The "Divine Chit-Chat" of Cowper’s The Task

  

William Cowper by George Romney

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; citations of The Task enclose book and line number in parentheses.

 

 

     R. W. had been at the center of the New York City artistic avant-garde since the ‘sixties.  When I knew him decades later, he habitually referred to the ground-breaking work he and others had produced in the most emphatically casual terms.  “We were just playing around.”  “Professors come asking me questions, but the main thing I remember is how drunk we were.”  “We did things just for the hell of it.”  Though earlier versions of Romanticism had exalted the artist as a visionary, a prophet, at least an “unacknowledged legislator,” the hip poets and painters and devisers of “happenings” took a cooler approach, as though art were simply an entertaining game.

     One effect of this pose is to foreground the value of the aesthetic.  If a work of art has no other value, no purpose, other than to be beautiful (or – expressing the same value in  milder terms --  amusing, or stimulating, or simply diverting), all the old excuses, most prominently to instruct, become incidental or irrelevant.  The poem or play or picture is justified if it allows one to pass some time in a pleasant manner.

      This stance is by no means novel.  Catullus calls his verses “nugae,” which Lewis’s dictionary defines as “jests, idle speeches, trifles” and Oscar Wilde ends his preface to Dorian Gray with the assertion “all art is quite useless.”  A few generations later Cage was maintaining “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all” n[1] while Frank O’Hara was touting his Personism, born, according to his account, when he realized a poem of his might just as well have been a telephone call to a friend.

     The eighteenth century is known for neo-Classicism, artificial language, and imitation of the greats of antiquity.  The era celebrated the imitation of Latin models (the Romantics in general favored the Greeks) many of which are highly conventional and structured , but which also include more relaxed occasional pieces and verse letters which prefigure Wordsworth’s advocacy of the “real language of men” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s conversation poems.  The fashion of posing as natural and casual had been growing through the eighteenth century in conjunction with the foregrounding of nature and emotional expression in content and a loosening of form, a trend apparent in the popularity of the ode, conceived since Cowley as allowing irregularity. [2]  The turn away from grand themes and settings is apparent in the popularity of topographical poems, both urban (such as Gay’s “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” and Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower”) and rural (such as Pope’s Windsor-Forest and a number of poems detailing agricultural operations including John Philips’ Cyder and Smart’s The Hop-Garden).  Each of these is structured with a casual colloquialism, as though in conversation. 

     William Cowper’s The Task,  called “the most popular poem of the late eighteenth century,” [3] was described by Burns as “glorious” [4] and by an admiring Coleridge as “divine Chit-Chat” [5], a term that highlights its wandering informality, and indeed the poem slips from one topic to another as freely as subjects might over a dinner table.  The poem’s occasion is social and its subject arbitrary as the poet explains in a prefatory note. 

 

[“The history of the following production is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the Sofa for a subject.  He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth, at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a volume.”]

 

The Task is then a kind of courtly display, brought off with sprezzatura to impress a lady, much as one might display elegant dress or a competence at dancing, music, or witty repartee.  While Cowper’s assigned “task,” indeed, as he says, turned somewhat “serious,” for instance when he started pitching his evangelical Anglicanism [6] and ventured on political topics such as opposition to slavery, imperialism, and France, its structure remains assertively casual, wandering from one subject to the next with no appearance of design. 

     The author’s intentionality is evident in the prominent use of the word “wandering” and words of similar import in the poem [7].  For instance, apart from calling himself a “wand’rer (I, 761) and describing himself as “wand’ring” (III, 692), Cowper says he is taking a “ramble” (I, 115) and speaks of “roaming” (IV, 232) and having “stray’d” (IV, 697).  So, apart from the arbitrary challenge that set the poet to composing, he developed the entire poem as an extended ad libitum discourse meant to give the impression that the poet is freestyling, to use a contemporary term.

    in a maneuver that recalls Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella ("’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’"), Cowper’s construction of what seems like spontaneity is, he asserts, the proof of his sincerity, directly expressing thoughts and feelings. 

 

Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere,

And that my raptures are not conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,

But genuine, and art partner of them all.

 (I, 150-153) 

.     The first transition following the opening history of sofas is as playful and arbitrary as its selection of  topic.  The only link is negative. why, in fact, the writer is not associated with sofas.  That article of furniture, the poet says, is for the indolent, whereas he and the woman he addresses are physically active. 

 

The SOFA suits

The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb

Though on a SOFA, may I never feel:

For I have loved the rural walk through lanes . . .

