Like the rest of his writing, Swift’s poetry is often disturbing and uproariously funny at the same time. It can be excessive, ungenteel and informal: equally it can be surprisingly conventional in form and dry in tone. Its language may be robust or, on occasions, almost prim. One of the things that makes the poems so appealing and accessible is their gusto, which comes in part from a scorn for false solemnity, self-pity, and existential complaints. The famous Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift provide a case in point.
The Verses explore some uncomfortable issues surrounding our response to the fact of dying, but they face the truth with a sense of courage and humanity, so that the final effect is more consolatory than depressing. Franz Kafka might have given this theme a sense of tragic helplessness, while Swift’s countryman Samuel Beckett would probably have introduced a bleak comedy of the absurd. Instead, Swift makes us recognize that our own death will not ripple the surface of most other people’s lives, and that our hopes of immortality are likely to be doomed to failure. Yet the energy, wit, and invention of the poem contradict this message in the very act of its assertion. According to the publisher, Bernard Lintot, Swift’s books will soon become waste paper – this is what he tells the would-be buyer, an old-fashioned rustic bumpkin:
Some country squire to Lintot goes.Inquires for Swift in verse and prose:Says Lintot, “I have heard the name:He died a year ago.” “The same.”He searcheth all his shop in vain;“Sir, you may find them in Duck Lane:I sent them with a load of books,Last Monday to the pastry-cook’s.To fancy they could live a year!I find you’re but a stranger here.The Dean was famous in his time;And had a kind of knack at rhyme:His way of writing now is past;The town has got a better taste:I keep no antiquated stuff . . .”(Poems 492)
The text subverts itself, since today we are still reading this “antiquated stuff,” and Lintot’s confident prediction about the short date of Swift’s fame has been totally disproved by later history. The joke is partly directed against complacent metropolitan taste, which despises what it sees as provincial and lacking in trendiness. There is something joyous in the way that the poetic life of this passage – the vigor of its language, the sharpness with which speech rhythms are caught, and the deft simplicity of the rhymes – deny the power of death. Negatives are converted into positives. Such an effect is characteristic of Swift’s poetry, both major and minor.
Tucked away in the raggletaggle group of poems designated by Swift’s editor as “Trifles,” we come on an item called “Dr. Swift’s Answer to Dr. Sheridan.” It is headed “December 15th” and starts in this way:
The verses you sent on the bottling your wineWere in every one’s judgement exceedingly fine,And I must confess as a dean and divine,I think you inspired by the muses all nine.I nicely examined them every line,And the worst of them all like a barn-door did shine.Oh, that Jove would give me such a talent as thine!With Delany or Dan I would scorn to combine;I know they have many a wicked design,And give Satan his due, Dan begins to refine.(Poems 199)1
And so on for another twenty-four lines, all using the same rhyme sound – a trifle indeed. Can this possibly come from the hand of that scabrous author of biting satire, who savagely criticized our most ingrained flaws and exposed our deepest self-deceptions as he set out to vex the world? The answer is yes, for the common notion of Swift is derived primarily from prose works, such as Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, and A Modest Proposal. These combine moral intensity with skillful and often virtuosic use of language: they exhibit great rhetorical sophistication, and they require to be read (as they seem to have been written) with fierce concentration, in case the author should ambush us into accepting some enormous or absurd position which he has slipped into the text.
It is all very different with Swift’s reply to Sheridan. The title proclaims its casual origin among a series of exchanges between close friends. The dateline at the head of the manuscript certifies its immediacy, but also its likely limitations for a modern reader (temporal particularity, narrowness of focus, absence of a general theme or occasion). Plainly, the year – 1719, as it happens – does not need to be given, and this must increase our sense that we are dealing with a mere jotting, or a piece of diurnal flotsam. It turns out that this item actually forms a direct response to a poem written by Sheridan: this in turn came in reply to a letter, partly in verse, which Swift had addressed to his friend, as recently as one o’clock on the previous evening.2 Such exchanges may remind us of a rapid-fire volley of e-mails, or perhaps a madly accelerated version of the correspondence in Richardson’s Pamela as the heroine’s suitor Mr. B closes in for the kill – a joke already anticipated by Henry Fielding in his parody Shamela. However, the form of the poem would not automatically convey to us the presence of a serious literary intent. The multiple rhymes, known as a “crambo,” belong to the area we assign to puzzles and word games.
In addition to that, Swift’s poetic technique looks crude: the trimeter skips off in a jaunty enough fashion, once we hear “every” in line 5 as a comically strained trisyllable, but the start of each verse seems to shift pointlessly between amphibrachs and anapests – that is, metrical feet of three syllables with the stress on the first or third syllable respectively. Moreover, the expletive “did shine” occurs in a metrically exposed position, and it is followed by a poeticizing gesture, “Oh, that,” which may seem false to the informality of manner which comes across elsewhere. Modern readers are apt to feel uncomfortable with the introduction of first names and especially short forms – it may recall to us of the way Wystan and his buddies crop up in poetry produced by W. H. Auden and his circle in the 1930s, when names like “Wilfred” and “Kathy” could be casually dropped, and it produces an effect less of intimacy than of undue familiarity. The homely proverb “give Satan his due” adds little by way of dignity or point, as poetry has mostly been conceived for the last two hundred years. Then there is the comparison with a barn-door, which is actually quite gross: it draws on an expression too coarse to appear in many collections of proverbs. In his robust way, Swift was happy enough to use it in Polite Conversation, albeit in a bowdlerized form: “Why, Miss. You shine this morning like a sh–barn door” (PW IV: 149). Finally, the presentation appears rough and ready, with its minimal punctuation, as well as oddities in matters like the use of capitals. It all looks like a piece of crass masculine bonding, both trivial (that is, slight but inoffensive) and trifling (irresponsible and nasty, perhaps).
