The Books: Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats: Jonathan Swift

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

“[He is] the most vigorous hater we’ve ever had in our literature.” — Edgell Rickword on Jonathan Swift

Primarily known for Gulliver’s Travels (here’s my post about it) and A Modest Proposal he was also a poet of pretty uncommon gifts.

In terms of being a good hater, “hate” sometimes calls to mind crowds of racists and Fred Phelps’s goons. But there is another kind of hate. A reminder kind of hate. Rebecca West wrote:

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

Now, now, that is brilliant.

Swift’s 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 and stupid now. It’s hard to do it right. There are a couple of political writers who seem to think what they are doing is satire, when what they are really doing is just bitching and whining in a tiny airless corner. And their command of the English language is minimal at best, so it is easier to tune them out, regardless of the points they may be making. Swift was merciless, yes, but Swift’s command of language was impeccable. He was not just a worthy foe, but the worthiest of all foes. People STILL get angry about some of his observations. There was a section in Gulliver’s Travels that is so misogynistic, truly hateful, that when I re-read it recently I found myself getting defensive, which I then immediately caught myself doing, and I had to laugh. Swift, still at it, from across the centuries, still ruffling feathers, so good is he. He cannot be touched to this day.

Swift wrote:

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

There is such truth in Swift. And, if you listen very closely, tremendous sadness.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

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 actual humor there. It is decadent and corrupt, a humorless leer as opposed to to something that will stand the test of time.

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.

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 come to mind) that they bring tears to my eyes.

Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 in Dublin, but he was English, dammit. He was ferocious on that point. He was educated, but not a brilliant student. He dabbled in verse, as they say, but again, did not really distinguish himself there either. Not at first, anyway. He imitated others. He was trying to sound like the other poets of the day. He came into his own in his 30s (late, by any standard). He stopped imitating and started writing in the voices that he heard all around him. This was revolutionary. You can still hear how “people must have sounded” when you read his poems. He’s like Kipling in that way. His poems clamor with different dialects, tones, voices. He had a high-level job as a secretary to Sir William Temple in Surrey, but he left that and got ordained. He lived in Ireland for a bit, despised it, moved back to England, moved back to Ireland – leaving scandal and intrigue behind him. He clearly made lifelong friends with a couple of people, but he also made lifelong enemies. No wonder that he wouldn’t fit in in any court, or any royal hierarchy. Too individual. He eventually became dean of St. Patrick’s, in Dublin, but the upheaval in England after Queen Anne died ruined his chances of advancement. Similar to Christopher Hitchens in many ways in that he is difficult to nail down politically (it is eloquent that The Nation would have had Hitchens on their roster and then given him the boot when they realized what he was about – but anyone who has been paying attention to Hitchens all along would not have been surprised at his contrarian views, many of which I share – so that was funny, but it’s been going on with him for years), Swift eluded classification and was basically a suspicious and distrusting individual. He reminds me of many of the Founders, with their deep distrust of Man’s ability to hold power responsibly. Swift found no one trustworthy. Everyone was corruptible, and those who believe they are not corruptible are the worst indeed. So he was not a “joiner”, in any way – an unpopular position to take at any time in history, when people seem to want to clump up on sides of fences. As St. Patrick’s dean, he actually did a lot of good, and helped the Irish out a lot. He became obsessed with the Irish situation, writing about it a lot. His view of things always seemed to be wide (a key quality of any wonderful satirist, which is one of the reasons why narrow minds today are so poor at satire). He saw things as they were, he despised corruption, and was willing to fight it. He’s a complex guy and I love him to death.

Michael Schmidt’s book Lives of the Poets has a chapter devoted to Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope (intense friends). The chapter is called “Three Friends”. Michael Schmidt wrote, in re: Swift’s poetry:

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.

More from Schmidt:

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, 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.

Samuel Johnson wrote in his The Life of Swift:

Perhaps no writer can be found who borrowed so little, or that in all his excellences and all his defects has so well maintained his claim to be as original.

And on that note, I will close this post – but before we get to the poem I want to post, 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.

Stella’s Birthday March 13, 1726-7

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.