(I, 106-110)

 

     After a lengthy survey of the pleasures of hiking in the countryside “where peace for ever reigns,” (208) he pivots then on the excuse of the single word to wish “Peace” to the artist who fashioned a certain “ingenious” (I, 210) weather toy, in which the male figure (presumably triggered by low air pressure) is “an emblem of myself,” (I, 213) willing to venture out in harsher weather than his more “tim’rous” (I, 214) friend.  Though it is unclear how the discovery is linked to bad weather, he describes then a locus amoenus, a cottage he calls “the peasant’s nest” (I, 227), remote, wild, and beautiful, where he  might find “the poet’s treasure, silence” (I, 235) and cultivate “the dreams of fancy” (I, 236). 

     This particular dream is short-lived, however, for the poet realizing that the home belongs to a poor

“wretch” (I, 239) whose hardships would outbalance his pleasures, turns on his praise of nature and exclaims “Society for me!” (I, 249).  Returning then to his country surroundings, he notes a nearby allée or “colonade” of chestnuts and the verbs shift from past to present only for the verse paragraph to conclude with and obscure reference to the landowner John Courtney Throckmorton of Weston Underwood and a line so tangled its very syntactical knottiness becomes ornamental.

 

Thanks to Benevolus — he spares me yet

These chesnuts ranged in corresponding lines,

And though himself so polish'd, still reprieves

The obsolete prolixity of shade.

 (262-265)

 

The final line is surely justifiable only as a kind of jeu d’esprit, a delight in words themselves as all-but-palpable objects, a pleasure to handle for their own sake prior to any consideration of meaning, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens.

     Rambling on in the present tense, he then happens upon a molehill which suggest people’s mines in that it “disfigures earth” (I, 275), leaving a visual record of “the mischief he has done.”  (I, 277)  This he then associates with the vandalism of some “clown” (I, 288) who carved his names on a tree motivated by “the zeal t’immortalize himself” (I, 284).  The faintly self-mocking parallel with the poet himself, recording his own bucolic strolls in words he might hope would be remembered is unmistakable.

     Still, Cowper’s pleasure in rural rambles as well as in words is displayed.  The joy he expresses when seeing the light scattered by tree branches anticipates the dance of Wordsworth’s daffodils. 

 

So sportive is the light

Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,

Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,

And darkning and enlightning, as the leaves

Play wanton, ev'ry moment, ev'ry spot.

                                                            (345-349)

 

      Though this survey has covered only half the first book of The Task, the pattern is clear and does not change.  To continue detailing his divagations would be to belabor the point.  Cowper goes on to consider wide range of aesthetic, political, and religious ideas in the same desultory manner, reproducing his rural strolls in equally meandering mental associative streams.  Like a scintillating conversationalist, he has an observation for every occasion, and he drifts freely from one to the next.  His many serious opinions are stated in an entirely unstructured manner. 

     This offhand procedure is not itself vacant of meaning.  By suggesting that anything, even a sofa, can be made an aesthetic object, Cowper allows for the possibility of a generally illuminated consciousness in which every experience is equally profound.  If he risks the appearance of a slovenly formlessness, he also opens the potential for all life to be poetry.  His assertively non-functional discourse foregrounds the value of signification itself, that distinctly human trait, and its purely recreational value.  Cowper does have preferences and values, and he never shrinks from expressing them, but after doing so he moves on to another topic, and his path remains a self-justifying promenade.

 

  

 

1.  Silence.

 

2.  Cowley was followed in this practice by Dryden Behn, and Pope, later by Gray, Collins, Thomson, and Cowper and then by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.  Aiming for the sublime, many of these authors adopted an excited tone to dramatize their release from rigorous formal conventions. 

 

3.  Peter Leithart “The Task” Presidential essays, Theopolis Institute, available online at https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/the-task/.

 

4. Letter to Mrs. Dunlop of December 25, 1795.

 

5.  Rosemary Ashton in The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (p. 30) quotes Lamb’s repetition of Coleridge’s phrase.

 

6.  Cowper was a close friend of John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace.”

 

7.  For details, see Raymond Bentman, “Robert Burns's Declining Fame,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1972).  Bentman traces a similar use of “wandering” in Thomson’s The Seasons.

