November 30, 2007
Happy Birthday, Jonathan Swift!
"[He is] the most vigorous hater we've ever had in our literature." -- Edgell Rickword on Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was born on this day, in 1667. Here's a ton of biographical information if you are interested.
Primarily known for Gulliver's Travels (which I re-read earlier this year - here's my post about it) and A Modest Proposal he was also a poet of pretty uncommon gifts. He's also one of the most quotable of all writers. He's like Oscar Wilde that way, his words have barbs in them - they stick, get a hold on you.
Swift wrote:
But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
His contempt has echoed across the centuries and given us the primary examples of satire that all writers should study. I am sorry that satire is so tepid these days. I find most of it way too coy, and stupid. They WISH that what they were doing was satire of the highest order - but what they are really doing is just bitching and whining in a tiny airless corner. Swift was merciless. Swift's command of language was impeccable. His observations were ruthless. He cannot be touched to this day.
Swift said, in regards to satire:
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
Swift embraced hate, it is true, yet he did not embrace corruption. Most people who fill their souls with hate (and I can think of many examples in our present-day political discourse) completely corrupt their humanity. Their hatred for everyone else (and their inability to look in a mirror - or, no, it's not just inability - it is blatant and conscious REFUSAL to look in a mirror) leaves them with no humanity. Swift does not seem to have had that problem. He was just alert, that's all. He saw the things going on around him, and wrote it all down. He pulled no punches.
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
There is such truth in Swift.
And also:
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
He called things as he saw them:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Obviously such blunt truth was highly unwelcome in many circles - and still is today. Oh, how much the pious haters despise those who call them on their phoniness!! Again: it all comes back to this: Can you look in the mirror? Can you face yourself? Can you entertain the possibility that that which you hate is also inside of you? Oh ho ho no. Many people don't even know what the HELL you are talking about when you talk like that!
But then there is also this:
It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
The belief in the good in people. Not universally - oh, no. Swift was perfectly willing to see some people as just plain assholes with no redeeming qualities - and I'm pretty much with him on that. But occasionally - where you least expect it - a "vein of gold".
Many professional haters have ZERO senses of humor. Oh, they think they do, and I see them chortling on political talk shows, throwing zingers at their opponents - and their witless followers guffaw "Ho ho ho" in response, but there is no actualy humor there. None.
But Swift used humor. He used it like a whip, yes, but also - well - there's something like this statement which makes me laugh out loud every time I read it:
There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.
Self-knowledge - a willingness to include himself in his own merciless searchlight:
Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
And his poems, let's not forget them. They're funny, biting, mean ... and yet sometimes so heartfelt (the ones to Stella - the woman he loved all his life - comes to mind) that they bring tears to my eyes.
You don't want to skim these. Read. Read them.
A Satirical Elegy: On the Death of a Late Famous General
His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age, too, and in his bed!
And could that Mighty Warrior fall?
And so inglorious, after all!
Well, since he's gone, no matter how,
The last loud trump must wake him now:
And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He'd wish to sleep a little longer.
And could he be indeed so old
As by the news-papers we're told?
Threescore, I think, is pretty high;
'Twas time in conscience he should die.
This world he cumber'd long enough;
He burnt his candle to the snuff;
And that's the reason, some folks think,
He left behind so great a stink.
Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widow's sighs, nor orphan's tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.
But what of that, his friends may say,
He had those honours in his day.
True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he dy'd.
Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of Kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing's a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.
I love the line: "How very mean a thing's a Duke". It just says it all.
And here is my favorite of the "Stella poems":
Stella's Birthday March 13, 1727
This day, whate'er the Fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me:
This day then let us not be told,
That you are sick, and I grown old;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills.
To-morrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.
Yet, since from reason may be brought
A better and more pleasing thought,
Which can, in spite of all decays,
Support a few remaining days:
From not the gravest of divines
Accept for once some serious lines.
Although we now can form no more
Long schemes of life, as heretofore;
Yet you, while time is running fast,
Can look with joy on what is past.
Were future happiness and pain
A mere contrivance of the brain,
As atheists argue, to entice
And fit their proselytes for vice;
(The only comfort they propose,
To have companions in their woes;)
Grant this the case; yet sure 'tis hard
That virtue, styl'd its own reward,
And by all sages understood
To be the chief of human good,
Should, acting, die, nor leave behind
Some lasting pleasure in the mind;
Which by remembrance will assuage
Grief, sickness, poverty, and age;
And strongly shoot a radiant dart
To shine through life's declining part.
Say, Stella, feel you no content,
Reflecting on a life well spent?
Your skilful hand employ'd to save
Despairing wretches from the grave;
And then supporting with your store
Those whom you dragg'd from death before?
So Providence on mortals waits,
Preserving what it first creates.