In fact, the “Answer” is fully representative of a large portion of Swift’s practice as a poet. It does not rank, of course, among his most important or striking works, even in the lighter category. However, it exemplifies some of the most prominent attributes of his poetry at large, and it does illustrate some of his characteristic effects in tone and cadence. The group of “Trifles” includes a “Left-Handed Letter to Dr. Sheridan,” written a year earlier than the last item: “I beg your pardon for using my left hand,” runs a note at the end of this poem, “but I was in great haste, and the other hand was employed at the same time in writing some letters of business” (Poems 676). An early printing of the item indicates that the manuscript was actually written out “Backwards or with the left hand”: again, this involves literalizing Swift’s claim that he has more important business to be going on with. Famously, Swift liked to refer in a disparaging way to his own productions in verse: he would acknowledge grudgingly that he sometimes dealt in rhyme, but that is about as far as it goes. The assertion is less disingenuous than it is usually taken to be: Swift very likely did write many of his poems in the intervals of more pressing concerns, and may well have considered much of what he produced as a kind of hobby. Unlike his sustained works of political, historical, or moral commentary, which were almost entirely reserved for prose, his poetic output seldom reaches out beyond its initial impulse, whether this is an event, a conceit, or a bit of social gallantry. His “Trifles” include items such as “Mary the Cook-Maid’s Letter to Dr. Sheridan,” a vigorous, witty, and linguistically rich portrayal of a member of Swift’s own circle. It hardly suffers by comparison with the much better-known poem, “Mrs. Harris’s Petition,” which appears in a different context of Swift’s career and has never been labeled a trifle. We can indeed trace a continuum which runs from riddles and rebuses, or experiments in macaronics (poems in two languages) like the half-dotty lines in Latino-Anglicus he essayed from time to time,3 through rough lampoons such as “An Elegy on Mr. Partridge” or “A Serious Poem upon William Wood,” all the way to the best-known poems such as Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift and “On Poetry: A Rhapsody.” The trifles, it emerges, can deal with serious matters, and the serious poems can be trifling when it suits them. This means that a reader who enjoys none of the effects in “Dr. Swift’s Answer to Dr. Sheridan” is likely to miss some of the sources of the imaginative power in the latter items.
We should now be in a better position to understand a singular fact about the reception of Swift’s work. Ever since his own day, the tendency has been to relegate the poetry to a separate and almost always inferior branch of his writing. In the nineteenth century, this was in part for the obvious reason that the genres he chiefly practiced were regarded as sub-poetic. Many pages in the collected Poems are taken up with items the Victorians would have placed very little above the category of outright trifles. These include acknowledged “libels,” lampoons, and other modes of personal satire which even today scarcely figure in our main anatomy of criticism. For two reasons, it is still hard to assimilate such works to our overall sense of Swift’s achievement, even when they take such impressive form as “The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician’s Rod,” with its series of damning analogies. The first reason is that such works often made an appearance, known or unknown to their author, in the collection of Poems on Affairs of State which year by year dished out the filthiest dirt on public life of the time. We think that we have moved beyond the Victorians’ moral distaste for such things, but we have hardly begun to work out a satisfactory poetic for describing the elaborate mix of burlesque, travesty, and parody which complicates their invective, and feeds into Swift’s own style.
Second, we no longer have an active partner to oppose satire in the traditional opposition of praise and blame which underlay all Augustan practice in this mode. That is, we do not understand the satire/panegyric coupling, where the slash represents opposition but also a kind of involuntary identity. All Swift’s satirical rhetoric depends on the fact that he could have written in the alternative vein: thus, his crushing onslaught on Lord Wharton in The Examiner No. 18 (which appeared at almost the same time as “The Virtues of Sid Hamet” in November 1710) does little more than invert the standard commonplaces of an encomium. As it happens, writers were still producing encomia, that is formal eulogies of prominent persons, often attributing godlike status to leaders of the state; and Swift in another mood could write of his patron Harley as a man gifted with “transcendent Genius for Publick Affairs” (Examiner No. 45). We can see what happens if we look at passages of mock-panegyric which occur regularly in the poems, such as a burst of self-praise at the end of the Verses on the Death or some preposterously laudatory lines in the savage work “On Poetry: A Rhapsody”:
Your panegyrics here provide,You cannot err on flattery’s side.Above the stars exalt your style,You still are low ten thousand mile.(Poems 535)
And the rhapsodist has already proved the point with his apostrophe to “Fair Britain in thy monarch blessed,” and his invocation of “Our eldest hope, divine Iulus”(Poems 533–34): this last is an absurd linkage of the unpromising Prince of Wales to an ancestor of the Emperor Augustus. The difficulty for us is that all panegyric is now unavailable for serious use, and therefore gradations of better and worse are impossible to calculate in this area. This has meant the blunting of an entire range of weapons in satire and parody. You can scarcely have a mock-form where the primary mode has utterly decayed.
Even in recent years, Swift’s poetry has proved recalcitrant. Twenty years ago a burst of monographs in this field promised much: half a dozen timely readings of the oeuvre came out in as many years. Some were perhaps unambitious in the narrowness of their focus, and none attempted to construct a grand narrative of Swift’s poetic career. As it turned out, it was a book not confined to the verse, Swift’s Landscape (1982; 1995) by Carole Fabricant, which provided the most coherent overview of the subject. This was partly because Fabricant surveyed a wider range of poems, doing full justice to the occasional items and “trifles”; but it was also because she offered a clear reading of the entire oeuvre from a single political standpoint, to which we shall return in due course. This work, along with the other more specialized monographs, gave hope that the poems would at last enter the mainstream of critical discussion. The reverse has been the case: even the most challenging accounts of Swift in the past decade have needed for their own purposes to show the poetry out of the main critical space where his works are debated. This is especially true in the case of those enterprises which have borrowed from modern linguistic theory to illuminate Swift’s praxis. More remarkably still, Robert Phiddian has managed to write a searching book on Swift’s parody without devoting anything beyond a few lines to the poems: this, despite the fact that parody is one of the staple elements in the verse, more pervasively so indeed than in the bulk of the prose works. The curious fact is inescapable. Postmodernist studies pay even less attention to this branch of Swift’s writing than did the old-fashioned commentaries which relied on a basically Romantic approach to literature.
Again, the reasons for this state of affairs seem to be broadly susceptible of explanation. First, Swift the verse man continues to suffer because he worked on a smaller scale than that of the major prose works. Obviously he has no Faerie Queene or Paradise Lost – for that matter, no Prelude. Beyond that, he attempted no large-scale series of linked poems such as the fables of Dryden or Gay, or the Imitations of Horace undertaken by Pope. Swift himself wrote some effective variations on odes and satires by Horace, but he failed to produce the organized and schematic group which Pope made out of materials scarcely more coherent in themselves. The advantage of an item like Gulliver or the Tale is that, just as it can be appreciated at leisure in a belletrist vein or explored in detail, so it can be deconstructed with comparative ease. In each book the form is substantial enough to expose cracks in the design; while its rhetorical trajectory is pronounced enough to make swerves and backtracking plainly visible. By contrast, hardly any of Swift’s poems have much cumulative effect: those addressed to Stella are tied to the particular birthday and the local occasion, rather than to any ongoing rhetorical plan, so that (except for the last, anticipating Stella’s death) they could be printed in almost any order. The so-called progress poems came to a halt after three or four items, of which the best is perhaps “The Progress of Beauty”: the term then implied step-by-step movement, usually deterioration, as in William Hogarth’s series The Rake’s Progress (1733–35). Then there are the urban eclogues, poems which replicate the themes and language of classical pastoral, but transfer the action to a modern city: these also peter out after two or three. Apart from the early imitations of the grand Pindaric ode in Cowley’s manner, which went on maybe longer than Swift’s ability to believe in his talent for such things, the standard groupings into which his poems are divided show a markedly ramshackle quality. The “excremental” group include one poem, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” which has very little to do with excrement. The “Market Hill” group, relating to the home in County Armagh of Swift’s friend Lady Acheson, make up about twelve poems, but they are primarily linked by mere location, while the poems on Wood’s Halfpence in 1724–25 constitute a brief efflorescence of writings on a topical issue, couched in differing modes. Some of the most striking individual items such as “A Pastoral Dialogue between Richmond Lodge and Marble Hill,” “The Place of the Damned” or “On the Day of Judgment” differ widely in theme and tone, but each is a one-off tour de force, which Swift never tried to repeat.
