{"id":105291,"date":"2016-11-30T11:37:28","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T16:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105291"},"modified":"2016-11-30T12:48:31","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T17:48:31","slug":"on-swift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/30\/on-swift\/","title":{"rendered":"On Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

William Powell Frith, Jonathan Swift and Vanessa<\/i>, 1881.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jonathan Swift is 349 years old today. Which is to say he\u2019s beginning his 350th year. What\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0he anyway? Or never mind what he was; what did he\u00a0think<\/em>\u00a0he was?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Did he think he was mainly the author of\u00a0Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/em>\u2014? Did he think he was a journalist? Deep down, did he consider himself mainly a \u201cChurch of England man\u201d? Maybe.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe he would have said, I am a satirist. I don\u2019t think he thought that was a job. Or a life. Perhaps he mainly thought he was the cat who walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. Heaven knows that\u2019s what\u00a0I<\/em>\u00a0think, but I want to know what\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0thought.<\/p>\n

We know what Thomas Jefferson thought Thomas Jefferson was. He designed his own grave marker and spelled everything out:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE
DECLARATION
OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
OF THE
STATUTE OF VIRGINIA
FOR
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
AND FATHER OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA<\/small><\/p>\n

BORN APRIL 2, 1743 O.S.
DIED JULY 4, 1826<\/small><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s elegant as hell. Who can read it without a thrill? The second you catch on that Jefferson has failed to mention he was also\u00a0the third president of the United States<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s a tasty moment. One rereads the inscription over and over, thinking,\u00a0Hmm! So this is what he thought were his greatest hits\u00a0<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

Swift, too, wrote his own epitaph. It reads:<\/p>\n

\n

Hic<\/em>\u00a0depositum est Corpus
IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.<\/small>
Hujus Ecclesi\u00e6 Cathedralis
Decani,
Ubi<\/em>\u00a0s\u00e6va Indignatio
Ulterius
Cor lacerare nequit.
Abi Viator
Et imitare, si poteris,
Strenuum pro virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem.<\/p>\n

Obiit 19\u00ba Die Mensis Octobris
A.D.<\/small> 1745. Anno \u00c6tatis 78\u00ba.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cHere is deposited the body of Jonathan Swift,\u00a0S<\/u>acr\u00e6\u00a0T<\/u>heologi\u00e6\u00a0D<\/u>octor [and] Dean of this cathedral church, where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart. Go, traveler, and imitate, if you can, one who, to his utmost capacity, strenuously championed liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

(And, \u201cHe died the 19th day of the month of October, A.D.<\/small> 1745, in the 78th year of his age.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Libertatis vindex<\/em>, eh? So, is that what he thought he was? An\u00a0activist<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Edward Said told us in class at Columbia, 1999, that Swift was indeed an activist, a model of \u201ctelling truth to power.\u201d Said (who, it turned out, was nearing the end of his own life) seemed to get off on Swift very much. He introduced us to Yeats\u2019s translation of Swift\u2019s epitaph, which I can still easily write out from memory:<\/p>\n

\n

Swift has sailed into this rest.
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him, if you dare,
World-besotted traveler. He
Served human liberty.*<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I remember Said saying this was one of Yeats\u2019s best poems. And it\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0good. Improves the original. Key improvement: \u201cif you dare\u201d instead of \u201cif you can.\u201d (\u201cLacerate his breast\u201d is a little labored, but then again so is \u201ccor lacerare<\/em>.\u201d) (\u201cWorld-besotted\u201d is good.)<\/p>\n

But I want Swift to have thought of himself as a poet. I don\u2019t think he did.<\/p>\n

I have the fourteen volumes of the standard edition of his prose writings, a very motley shelf of battered codices, accumulated one-by-one over the course of twenty years. Anybody who sends a helicopter over that territory will agree with Edward Said. Tracts and pamphlets and histories and what I want to call \u201cprovocations\u201d dominate. But Swift was an absolutely superb versifier, too. And the Penguin paperback of his complete poems is six hundred\u00a0pages.<\/p>\n

I only have one idea about this. Once upon a time, there were two traditions in Anglophone poetry. On the one hand, there was poetry that was completely easy to understand and whose elegance depended on translucent phrases and straightforward sentiments. On the other hand, there was the hard stuff: poetry where the reader had to concentrate intensely, because every line was supersaturated with subtle meanings and exotic, twisted-up diction\/syntax.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The last time these two traditions (easy\u00a0vs.\u00a0hard) were more or less evenly matched was, um, 462 years ago. Ever since the later Elizabethans, the difficult tradition has utterly dominated poetry in English, to the point where what I\u2019m calling \u201ceasy\u201d (things like Wyatt\u2019s songs or Cavalier lyrics or old ballads or nine-tenths of Langston Hughes) seems like \u201clight verse\u201d to many a shit-for-brains English major. Today, people pretty much assume poetry should not be easy to understand.<\/p>\n

But this is part of why poets like Robert Burns and Swift are special. They are throwbacks to that other tradition. Burns is easy\u2014confidently so, because he saw that people lapped it up, girls especially. Swift is more a middle case. When he says:<\/p>\n

\n

In Pope, I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh, I wish it mine:
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six:
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, \u201cPox take him, and his wit.\u201d<\/p>\n

(\u201cVerses on the Death of Dr Swift,\u201d ll. 47\u201352)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I doubt he is ironizing. I think Swift believed, along with everybody else in the eighteenth century, that lines of poetry should be loaded up with three times as much \u201csense\u201d as language would normally bear. Hence, he had to regard all those billions of tetrameter couplets he wrote as bagatelles; whereas, in fact, he\u2019s right up there with Chaucer in terms of easy and stands up to a hundred readings.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, such is my little flower, laid upon Swift\u2019s grave today. As a poet, he was the cat who walked by himself, and all places were alike to him. He was perverse. And he didn\u2019t know what he had.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*I checked, and the punctuation in my Yeats quotation is not correct. I have done to Yeats what my editors always do to me. Demoted semicolons to periods and inserted one unnecessary comma.<\/small><\/p>\n

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas<\/i>. His poems have appeared in <\/em>Best American Poetry 2013,\u00a0<\/em>Boston Review, <\/em>Fence, <\/em>Harvard Review, <\/em>Lana Turner, LIT,\u00a0and<\/em> Poetry. His first book is called<\/em> I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say\u00a0<\/i>(Canarium Books, 2012).\u00a0He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Jonathan Swift is 349 years old today. Which is to say he\u2019s beginning his 350th year. What\u00a0was\u00a0he anyway? Or never mind what he was; what did he\u00a0think\u00a0he was?\u00a0 Did he think he was mainly the author of\u00a0Gulliver\u2019s Travels\u2014? Did he think he was a journalist? Deep down, did he consider himself mainly a \u201cChurch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[9158,25963,14045,13439,16099,13706,2634,165,2047,3724,25962,25961,2292,11116,157],"class_list":["post-105291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-birthdays","tag-difficult-poetry","tag-edward-said","tag-eighteenth-century","tag-english-poets","tag-epitaphs","tag-jonathan-swift","tag-poetry","tag-poets","tag-rudyard-kipling","tag-satirists","tag-self-conception","tag-thomas-jefferson","tag-william-butler-yeats","tag-writers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnthony Madrid on Jonathan Swift<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As a poet he was the cat who walked by himself, and all places were alike to him. He was perverse. 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