Convention and Innovation in Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour”

 

     Anticipations of Romantic values and literary practices occur throughout the eighteenth century.  Many critics have traced the origins of specific Romantic values in the cults of sentiment and the sublime, the “graveyard school,” and the burgeoning interest in the concept of natural genius and an interest in the works of the archaic, uneducated, and “primitive” writers. This latter development was reflected in greater attention to early poets as well as ballads and other folk materials resulting in the publication of Percy’s Reliques (1765) as well as the frauds of Macpherson’s Ossian (1761) and Chatterton’s Rowley (1777).  This interest led also to the recognition of a number of uneducated working class poets regarded as “natural geniuses,” among them Mary Collier (whose first publication was in 1739), Henry Jones (1746), Mary Leapor (1748), James Woodhouse (1764), Ann Yearsley (1785), John Frederick Bryant (1787), and a good many others.  During the time when writers learned rules of neo-Classical composition adapted from Boileau by Dryden and Pope, some readers sought something different and found support for the idea of untutored art by citing the authority of a Latin tag: Poeta nascitur, non fit (the poet is born, not made).

     Pastoral and georgic poetry might seem to pose a particular problem of decorum since agricultural work is associated with poverty and ignorance and the poetic art with urban sophistication.  Hesiod enjoyed enormous prestige from his position next to Homer but his Works and Days was clearly not a courtly document but included folk traditions and details of actual husbandry.  Likewise the sophisticated urbanite Theocritus may have adapted some language he had heard actually used by herdsmen, but they surely did not sing in the epic dactylic hexameter that he used.  In the English Renaissance the authoritative George Puttenham characterized “Eglogues” as “shepheardly talke” which “in base and humble stile by maner of Dialogue, vttered the priuate and fami∣liar talke of the meanest sort of men, as shepheards, heywards and such like.” [1]  Yet he also maintains, with a lofty embrace of contradictions characteristic of him to claim that such poems were in fact sophisticated symbolic artifices.  Their true focus was not after all “to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication” but rather “under the vaile of homely persons to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters” even “to enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour.” [2]

     For Thomas Tickell in the early eighteenth century the pastoral is in fact defined by its fantastic unreality.  Pastoral poetry “transports us into a kind of Fairy Land. . . An Author, that would amuse himself by writing Pastorals, should form in his Fancy a Rural Scene of perfect Ease and Tranquility, where Innocence, Simplicity and Joy abound. It is not enough that he write about the Country; he must give us what is agreeable in that Scene, and hide what is wretched.” [3]

     Addison in his preface to Dryden’s Virgil similarly had no doubt that “the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a plowman, but with the address of a poet.” “The low phrases and turns of art that are adapted to husbandry,” should not “have any place in such a work as the Georgic, which is not to appear in the natural simplicity and nakedness of its subject, but in the pleasantest dress that poetry can bestow on it.”  Rather than realism, Addison called for “pomp” and “dignity,” avoiding “meanness” and “letting his subject debase his style.”  “Nothing which is a phrase or saying in common talk, should be admitted in to a serious poem; because it takes off from the solemnity of the expression and gives it too great a turn of familiarity.”  For Addison, Virgil “breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness.”

     All the same Addison was open-minded enough in some moods to admit that “Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures.” He recognized his own “particular Delight in hearing the Songs and Fables that are come from Father to Son, and are most in Vogue among the common People,” noting that “it is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a Multitude, tho' they are only the Rabble of a Nation, which hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratify the Mind of Man.”  He makes good on this general enthusiasm with a detailed appreciation of “Chevy Chase.” [4]  He came to include Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare among the “great natural Genius's that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art.” [5]

     Interest in contemporary untutored “natural” authors enjoyed a vogue from the mid-eighteenth century on, supported by readers’ growing curiosity and appreciation and the willingness of some to exchange literary refinement for homely vigor.  The issue was under witty and spirited discussion as early as 1714 when Gay published his “Six Pastorals” as The Shepherd's Week with a preface ridiculing the artificiality of pastoral conventions.  He promised that his poem would be a “right simple eclogue after the true ancient guise of Theocritus,” unlike the productions of “certain young men of insipid delicacy.”  “It is my purpose, gentle reader, to set before thee, as it were a picture, or rather lively land- scape of thy own country, just as thou mightest see it, didest thou take a walk into the fields at the proper season.” [6]  Gay then proceeded with richly artificial rhetorical poems ornamented with allusions both ancient and modern with as little reference to actual farmworkers as any of his predecessors.   