A second factor is that the poems almost all operate in a comic mode, and provoke laughter of a more or less discomforting kind. The slighter pieces display Swift parading as the jocular Dean, enlisting verse as one of the social skills which enabled him to make his friends love him – at the same time that he took good care to ensure that the wider world regard him with fear and awe. Some of the more considerable items utilize a blacker kind of humor: for example, “The Legion Club” (1736), a biting satire on the Irish parliament, comes close to the territory of curses, imprecations, and black magic spells as it envisages the destruction by the devil of the new assembly building in Dublin. But it also plays grisly games with the nursery rhyme, “Oranges and Lemons”:
There sit Clements, Dilkes, and Harrison,How they swagger from their garrison.Such a triplet could you tellWhere to find on this side hell?Harrison, Dilkes, and Clements,Souse them in their own excrements.(Poems 555)
The trouble is that Swift’s burlesques and travesties conduct their own acts of self-demolition, and recent critics have found difficulty in boldly going where Swift had not gone before. Deconstruction works best where the text retains its opacities: but with these poems the workings are seldom occluded. For a critic bent on ludic rearrangement of parts, there is little that is quite so disconcerting as a piece of writing which disowns its potential seriousness of purpose and which (sincerely or not) brandishes its own flippant disregard of high ambitions. Constantly Swift’s poems subvert grandiose expectations, and they often resist the efforts of a well-intended critic to carry out further subversion of their workings.
A third differential factor lies in the question of identity. The major prose satires complicate the relations of author and reader by using the role of an assumed speaker. By contrast, few of the poems beyond Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift employ this device. There are first-person monologues, notably the “Humble Petition” of Mrs. Frances Harris or the “Lamentation and Complaint against the Dean” by Lady Acheson; but it is unhelpful to think of these as using personae, since they establish no conscious or ironic distance between Swift and the speaker – they are rather dramatic utterances by a character as different from the author as Laertes is from Shakespeare. Similarly, poems in which Swift offers an apologia for his career cannot strictly be said to employ an unreliable narrator. This term should be reserved for cases where the putative speaker deliberately misleads the reader or falls into self-contradiction: it fits Gulliver well enough, or Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. But Swift’s poems resemble more closely stories such as Great Expectations. In that novel, we may think that Pip gets things wrong, but the narration reveals this very fact to us: it does not matter whether we agree with his judgments, or whether Dickens does, because the rendition authentically reproduces Pip’s version of events. Similarly, Swift delivers in “The Author upon Himself” a version of his past which he wants us to accept at face value: it may involve rewriting history, but it requires no deceits concerning authorial viewpoint. In short, the poem may be biographically unreliable, but that is quite another thing from saying that it is unreliable in narratological terms. The poems in fact display a remarkable stability of self, with the author regularly presented as sensible but bossy, good-humored but mistreated, driven by noble ideals but fated to encounter ingratitude and neglect.
Admittedly, the situation is not the same with the famous Verses on the Death. Readers have notoriously differed widely in assessing the intent of a panegyric on Swift, which is delivered by an admirer at the Rose Tavern, and occupies the last 180 lines of the poem. The passage, claiming to draw Swift’s “character impartial” begins in a studiously noncommittal fashion:
The Dean, if we believe report,Was never ill received at court:As for his works in verse and prose,I own myself no judge of those.(Poems 493)
Clearly we are still far from reaching a consensus on the drift of the Verses.4 Swift would probably have been happy enough if readers were able to take all the claims made here more or less as they stand. He knew that this was unlikely, since some contradictory elements can be discerned by internal scrutiny: thus, the claim that Swift “never courted men in station / Nor persons had in admiration” (Poems 564) sits uneasily with the subsequent reference to his lengthy attempts “To reconcile his friends in power” – especially as this is soon followed by a list of these same men as they strove to “save their sinking country” in the last years of Anne’s reign (Poems 567–68). But the utterance as a whole seems too close to Swift’s own deepest feelings about the betrayal of his cause to be altogether convincing as a statement by a detached third person. In this instance, we do need to wonder if the teller is telling the tale Swift thinks he is.
An even more pervasive strand in recent criticism isolates matters relating to gender. Among the total of about 280 poems in English, which can with confidence be laid at his door, no more than fifteen or twenty clearly qualify under this aspect, as confronting gender per se. This neglect of fashionable topics has limited the choice of poems for general critical debate in recent years, and thus the full spectrum of Swift’s work as a poet has been largely overlooked. This is a pity, for the poems are marked by energy, drama, and subversive wit. As soon as we open our minds, and ears, to these works, we shall find them engaging and often startling in their originality. If we are to come to terms with Swift’s achievement in this area, we must look at a broad range of his verse, and take account of its diversity in mood and style.
Let us recall the terms in which Swift described his “left-handed” letter: his right hand was employed in writing simultaneously “letters of business.” The lesser poems could technically be thought of parerga, that is literally works on the side, or “subsidiary business,” as Greek lexicons have it. One way of defining Swift’s achievement might be to say that he makes neglected and slighted modes into vehicles of his deepest feelings: in other words, he makes the side-business central.
It may be no accident that so many key terms which find concrete embodiment in Swift’s poetic practice all derive from the same particle para, that is ultimately from the Greek preposition πapa, meaning “beside, alongside.” There are several obvious examples, starting with parody, going back to a Greek word which refers to a singing or utterance on the side, hence an imitation or burlesque. Another clear case is parallel, designating some entity lying “beside another thing.” Swift’s verse uses a number of forms of parallelism, but we might think initially of the corresponding text of Horace which accompanies his own versions, though strictly at the foot of the page. A term he actually employs in a related context is paraphrased, found at the head of two such Horatian items (the ode addressed to Steele in 1714, and the one inscribed to Ireland around 1724). Educated readers of the day well understood the difference between a “paraphrase,” which stands alongside the original, and a “metaphrase,” which gives the literal sense and in a way replaces the original. We shall encounter this difference again in a moment. A further case is paradox, a rhetorical device employed by almost all Augustan poets, but one that is utilized with particular brilliance in a poem like “Vanbrugh’s House,” where the small and derivative attainments of the Moderns are exactly the things on which they pride themselves most, scorning the grandeur of the Ancients. A further term from rhetoric is paronomasia, a naming beside, that is, a pun. Swift excels even Byron or Thomas Hood in making the use of punning a constructive element in poetry.5 Entire poems rest on the device: thus, “The Place of the Damned” came out as a broadside (a work treating contemporary politics in rough populist idiom) in 1731, and it is built around the repetition of “damned” eighteen times in as many lines. Each usage straddles the meaning of “condemned” (to hell) with the profane sense of “bloody.”
