Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more.

These lines come from William Cowper’s long didactic poem *The Task* (1785), written during his years at Olney and shaped by his recurrent depression and religious anxieties. In the poem Cowper often contrasts the moral and psychological costs of public life—political corruption, fashionable society, and the noise of news—with the restorative quiet of rural retirement. The speaker’s wish for a “lodge in some vast wilderness” reflects an 18th‑century strain of retreat literature, but in Cowper it is also personal: a longing to escape the pressures of contemporary events and the “rumour” of human conflict that intrudes even into private life.

The passage expresses a desire for radical withdrawal: not merely a country house, but a remote refuge so secluded that reports of tyranny, deceit, and war cannot penetrate it. Cowper’s phrasing (“unsuccessful or successful war”) suggests that even victory is morally tainted and psychologically exhausting; the problem is not which side wins, but the very machinery of power and violence. The “boundless contiguity of shade” idealizes nature as a protective canopy, offering silence and moral clarity against the incessant, corrupting chatter of the world. The lines capture Cowper’s characteristic tension between civic awareness and a yearning for peace that borders on self-erasure.