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.