Your gen'rous boldness to defend
An innocent and absent friend;
That courage which can make you just
To merit humbled in the dust;
The detestation you express
For vice in all its glitt'ring dress;
That patience under torturing pain,
Where stubborn stoics would complain:
Must these like empty shadows pass,
Or forms reflected from a glass?
Or mere chims in the mind,
That fly, and leave no marks behind?
Does not the body thrive and grow
By food of twenty years ago?
And, had it not been still supplied,
It must a thousand times have died.
Then who with reason can maintain
That no effects of food remain?
And is not virtue in mankind
The nutriment that feeds the mind;
Upheld by each good action past,
And still continued by the last?
Then, who with reason can pretend
That all effects of virtue end?
Believe me, Stella, when you show
That true contempt for things below,
Nor prize your life for other ends,
Than merely to oblige your friends;
Your former actions claim their part,
And join to fortify your heart.
For Virtue, in her daily race,
Like Janus, bears a double face;
Looks back with joy where she has gone
And therefore goes with courage on:
She at your sickly couch will wait,
And guide you to a better state.
O then, whatever Heav'n intends,
Take pity on your pitying friends!
Nor let your ills affect your mind,
To fancy they can be unkind.
Me, surely me, you ought to spare,
Who gladly would your suff'rings share;
Or give my scrap of life to you,
And think it far beneath your due;
You, to whose care so oft I owe
That I'm alive to tell you so.
"Does not the body thrive and grow By food of twenty years ago?" Yes, Swift ... yes, it does.
And this one - hee hee:
Oysters
Charming oysters I cry:
My masters, come buy,
So plump and so fresh,
So sweet is their flesh,
No Colchester oyster
Is sweeter and moister:
Your stomach they settle,
And rouse up your mettle:
They'll make you a dad
Of a lass or a lad;
And madam your wife
They'll please to the life;
Be she barren, be she old,
Be she slut, or be she scold,
Eat my oysters, and lie near her,
She'll be fruitful, never fear her.
Michael Schmidt's book Lives of the Poets has a chapter devoted to Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope - it's called "Three Friends". Schmidt's book is a must-read for poetry lovers. He's not a critic, first of all. He's an editor and a book publisher. He's a fan of poetry - and he writes like a fan writes - not like a critic - and yet his knowledge is encyclopedic.
Here is some of what he has to say about Jonathan Swift:
His vexed relations with women, especially "Stella" and "Vanessa", and his disgust with physical functions, have given much latitude to Freudian interpretations. Disgust informs much of the prose and verse, but so does a real interest in common people, their language, actions and concerns. The verse opens on this area of his genius, and on his darker musings. It possesses the satiric virtues of the prose with an additional element: the "I" speaks, speaks as itself, with an uncompromised acerbity that few poets have masterd. When he died in 1745, Ireland and England were in his debt. The topicality that limits the appeal of some of his prose is itself the appeal of the verse: it catches inflections and remembers small actions now lost -- the voices of gardeners, street vendors, laborers ... the tone of a cryptic man of conscience speaking of his world, his bitter, life, his wary loves.
Jonathan Swift described style, in writing, as "proper words in proper places". I think he pretty much mastered that - in his prose, certainly, but also in his poems. There isn't an extra word there - there is no FAT in his language - he has pared everything down to its essentials. The verses come to us as though they were born complete - and perfect.
More from Schmidt - and this, I believe, is a brilliant point:
In the more ambitious pieces Swift challenges the reader ... There is a unique irony at work, not normative, like Dryden's, but radical: thematic rather than stylistic. This is why his poems, even the most topical, retain force today. "I take it to be part of the honesty of poets," he wrote, "that they cannot write well except they think the subject deserves it." The subjects he chose he approached as if for the first time, as if we stepped from the chill, clear world of reason into a world of men.
More (I see his point here about Swift not being quotable, not really - most of the quotes I excerpted above were from his prose works - His poems are pretty much complete as they are - and need to be read straight through - they are difficult to excerpt. They depend on momentum and continuity):
Swift is hard to recommend as a poet because he is hard to quote out of context. There are few purple passages, detachable maxims; the poetry is drawn evenly through the poem in ways that out-of-context quotation violates. The epitaphs, the spoofs, the eclogues, the anecdotes spoken by various voices, the ironic love poems, the first-person poems, will not be broken up into tags like the rich couplet bric-a-brac of Pope. In Swift we come upon a writer who might have preferred to be called versifier rather than poet. There is a difference in kind in his work from that of his predecessors; and he is not "polite" enough to have beguiled his contemporaries into imitation. He stands alone, he doesn't sing, he never ingratiates himself. He speaks, and he understands how the world wags.
And on that note, I will close this ginormous post - but I will let William Butler Yeats have the last word on Jonathan Swift:
Swift's Epitaph
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
Yup. Imitate him if you dare.