Another device, parataxis, is seen in Swift’s fondness for lists and catalogues placed in apposition without any syntactical connective. It is notable that Pope insinuates some ordering principle into such lists, for example through the insertion of an obvious give-away element (“Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux”). As critics such as Claude Rawson, W. K. Wimsatt, and A. B. England have observed, Swift’s catalogues generally avoid discrimination and hierarchy among the component parts; thus, the “inventory”of the contents found in the lady’s dressing room uncovers a composite paste made up of “Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead and hair” (Poems 449). The whole point about this series is that nothing is better or worse to the horrified gaze of the observer: the items could come in any order. Such refusal to set up any ranking may be seen as consciously un-Augustan, but this is to say that it depends on the breach of a habitual decorum. Another apposite term is parenthesis, that is, laying alongside: Swift is famous for the brilliant juxtaposition of alternating voices, as in the layered presentation of card-game and banal chat about the Dean in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift. But he is also adept at the insertion of apparent digressions, such as the miniature fables he incorporates into such narratives as the lines “Upon the South Sea Project,” his fantasy based around the great financial scandal of 1720, a debacle which implicated some of the major figures in national life. These fables make up small confirmations of the running argument, but they stand by themselves as rhetorical equivalents of the main narrative. Such devices shade into parable, a short didactic tale. In Swift this is most commonly an episode within a larger design, employed much as the preacher in this period might enlist biblical stories to enforce a moral message: see for example one of the poems on Wood’s coinage, “A Simile” (Poems 290).
The common feature of these mechanisms is that they place one thing against another: they align differing entities or orders of significance next to each other. Swift’s imitations of Horace require the existence, indeed the presence, of the original: they are very directly parasites on the host text. Such allusive forms in Swift’s time perform the opposite of modern intertextual references, where the new text absorbs its predecessor. Such is the case with Joyce’s parody of classic writers in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, based on random extracts from anthology of English prose: Pepys, Gibbon, and the rest are there to be made over as Joyce, that is to become part of the continuous, fluid medium of the narrative. Significantly, modernist and postmodernist discourse alike tend to rely heavily on terms derived from the Greek preposition meta, meaning “among, in the midst of, after.” The derivatives include words like that ubiquitous coupling metaphor and metonymy, not to add metamorphosis or metaphysical. The key element here is an idea of transference or transformation: as with the use of metastasis in disease, where the spreading growth envelops and destroys almost everything in its path. In addition, there is the burgeoning group of expressions using the same particle to express a reflexive or critical approach to a given practice, as in metafiction. Joyce or Thomas Pynchon can be said to write metanovels, whereas Swift writes parapoetry: the early odes keep his seventeenth-century model Abraham Cowley at a safe distance, borrowing the idiom of his predecessor without supplanting it. With his interest in word-play, Swift might have enjoyed such a thought, given his professed scorn for metaphysics.
All this helps to explain why Swift has an ambiguous place in the long history of transforming genres. He established a new form, technically, with the urban pastorals “A Description of the Morning” and “A Description of a City Shower.” Shortly afterwards his friend William Harrison, almost certainly in collaboration with Swift, produced “A Town Eclogue” (see Poems 115–17), further developing the conceit; and his close ally John Gay, along with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, gave the town eclogue a brief currency. But these poems rest on the authority and primacy of the serious pastoral, and never escape its clutches. Whereas prose fiction quickly transcends its models, so that the “comic epic in prose,” as Fielding called Joseph Andrews, is immediately setting up its own decorum and its own rhetorical properties, Swift carefully confines the scope of his innovation. We can see this in his culminating series of urban pollutants in the “Description of a City Shower”:
They, as each torrent drives, with rapid forceFrom Smithfield, or St. Pulchre’s shape their course;And in huge confluent join at Snow Hill ridge,Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and bloodDrowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,Dead cats and turnip tops come tumbling down the flood.(Poems 114)
The mere locations are unsuitable to bucolic, whereas the setting in Fielding’s Tom Jones is perfectly apt to its novelistic purpose, and their names convey not just a modern or urban site, but a kind of debased ancestry (“St. Pulchre’s” is itself a malformed derivation) and a gesture towards origins in the world of nature which their present condition belies (“field,” “hill,” “bourne”=stream). Moreover, the language of the concluding lines expresses in its plosive force a peculiar distaste which might seem to go beyond a normal reaction. City-dwellers of this period were familiar enough with such stench and ordure (and of course most of the detritus of the poem would pass completely unobserved in a real farmyard, as opposed to a bucolic landscape): but Swift, with his almost allergic sensitivity to such things, gives them specially concrete presence. What enables this from a literary standpoint is the remoteness of the diction from the prettified vocabulary of pastoral convention. In other words, the jolt which the reader experiences is directly tied to the felt absence of norms which retain their authority. This is totally different from the creation of an autonomous form, which exists by the act of transgressing the rules of its predecessors so comprehensively that it makes them obsolete.
Swift’s parody, then, requires a parity of host and invader. To be sure, the poet echoes, replays, transposes, and updates the models he has inherited; but he generally does so in order to launch an attack on some tertium quid, an external target, rather than to devalue this model. An example is the sudden incursion of a biblical paraphrase in the poem “Upon the South Sea Project”: here, Swift interjects a perfectly respectable shot at a verse such as one would find in the metrical psalms which were then commonly used in church services (lines 157–60, in Poems 212). Far from guying the original, the effect is to deepen the tone of this prophetic work as we hear the voice of a psalmist crying in the wilderness which is England. Later in the same poem (lines 217–20), Swift presents a kind of abbreviated Litany, this time drawing chiefly on New Testament sources and the Magnificat. Once again the context fails to debase the borrowing, and this is crucial to Swift’s purposes. His poetry lives alongside its sources, which continue to resonate behind the text, like receding overtones of the fundamental note.
We should find it hard to know from Swift’s verse just where he stood on the large political issues of his day. He avoided Britain’s involvement in the wider world and its historic role within the community of nations. Such matters were confronted directly by Pope in Windsor-Forest, culminating in a triumphant vision of a world made free and safe by trade, where slavery will be “no more.” Some readers find this vision unconvincing or inauthentic, but it genuinely addresses major concerns – something that could be said of Swift only if we detect in Gulliver’s Travels an adumbration of this theme at a disguised level. The politics of Swift’s poetry is always local and usually topical.