     The fact is, of course, that Gay lacked the experience to write as an authentic rustic.  Among the most celebrated of the “natural” writers who did actually belong to the working-class who benefited from this trend was Stephen Duck, the agricultural worker whose most well-known poem today is “The Thresher’s Labour.” [7]  Even before his own publication of Poems on Several Occasions (1736), as many as ten pirated editions of Poems on Several Subjects (1730) appeared, signaling the public’s eager curiosity.  His oddity was highlighted on the title page which not only prominently identified the poet as “a poor Thresher” but even specified his wages: “Four Shillings and Six Pence per Week.”  These surprising facts are made even more impressive by adding the circumstance that the poems were “publickly read” by the Earl of Macclesfield to “Her Majesty” who thereupon deigned to offer the writer a home and an annuity.  Though George II had scant literary interests, his wife Caroline indeed so favored Duck that she made him keeper of her private library in a fanciful grotto called Merlin’s Cave where a journalist said “the work of the Learned surrounded him [Merlin], and the celebrated Stephen Duck is both his House-keeper and his Poet Laureat.” [8]   Thus both Duck’s rusticity and his acceptability were proven before the reader had perused a line.

     The early pension was one of many signs of his popular success.  He was the talk of the town.  Satires of his biography and his poetry appeared. [9]  He was introduced to London’s beau monde in the eighteenth-century version of radical chic.  Joseph Spence, at the time Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote a biography to preface Duck’s first book and recommended it to all, including his friend Pope to whom he wrote that Duck was “an Excellent Poet” “of particular good sense.”  Both Pope and Swift were subscribers to Duck’s Poems on Several Occasions (as was the Prince of Wales), though the two poets were less impressed than the Rev. Spence. 

     Pope, for instance, though finding Duck “an honest man,” sniffed that “most villages could supply verses of equal force” and mocked Duck’s role with the Queen’s library, in a satiric picture of modern poetasters artificially boosting each other’s reputation

 

Call Tibbald Shakespear, and he'll swear the Nine

Dear Cibber! never match'd one Ode of thine.

Lord! how we strut thro' Merlin's Cave, to see

No Poets there, but Stephen, you, and me.        [10]

 

 

     Swift for his part griped about Duck’s pension in letters to Pope and Gay and published his reaction publically as well.

 

 

On Stephen Duck, the Thresher and Favourite Poet.

A quibbling epigram. 1730.

 

THE thresher Duck could o'er the queen prevail,

The proverb says, "no fence against a flail."

From threshing corn he turns to thresh his brains;

For which her majesty allows him grains:

Though 'tis confest, that those, who ever saw

His poems, think them all not worth a straw!

⁠Thrice happy Duck, employed in threshing stubble!

Thy toil is lessen'd, and thy profits double.

 

 

In representing Duck’s mind as worthless straw or stubble, Swift deftly associates the poet’s rural occupation with stupidity, quite naturally concluding that Duck’s poems are “all not worth a straw!”

     While estimations of its value might differ, Duck clearly offered a voice hitherto little-heard in literature, a working man speaking from a class perspective.  [11]  From this perspective the traditional  pastoral conventions seem inappropriate.  In  the tumult of his work poetry, indeed, language at all, becomes inaudible.

 

The Voice is lost, drown'd by the louder Flail.

But we may think — Alas! what pleasing thing,

Here, to the Mind, can the dull Fancy bring?

(51-3)

 

Even could the Muses be heard, their songs would be out of place on a working farm.

 

’Tis all a gloomy melancholy Scene

Fit only to invoke the Muse’s Spleen

                                                         (60)

 

 

       In the morning voice of the “Master” the reader hears not a joyful anticipation of plenty but an irritable foreman: “Sure large Days-works I well may hope for now.” (27)  And in the afternoon he is never satisfied: “Ye scatter half your Wages o’er the Land” (244), denouncing the laborers as “Rogues.” (74)

     Duck appeals to the reader who is presumed never to have been in his position.

 

Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare

Pity the Reapers who their Feasts prepare”

(246)  

 

“Think what a painful Life we daily lead,” (251) he cries out, with “toils scarce ever ceasing.” (248)  As for beauty the workers are said to destroy the landscape, turning “pleasant Prospects” to “a gloomy Waste.” (231).  Their reaping turns the “Beauties” of the field to “Ruin” (223) and “sure Desolation.” (229)  In a bathetic burlesque of heroic war-making in which the field workers resemble a troop of marauding Muslims. (230)

    Duck’s voice is far from consistent, however.  As one of the poem’s most acute critics has noted, the variation in voice is one of the most striking aspects of “The Thresher’s Labour.” [12]  When the first person plural is used, it is the workers speaking collectively, Duck among them, while it is clearly a disciple of Pope who opens the piece and ornaments it throughout, and every now and then the supervisor or “Master” rails to the laborers with consistent antagonism.  While the first and third of these foreground the socio-economic relationships of the actors, it is the second that reveals most about Duck and his use of Augustan convention.

