Read & copy

“God made the country, and man made the town.”

William Cowper

Voice: Poetic speaker · Narrator of “The Task”

Meaning & context

Cowper compresses the poem’s preference for rural nature over fashionable urban life into a religious contrast between what he sees as creation and human construction.

Source details

The Task, Book I, represented by Project Gutenberg #3698. “God made the country, and man made the town” appears in Cowper’s didactic contrast between urban fashion and rural life immediately before claims about health and virtue in fields and groves. It remains eighteenth-century poetic and Christian-inflected judgment rather than empirical evidence that country living is healthier or more virtuous.

Open a public or archival text connected with these quotations

Prominent ideas connected with the quotations represented here

1 quotations with source context and meaning

Continue through other sources by William Cowper