This essay reads the persistent recurrence of “strenuous idleness,” and other such oxymoronic cognates, within William Wordsworth’s output, with a particular focus upon the MS B version of “The Ruined Cottage” (1798). It sets such concerns within the context of the changing scientific treatment of inertia across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, during which time Newton’s vis inertiae produced a variety of responses, before finally fading from view in the revisionist physics of J. C. Maxwell and others. Wordsworth, I contend, inherits and transfigures an extant treatment of resistant matter, which productively complicates socio-economic accounts of idleness. I conclude by drawing structural parallels between the scientific treatment of inertia and the (pseudo-)science of prosody, arguing that both stand to benefit from an enlarged temporal envelope.