     The first lines of the opening address to both Muse and patron establish the verses’ bona fides in poetic discourse, indicating familiarity with Classical lore and by patronage a connection to the respectable world.  He does insert a mention of his own goddess’s “Poverty” (6) and he goes on to mention the “Toils of each revolving Year;/ Those endless Toils, which always grow anew,” (8-9) striking a note that must have jarred his genteel audience while perhaps delighting the more fanciful among them with its very novelty.

     In what might be considered the central image of the poem – the thresher threshing – the heroic epic tone strains against the insistently bathetic realistic details.  Almost as though he had intended to illustrate Pope’s 1728 essay "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry" [13], Duck mixes here the lofty and the familiar in the most provocative manner.  Though the grain is “Ceres’ Gifts” (14), to the farmer it brings only intimations of ”the Profits of the Year” (16).  The threshers who work “Divested of [their] Cloathes” wield their flails like “Weapons” (36) of war, momentarily resembling valiant warriors.

 

 

The CYCLOPS' Hammers could not truer chime;

Nor with more heavy Strokes could Aetna groan,

When VULCAN forg'd the Arms for THETIS' Son.

In briny Streams our Sweat descends apace,

Drops from our Locks, or trickles down our Face.

                                                                            (39-43)

 

References to Cyclops, Aetna, and Vulcan, then, are deployed in order to introduce the sweat “in briny Streams” running down the workers’ faces. [14]  Bathos could hardly be more audacious. 

     The intentional mingling of high and low strains might produce comedy (as in Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week), but here the principal effect is simply incongruity.  Cyclops and Vulcan have little relevance to the scene, nor do they play a role in a greater mythological structure shaping the poem, and when the passage culminates in sweat, the effect is inevitably ridiculous.  Duck is only too clearly straining to establish his own Classicism, imitating his university-educated fellow poets by decorating his lines with adventitious learned references. 

     Throughout the poem the comparison of the workers to ancient martial heroes enables the allusive machinery to operate though it is regularly ambiguous.  While their implements are called weapons (36), and the workers are themselves are “Hero-like” (114), they resemble Muslim not Christian warriors (230).  This denigrating qualification is intensified with their later identification with “Ethiopians” (65) not to mention “Rogues” (74) and “School-boys” (78). 

     Duck testifies from years of experience when he calls the field-workers occupation a “dull Task” (68), deserving of “Pity” (247).  The contests of Achilles and Hector or Aeneas and Turnus had a victor and of nations, too, to the winner goes the glory, but on the farm, there is no triumph no matter how dedicated the worker.

 

 

All strive to vanquish, tho' the Victor gains

 No other Glory, but the greatest Pains.

                                                                   (118-9)

 

 

For this reason the entire enterprise seems in the end a “Cheat.” (277)  Facing the challenge before him, the thresher responds soldier-like with energy and dedication, but the fact that he never gets anywhere, that the same tasks must be endlessly repeated, renders his occupation ignoble.

     Duck’s biography leaves little doubt that he himself escaped sweating in the fields as soon as he was able.  He had not even wished to write about the work experience that in his day and yet today endows his poetry with particular interest and he never returned to the topic.  Becoming a priest, he was first chaplain to a courtier and then pastor of a church in Surrey. [15]  He surely adopted the most prestigious literary practices of his day with the hope that he might thereby gain acceptance, and chance brought him extraordinary success.  His use of Classical references in spite of having through no fault of his own failed to receive the thorough education in Greek and Latin poets then standard for the wealthy must always seem factitious, tentative.  He was an expressive enough poet that his dubious status as an outsider is always evident.  He genuflects before the names of ancient mythology as one would before a patron.

     When directly commenting on his work experience, Duck never softens or deceives.  He cannot, like some socialist writers, conceive of labor as itself heroic; it is for him merely a harsh reality.  The closing lines of “The Thresher’s Labour” figure the farm hand not as a valiant warrior but as Sisyphus, a vicious man undergoing eternal punishment.

 

 

THUS, as the Year's revolving Course goes round,

No Respite from our Labour can be found:

Like SISYPHUS, our Work is never done;

Continually rolls back the restless Stone.

