This is the excerpt in which Cowper tries to convince me that long winter evenings are really great and he even succeeds a little bit. The excerpt is anthologized under the title “The Winter Evening: A Brown Study”. It starts with an apostrophe to the evening, depicted as a kind of goddess “with matron-steps slow moving”, and followed by the night, treading on her train, putting birds and animals to sleep with one hand and people with the other. The evening is the more beautiful of the two and so she doesn’t need many twinkling ornaments like the night, just a few stars and the moon, which, although in the evening does not shine as brightly, is larger. The hours of the evening are spent by the poet in writing, reading, music, weaving nets for birds or helping ladies with their work by rolling yarn. The rooms are now ablaze with hearth fires, multiplied by the mirrors so large that Goliath himself might have a look at his reflection without stooping. But what the poet likes best is to gaze in the fire and fantasize, or think about nothing at all in particular. He owns that freely and is not ashamed of admitting that to those who can’t stop thinking for a minute. (I must admit I am one of such people. Whenever I see people on the train or in the waiting room doing nothing at all, I can’t imagine how they can do it for a second.) So he likes to stare at the shape-shifting cinders or the pieces of soot caught on the grate of the fireplace, which were called “strangers” because there was a superstition they mean an unexpected visitor. Meanwhile his face, he adds, perhaps with a touch of sly humour, looks like the face of somebody who is thinking really hard about something. But then he is awakened from his reverie by a gust of wind hitting the shutters.
He muses pleasantly about the difference between the warm room and the cold weather outside. He reminisces about the landscape he saw today: the faded green of meadows, the newly-plowed brown fields, the fallows where animals graze and the leafless dark woods on the horizon, merging with the approaching night. Tomorrow it will all change, because even now as he is writing, even though nobody inside can see that, the snow is falling slowly, covering the blades of grass and protecting them from frost.
This is a nice excerpt, clearly foreshadowing Romantic poetry, with its focus on the inner life of the mind, fuelled by the scenes the author saw during the day. Its language reflects the peace of the evening and the enjoyment the author feels because of being inside a warm home made me think, strangely enough, about some of Tolkien’s descriptions of creature comforts his creatures enjoy.