The most obvious place to look for engaged commentary is the group of poems relating to Ireland: many of these seem remote from serious political affairs, but this leaves a number which deal directly with matters of state. Elsewhere, Swift shifts his focus rather disconcertingly from Dublin to London, a process which may be related to his dependence on Pope for an intimate hold on social, cultural, and political doings. As already indicated, the most provocative account of Swift’s politics has been given by Carole Fabricant in her book Swift’s Landscape. The argument presented there is that Swift’s work testifies to the need for “morally informed passion and political struggle,” and for a commitment to “perpetual revolution,” not just within the human heart but also “on the larger stage of human history.”6 This resonant conclusion seems to many scholars hard to defend in its entirety, whichever portion of Swift’s work and/or biography we examine: as a comment on the poetry, it surely goes quite a lot too far. Nevertheless, much of Fabricant’s discussion provides a valuable lead, and her willingness to look for evidence to bolster her case in the smaller occasional poems, usually so neglected, does lend weight to her views. It may also be that she is forced to this position because she gets a nil return when scanning the more obviously substantial items such as Cadenus and Vanessa, which is left totally out of account, along with many items such as “The Virtues of Sid Hamet’s Rod,” composed in support of the Tory cause between 1710 and 1714. The justification for this emphasis is that Swift, according to Fabricant, achieved little during the years of the Harley administration, felt increasingly remote from his former friends, and was compelled by a force majeure to turn to Irish affairs as the staple of his verse. This will appear to some a skewed version of events, but it has the merit of supplying a rationale for looking closely at the Irish poems.
Undeniably, the pace of Swift’s verse production increased sharply in his later years: over two-fifths of his surviving poems were written in his sixties. The jump did not occur straight away on his return to Dublin in 1714: rather, the take-off can be dated around the 1720s, with a gradual acceleration throughout that decade. The most barren period occurs immediately after the Hanoverian accession, when Swift was forced to come to terms with his own removal from the center of political and ecclesiastical influence: for some years, he had been consorting on a daily basis with the chief ministers, and had enjoyed a conspicuous role at court. It is natural that some of his most nakedly autobiographic pieces, including the imitation of Horace which he addressed to Harley (now Lord Oxford), as well as “The Author upon Himself” and “In Sickness,” emerged around this time, while the Tory ministry broke apart and the Stuart dynasty wobbled into oblivion. Condemned to what was by comparison an extremely provincial and limited world, Swift fell into almost total silence for the next few years. His friends and patrons were scattered once they fell from power: after the failure of the Jacobite rising in 1715–16, some of its leaders like Viscount Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormonde had fled into exile, while the Earl of Oxford (formerly Robert Harley) and the poet Matthew Prior were incarcerated in the Tower of London. All of these individuals had been on familiar terms with Swift while the Tories held power between 1710 and 1714. Swift managed to compose lines in imitation of an ode by Horace, which he adapted to fit the situation of Lord Oxford, the former Lord Treasurer, who was lying in prison awaiting trial for treason. Highminded and orotund, the poem gives off an impression of strain as though Swift felt a degree of guilt about his own modest but secure station. It may be significant that he deliberately mistranslated the most famous verse of the original: where Horace writes, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country – Swift gives us “How blessed is he, who for his country dies” (Poems 170, italics added). The threat of a public beheading was close and real enough for Swift to see Oxford as a martyr in the nation’s cause.
In the event, Swift seems to have eased himself back into poetry around 1715–20 by writing trifles, indeed precisely the kind of lighthearted exchanges with men like Sheridan from which we began. Gradually he gained confidence to write on public themes again, although his poems on affairs of state after this date sometimes interact with private concerns and often share a common stylistic register with the personal items. The South Sea Bubble had its repercussions for Ireland in 1720, although it was in essence an English phenomenon. Then in 1722–23 came the Jacobite scare known in shorthand terms as the Atterbury affair, when the treasonable correspondence of the Bishop of Rochester was decoded to give authorities warning of a planned invasion by Stuart supporters. During his time in London, Swift had been well acquainted with Francis Atterbury, a High Churchman who stood at the center of this controversy, although by this date the bishop was much closer to Pope. Each episode provoked a characteristic and powerful poem: the poem on the Bubble (1720–21) launches a series of witty parallels serving to literalize the fate of investors in the South Sea:
Thus the deluded bankrupt raves,Puts all upon a desperate bet;Then plunges in the Southern waves,Dipped over head and ears – in debt.(Poems 208)
We might notice first the assured handling of the alternately rhymed quatrains: far more of Swift’s best poems are in such patterned stanzaic forms than is generally realized. (The poet to whom he owes most technically may well be not Samuel Butler, the author of the rambunctious satire Hudibras, but rather Matthew Prior: look at “Hans Carvel” or “The Ladle”as models for fables and fabliaux.) A second relevant point is that the poem on the Bubble was reprinted more often than almost any other in Swift’s lifetime. It came out in a variety of guises, including one appearance as the caption to a satirical print. This shows that the populist Swift started to emerge within his poetic output long before the Drapier stood forth as a tribune of the Irish nation. Then, in the lines he wrote “Upon the Horrid Plot” (1722–23), the poet manages to suggest by an ingenious chain of proverbs that the blame for the whole Atterbury affair lay squarely on the government, even though it is the informers and corrupt witnesses who are mentioned by name.
Ironically, the hated Robert Walpole got Swift fully into his stride, when the prime minister embarked on his long period of power stretching through the 1720s and 1730s: for Walpole came to stand as a symbol for the triumph of Whiggism and commercial values, and represented a mighty opposite to the humanism of Swift, Pope, and their friends. However, it was the episode of “Wood’s halfpence” which launched the author into a new role within the community. Without doubt, the letters Swift composed as the Drapier did most to arouse public opinion against the coinage scheme, but he also wrote about ten poems on matters relating to the controversy. The earliest may well be “A Serious Poem upon William Wood” (1724), and it is among his most effective political verses. Unquestionably serious in its implications, its manner is dismissive, derisory, and profane. A single couplet points to Walpole as “Brass,” a dragon who “had gotten two sows in its belly”; while another mentions “two hags in commission,” which indicates the Hanoverian duchesses whom Wood had bribed to obtain his patent (Poems 274–75). Otherwise the attack is concentrated wholly on Wood, as a villain and a suitable tool for unholy purposes. A succession of wounding comparisons is made by application to stock expressions involving the common noun “wood”: again, proverbs are much in evidence, as when Swift writes,
And England has put this crab to hard use,To cudgel our bones, and for drink give verjuice.(Poems 274)
This goes back to an old saying, “Hang a dog on a crab tree and he’ll never love verjuice” (that is, the sour juice of unripe fruit). Of course, the poem is intimating that Wood deserves to be hanged; he is like one of the dirty dogs who contrived Atterbury’s arrest in the earlier poem. At the conclusion, Swift picks up another stock expression and does it over for his own ends:
But soft, says the herald, I cannot agree;For metal on metal is false heraldry:Why that may be true, yet Wood upon wood,I’ll maintain with my life, is heraldry good.(Poems 276)
Wittily, the resources of homespun language are made to settle the point regarding Wood’s guilt and suitable punishment.
