Cowley’s lines describing the nunc stans in Book 1 of the Davideis are introduced with a reference to the spatial as well as temporal infinity of heaven: ‘Nor can the glory contain it self in th’endless space.’ In his note to this line Cowley reflects on the relationship between subject-matter and poetic length, acknowledging the three extra syllables: ‘I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of Readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and, as it were, Vast; it is to paint in the number the nature of the thing which it describes.’ In his ‘Life of Cowley’ Samuel Johnson objected to this logic affiliating a long line with great space: ‘Verse can imitate only sound and motion. … I cannot discover … why the pine is taller in an alexandrine than in ten syllables.’ There is an absurdity in the implication that three extra syllables can better represent ‘endless space’, but this is not the basis of Johnson’s objection. By Johnson’s logic, poetic length can represent a long length of time (by imitating motion), but not space. Cowley’s reference to lines ‘painting’ space, however, suggests that unlike Johnson he conceives of his poem as a spatial form. This is corroborated by his going on in the note to extract lines from ‘divers other places of this Poem’ to illustrate his principle, reading them independently of their immediate context in the organisation of the poem. The fact that this note immediately precedes the note on Boethius’s theory of the nunc stans further suggests that his idea of spatial form builds on this theological groundwork. The nunc stans permits time to be mapped onto space and vice versa; a long time and a wide space implicitly represent one another. While Cowley’s ‘Eternal Now’ is contained within a neat pentameter line, his theory of the mimetic potential of poetic length applies equally to the length of a whole poem as to a line, so it is no leap to consider that a poem of epic length is for Cowley the fit vehicle for communicating the vast time and space that the nunc stans embraces. Every line, every word in the poem is, like every moment or event, both a time and a place in a vast spatio-temporal prospect.