We are touching here on a central aspect of Swift’s poetic mode. The implicit argument of the poem is that someone called Wood will live up to his name, and that his personal attributes will be deducible from folk wisdom concerning that material. Even those most skeptical of Locke’s theories concerning language would have accepted that names are peculiarly arbitrary with regard to the people who bear them. But Swift pretends, here and elsewhere, that name and owner are mysteriously connected, so that the stock of everyday expressions which relate to a common noun can be applied to the proper noun. In a similar way, Swift’s method in his poem on the Atterbury affair is to treat the little dog Harlequin (who was used by the authorities to clinch their case against the Jacobite conspirators) as a fount of proverbial morality: “And ’twas but just; for, wise men say, / That, ‘every dog must have his day.’” Such maxims are tested and sometime found wanting: the fact that one of the main prosecution witnesses, Philip Neyno, was drowned when trying to escape from custody prompts the Tory speaker in Swift’s dialogue to comment, “Why then the proverb is not right, / Since you can teach dead dogs to bite”(Poems 248). The last line alludes to the old saying, “Dead dogs don’t bite,” but also neatly recalls the cadence of an equally venerable expression, “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” By implication, Neyno was saved from a deserved hanging by his watery death: this goes back to the proverbial idea, drawn on by Gonzalo in The Tempest, to the effect that “He that is born to be hanged, will never be drowned.” We can be sure that Swift was familiar with this, because he quotes the saying in Polite Conversation (PW IV 4: 147), and plays with it in “The South Sea Project.” As the Atterbury poem comes to an end, the Tory interlocutor scornfully remarks to the Whig, “Your bishops all are dogs indeed” (Poems 249). Underlying all this may be the expression, “Give a dog a bad name and hang him”: the subliminal idea works to suggest (1) that this is the way in which the government has trapped Atterbury and his co-conspirators; (2) that in a just world it is ministers like Walpole who would face condign punishment.
The effect is to produce an equivalence of signifier and signified. Far from being random, the connection between things or persons and the name they bear is precise and reliable. A broadly parallel technique can be discerned in the political poems which Swift wrote during his sojourn in England. In “A Dialogue between Captain Tom and Sir Henry Dutton Colt” (1710), Swift attacks a busybody Whig politician: while in “An Excellent New Song” (1711), he assaults his enemy the Earl of Nottingham. Each depends on a barrage of puns. For Swift, homology in sound slides into a homology in sense: the Earl is made to say that he will “quit my best friends, while I’m not in game” (Poems 118). So the popular mind often works: during the Second World War British people cruelly and rather unjustly observed when Noel Coward appeared to keep himself safely remote from hostilities, “Coward by name and Coward by nature.” There is a pervasive sense that the facts of ordinary usage in speech will come to the aid of the satirist, as his words float on the breath of the people. A favorite expression runs along the lines, “As wise men say,” which we have just encountered in the Atterbury poem.
Another characteristic technique which first appeared in the poetry dealing with English politics takes the form of a chain of linked analogies. Swift’s methods have been seen as subversive of logic, but in fact analogy is not anti-logical, simply alogical. What these poems do is to suggest that a man’s attributes may be known by the linguistic company they keep. In “The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician’s Rod” (Poems 110–12), the basic conceit resides in finding parallels to the Lord Treasurer’s white staff. (“Sid” comes from Godolphin’s first name Sidney, while “Magician” conveys not just, ironically, wonder-worker, but also charlatan.) Of course, such an emblem should bespeak the honor of high office, and should express the holder’s commitment to the nation as well as his loyalty to the crown. As soon as Oxford rises to this dignity, a year or so later, we hear nothing but good of such trappings. But Godolphin’s staff suggests to Swift other rods which resemble it to varying degrees and set up damaging comparisons. Running through each similitude is the idea that the Lord Treasurer is a stage magician or conjuror, who plays tricks instead of attending to the real business of his high calling. Unlike the rod of Moses in Exodus, Godolphin’s staff, though made of “honest English wood,” begins to hiss and sting like a serpent when the Treasurer assumes its care. In this way it resembles a broomstick, available for nefarious magic when ridden at night by the witch, but otherwise an inoffensive domestic object. The “wand of Sid” proves to be closely similar to a divining rod, since Godolphin uses his power to find out hidden gold mines, that is sources of graft which he can tap into. Like the caduceus of Mercury, the white staff enables its bearer to induce sleep – in this case, the Lord Treasurer’s bored auditors in parliament. Further parallels allude to a conjuror’s wand, the scepter of Achilles, the golden bough, Aaron’s rod, and finally a jockey’s whip (scornfully recalling Godolphin’s obsessive interest in horse racing). The concluding paragraph is built around Godolphin’s removal from office in August 1710, when he was required by the queen to break his staff as a gesture of resignation. By his petulant manner of smashing the staff, it is insinuated, Godolphin has made “a rod for [his] own breech,” a saying interpreted by the contemporary lexicographer Nathan Bailey as meaning “to prepare one’s own punishment.” He can now look forward to “a rod in piss”: Bailey glossed the phrase, “reward you according to your deserts.”7
Swift himself called this poem “a lampoon”: this accurately describes its merits, which proceed from a vivid exaggeration of loosely connected attributes. Where metaphysical wit asks us to admire the ingenious discovery of a far-fetched likeness, Swift’s verses ask the reader to discern a deep congruity in apparently disparate elements: an authentic, rather than a momentary or contingent, similitude. There is something in effect essential which links the different forms of staff, and that is the word “rod” which applies to all of them: there is no appeal against linguistic fiat, since common usage determines the way they exist in the world. Like Humpty Dumpty, the modern author or reader makes words mean whatever he or she chooses, since their signification is arbitrary and capricious: for Swift, words have an inviolable existence out there which cannot be gainsaid at will. And, once again in this poem, the proverbs blurt out the truth in defiance of anything Godolphin can say.
Much of Swift’s political poetry takes the form of a more or less sophisticated version of name-calling. In some of the later Irish poems, the verbal habits display brutal simplicity: “From his father’s scoundrel race, / Who could give the looby such airs?” (“Traulus”). Here, “looby” is an old word for an awkward, shambling individual. A few lines later: “Hence the greasy clumsy mien, / In his dress and figure seen” (Poems 426). Sometimes there is an incantatory air, as with the refrain of “The Yahoo’s Overthrow,” one of several vicious onslaughts on the lawyer and politician Richard Bettesworth: “Knock him down, down, down, knock him down” (Poems 539–41). The verse engages in huffing and puffing to bring the giant to his knees: nursery rhymes become a mode of political rhetoric. Just as “The Legion Club” invites two of the poet’s enemies, “Dear companions hug and kiss, / Toast old Glorious [William of Orange] in your piss,” so it characterizes the relatives of the hated Lord Allen as “Son and brother to a queer, / Brainsick brute, they call a peer”(Poems 554–55). More naked anger appears in these later items, perhaps because Swift had despaired of more civilized modes of response: he has more regular recourse to obscenity and personal calumny, as though his rhetorical technique can no longer cope in an equable manner with the enormity of Irish reality.
Carole Fabricant is certainly right to point out that Swift drew on the vigor and directness of the common people, though some think it an exaggeration to claim that Swift achieved “a bond of imaginative identification between himself and the servant class,” and that this “makes him a figure who seems far more at ease in the cramped stench-filled alleys of the Liberties than in the fashionable, expansive landscape of a typical Augustan estate.”8 It is true that Swift showed great charity in his treatment of the poor, especially in the Liberties, slums surrounding his deanery at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Nevertheless, his portrayal of servants in poetry goes little beyond vivid mimicry (remarkable though that is); his depiction of members of this class depicts them unsentimentally, with sympathy but no false idealization. We need not appeal to the harsh satire of the Directions to Servants to see that Swift had a strong sense of hierarchy in domestic affairs as elsewhere. In real life we know that Swift showed no tendency to quit his comfortable deanery, or to fraternize with the mob more than it suited his immediate purposes. Ever-conscious of his dignity as a Dean, he confined his closest relations to people of substance and usually breeding.
Equally, while Swift wrote a number of disparaging poems about his friends’ country houses (Delany’s at Delville, Sheridan’s at Quilca), these hardly seem to represent a thoroughgoing subversion of the country house ideal. The joke in the Quilca poems is that Dr. Swift, the great Dean, should be forced to slum it in a rotten cabin, amid “Sloth, Dirt, and Theft” (Poems 300). This is clear from verses by Swift’s friend Thomas Sheridan, describing a visit to the country retreat in 1724:
To see him now a Mountaineer!O what a mighty fall is here!From set’ling Governments & ThronesTo splitting Rocks & piling StonesInstead of Bolinbroke & Anna,Shane Tunelly & Bryan Granna,Oxford & Ormond he suppliesIn ev’ry Irish Teague he spies;So far forgetting his old StationHe seems to like their Conversation.Conforming to the tatter’d RabbleHe learns their Irish Tongue to gabble,And what our Anger more provokesHe’s pleas’d with their insipid jokes.(P III: 1040, slightly normalized).
Swift enjoyed mixing with this “tattered rabble,” instead of the queen and her ministers, but he never forgot the company he had once kept. Repeated references in his correspondence show how proud he was of the intimacies he had enjoyed during the years of the Harley ministry (and the Journal to Stella displays some of his authoritarian side). What the poems about simple country living exhibit is a way of coping with a great comedown: the locus amoenus is negated not by a great cultural shift but by human incompetence, laziness, and poor workmanship.
What remains true is that Swift felt a strong attachment, almost Joycean in its fervor, to the small affairs of life. He was able to enter into the voice of Dublin tradesmen less because he shared their outlook, political or otherwise, than because he listened so carefully to the accents of everyday speech, and relished the tang of local idiom. While there is no evidence that he ever really mastered the Gaelic language, he certainly was alert to the ring of Dublin craic (fun, joking), and drew on traditions of vernacular writing. This contributes to the powerful quality of earthiness which his poetry so obviously exudes. Swift starts from the physical and material. One of the most suggestive comments ever made about him was that of Denis Donoghue, to the effect that “Swift was uneasy with anything that did not occupy space; so he treated words as if they were things.”9 Disregarding any implications this may have for wider philosophic issues, it is surely clear that this need to register thingness imparts a striking quality to his poetic lexicon: it makes for the concise accuracy of his descriptions. This applies equally to the contents of a prostitute’s bedroom, or to the starving Scottish cows with whom Stella is shamelessly compared in “A Receipt to Restore Stella’s Youth” (Poems 298–99). Almost any poem will display this feature, but a not-quite-random choice might fix on a passage such as this:
Next day, to be sure, the Captain will come,At the head of his troop, with trumpet and drum:Now, madam, observe, how he marches in state:The man with the kettle-drum enters the gate;Dub, dub, a-dub, dub. The trumpeters follow,Tantara, tantara, while all the Boys holler.See, now comes the Captain all daubed with gold lace:O lor’! The sweet gentleman! look in his face;And see how he rides like a lord of the land,With the fine flaming sword that he holds in his hand,And his horse, the dear creter, it prances and rears,With ribbons in knots, at its tail and its ears . . .(Poems 383)
The choice was not arbitrary, since this comes from one of the so-called Market Hill poems, entitled “The Grand Question Debated,” and it involves an impersonation of Lady Acheson’s servant Hannah. There is consequently a particular effect deriving from the use of slang, dialect, and a certain gushing garrulity (“like a lord of the land”), all apt to the speaker. But for the most part the qualities we find here are likely to be present in any sustained passage of verse which Swift wrote after he abandoned his Pindaric attempts.
A poetry of concrete objects, certainly then. But Swift is no commodity fetishist: he seldom dilates on the sensuous or consumerist attributes of these objects, as Pope does in The Rape of the Lock. Rather he presents the reader with things which do occupy space, which have mass rather than exchange value, or which at the most have an assigned political value. Thus he lists the imported silks foisted on the people as “Brocado’s, and damasks, and tabbies, and gauzes” in “An Excellent New Song” of 1720 (Poems 217), where the fancy names make these stuffs appear somehow flimsy and vulgar in comparison with plain Irish wool.
The poems on Irish politics often gain in force and point from these features of Swift’s language. Their appeal is limited by a quality of repetition: the same targets reappear in the shape of Swift’s personal enemies, such as Richard Tighe, Richard Bettesworth, Joshua Allen, Thomas Prendergast, and their kin. Nor were these men caught up in any great crisis such as the coinage episode which had brought together large segments of the Irish nation (more strictly the Dublin people, since even Wood’s halfpence caused much less uproar among the great bulk of the population who lived outside the capital). The result was that Swift found it hard to dramatize Irish affairs with the immediacy he had achieved in his poems at the time of The Drapier’s Letters. The people he hated most of all were probably fellow members of the Anglo-Irish establishment, born and based in the island, who had been able to accommodate their opinions to serve the Westminster administration: men like William Connolly and Lord Chief Justice Whitshed. They were upstarts like himself, but more successful. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Swift’s resentment was based partly on envy and rancor, occasioned by his own disappointed hopes of preferment. He is comparatively mild on the subject of the true importees, such as Lord Carteret, a Lord-Lieutenant who, like most of his kind, had no permanent links with Ireland; or even Thomas Rundle, a bishop thought by some to hold heretical beliefs. The trouble is that Swift did not have any alternative to offer to Walpole’s way of doing things. His friends across the Irish Channel, whether proscribed Tories or disaffected Whigs, lacked a policy which would have bettered the political and economic situation of Ireland: there was no alternative government in waiting among the native Irish, and an absence of any feasible plan which would not involve replacing Walpole’s ministry with another set of remote functionaries and a different parcel of Anglo-Irish agents in Dublin. It is perhaps unhelpful to bundle the Irish situation into a broader framework given the label of colonization, since the differences between this and the experience of (say) Spanish America were immense, owing to the tiny distances involved, as well as the functioning in Ireland of a parliament and a system of courts which were not in every way less meaningful than their English equivalents. (A dissident like Atterbury would probably rather have faced trial in Dublin than go before his peers in the House of Lords; and a member of the proscribed Tory party had scarcely more access to the summit of power in the Westminster assembly than he had across the water.) All the same, the discontents of the Irish nation were manifest, and even if Swift’s loyalties were divided at the level of ideological commitment he assuredly came to feel a good deal of sympathy at first hand with the men and women around him.10 The poetry reflects the strength of this feeling, but also testifies to the lack of any real answers to the political problem in its bursts of impotent fury.
Swift produced a poetic oeuvre which is too extensive and too diverse to be adequately explored in a brief survey like this. An effective reading strategy must take account of this range of achievement: we should pay attention to the acknowledged “major” poems, but we should also seek to incorporate apparently slighter items such as the exchanges with Sheridan and the group centering on Lady Acheson. We need to include private poems, including those in which Swift fashions, or massages, his own literary identity, but also those on public themes. In this latter group, we ought to allow full weight to works concerned with English politics as well as those of Ireland. As the discussion here should reveal, there is a great deal of continuity between the two: when Swift discovered a new cache of material in Dublin, initially with the affair of Wood’s coinage, he was able to cling on to the values and poetic ambitions he had first displayed during his involvement with the Tory ministry in 1710–14. In this respect, he was aided by his continuing friendship with men like Bolingbroke, Lord Bathurst, Gay, and above all Pope: one of the strangest features of poems like “On Poetry: a Rhapsody” is its reliance on a cast of villains drawn from the English realm – minor writers like Leonard Welsted and James Moore-Smythe who owed their inclusion to their battles with Pope, while the reprobate Colonel Charteris was a Scot tainted by his association with Walpole. Similarly, the London publisher Bernard Lintot is allotted a significant role in the Verses on the Death despite the fact that he had given Swift little cause to like or dislike him. It was Pope whose career had always been closely tied in with Lintot’s business, just as it was Pope who had tangled with Lewis Theobald, a rival editor of Shakespeare as well as a dramatist. Beyond this, we can detect a deeper link between the poetry of the English and Irish phases by noting a congruence in poetic idiom: all the main techniques utilized in Swift’s “Serious Poem” on Wood had been pioneered years earlier in his attacks on Godolphin, Vanbrugh, Partridge, and others.
Among all the features of his poetry, the most striking effect comes from Swift’s ability to harness the resources of familiar speech to sustain argument, allegory, or narrative. The stock of household words Swift would assemble to create his anthology of commonplace ideas known as Polite Conversation adds zest to his works right across the board: cliché, catch-phrase, and proverb energize the language, as well as dialect, slang, and rough colloquialism. That much is true of the fierce “libels,” with their brutal assault on the person of corrupt politicians, and it also applies to the lighthearted vers d’occasion, right down to the riddles and quibbling messages which lie unmolested among the “Trifles.” An inquiring reader will find the same wit in the gentle raillery of the birthday poems to Stella as in strenuous display-pieces like the verses “Upon the Horrid Plot.” The left-handed letters make heavy use of puns, but then we turn to the verses on Swift’s death, and encounter this:
Now Curll his shop from rubbish drainsThree genuine tomes of Swift’s remains.(Poems 490)
The primary meaning here refers to the literary flotsam and jetsam which the publisher Edmund Curll – again a leader of the London trade – was in the habit of dredging up after an author died. In the context of the ongoing argument, we are unavoidably reminded of the Dean’s corpse stretched out, ready for burial. Like Mercutio’s line about “finding me a grave man,” it wonderfully suggests two things at once: how comic devices can make serious points, and how the great solemnities of life can be viewed as heartbreakingly funny.
1. The rough-hewn quality of this poem is seen more clearly in the original manuscript, reprinted in P III: 1017. The “Trifles” occupy P III: 965–1052 in this edition, along with a group of riddles at P III: 911–43.
2. Another time Swift even got back to Sheridan his poetic response “written, sign’d, and seal’d,” so he claimed, “five minutes and eleven seconds after the receipt of yours, allowing seven seconds for sealing and subscribing” (P III: 980). The physical process of writing and transmitting the message seems almost to override its content: this is truly to textualize the act of composition.
3. See P III: 1038–39; and for the background, see George P. Mayhew, Rage or Raillery (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967).
4. Some of the most influential readings of this passage are collected in David M. Vieth (ed.) Essential Articles for the Study of Jonathan Swift’s Poetry (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984). See also James D. Woolley, “Autobiography in Swift’s Verses on his Death,” in John I. Fischer, Donald Mell, Jr, and David Vieth (eds.) Contemporary Studies of Swift’s Poetry (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), pp. 112–22.
5. There are other more technical terms, such as paronym, meaning a word taken from a foreign language. Like Pope, Swift uses the verse paragraph as the principal mode of organization above that of the couplet: one possible effect has been defined as the “radiantly disjunct concentrations” found in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift: see W. K. Wimsatt, “Rhetoric and Poems: The Example of Swift,” in Vieth (ed.) Essential Articles, pp. 87–104. On Swift’s practice of parody in poetry, see Michael Suarez’s chapter in this volume and also Michael J. Conlon, “Singing ‘Beside-Against’: Parody and the Example of Swift’s ‘A Description of a City Shower,’” Genre 16 (1983), 219–32.
6. Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 271.
7. Old English Proverbs Collected by Nathan Bailey, ed. John Ettlinger and Ruby Day (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992), p. 98.
8. Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape, p. 42.
9. Denis Donoghue, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 131.
10. Fabricant, in Swift’s Landscape, pp. 214–18, ingeniously argues that Swift’s repeatedly expressed sense of exile in Ireland serves to confirm his affinities with the Irish, since they too were “strangers in a strange land” (as Swift himself expressed his dilemma). This involves eliding much of the evidence concerning Swift’s continuing ties to England and loyalty to his friends there, but it might explain some of the desperation we can detect in the later poems.