New-growing Labours still succeed the past;

And growing always new, must always last.

                                                                       (281-286)

 

 

This choice of Sisyphus, which casts the collective “our Work” as a meaningless grind, leading only to fatigue, harmonizes oddly with Camus’ image for the absurdity of human life in the twentieth century.  Though the reader may not share Duck’s ambition to find acceptance in proper society, his suffering and alienation are universal.  His own wish to rise in status prevented his critiquing the system he sought to enter and thus qualifying for the role of proto-radical some would like to give him.  Nonetheless, writing about rural life was never again so wholly imaginary as it had been for his predecessors.  Varying degrees of country realism may be traced in Thomson, Crabbe, Wordsworth, and the Tennyson of Enoch Brand and the Northern Farmer (both Old and New) as the influence of Classical poets and the use of ancient references has faded. 

     The tension between the learned gentility of the poetic conventions and unpretty facts like sweat and economic exploitation is the wellspring of Duck’s poem.  Using the heroic couplets associated with Dryden’s Aeneid and Pope’s Homer the very name of which implies grandeur, aristocratic values, and war, Duck produced a poetic chimera compounded of high and low, with attitudes from either end of the social scale mingled with little design and suggesting no new synthesis

     Duck was able to hone his own poetic skills sufficiently to accomplish his goals.  He impressed the Queen and the Oxford Professor of Poetry with his pastiche of successful Augustan poets, but he also gained readers, both then and now, by recording a genuine worker’s voice.  If the high-flown rhetoric and gritty detail never really work together, “The Thresher’s Labour” nonetheless provides the reader with a sympathetic experience of the rigor and hopelessness of manual labor, little unchanged for the greater part of humanity yet today.  For that alone it remains worth reading.

 

 

 

 

1.      1.  George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie I.18.

2.      2.  Puttenham, Arte I.11.

3.      3.  The Guardian No. 22, 6 April 1713.  The essay was long attributed to Addison.

4.      4.  The first two quotations are from Spectator 70 (May 21, 1711).  The theme continued in Spectator 74 (May 25, 1711).  Then in Spectator 85 (June 7, 1711) he continued the theme with an account of the sentimental broadside  ballad “Two Children in the Wood” in which, though the song was “a plain simple Copy of Nature, destitute of the Helps and Ornaments of Art,” he found “a most exquisite Pleasure.”

5.      5.  Spectator 160 (Sept. 3, 1711).

6.      6.  "Proeme,” The Shepherd’s Calendar.  The immediate target is Ambrose Philips, whose eclogues rivaled Pope’s in popularity for a time.

7.      7.  His other poems are nearly all occasional or religious.  Duck had written about his agricultural work only at the suggestion of his patron, Rev. Stanley.  In his own time his Biblical “The Shunammite” was widely applauded.  Having acquired a late education, Duck became a priest.

8.      8.  Country Journal, No. 15, 1735, issue 489.

9.      9.  The Thresher’s Miscellany: or, Poems on Several Subjects, Written by Arthur Duck appeared even before the real Duck’s work.

10  10.  Alexander Pope, “The Second Epistle Of The Second Book Of Horace,” 137-140.  In the dense semantic underbrush Pope constructs he cleverly played on Dryden’s translation of Virgil Eclogue III 162 with his l. 146 "And you shall rise up Otway for your pains."  With even greater subtlety Pope set a line from Horace (Epistles II.2) as epigraph: “Ludentis speciem dabit, et torquebitur” (“he will give the appearance of playing and be turned”) which implies the decline of letters and plays on the original sense of “turning,” meaning the poet’s ability to assume different moods and voices.

11    11.  Though not educated in the conventional school curriculum, Duck aspired to the same stylistic ideals as the accepted culture of the day.  In this he differs from those today called “outsider” artists.  His class viewpoint was prudentially softened in the authorized edition, most dramatically by eliminating the lines (17-18 in the 1730 edition) referring to the landlord.

1      12.  Bridget Keegan, “Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's ‘The Thresher's Labour’", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 41, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 2001).

1      13.  Pope had recommended that the poet prepare “by familiarizing his mind to the lowest objects” (Ch. 7) by that means developing a style “frothy, pert, and bouncing” (Ch. 4).

14    14.  Sweat, clearly a strong marker of outdoor labor, reappears four other times in Duck’s poem.

15    15.  His apparent suicide has by some over the years been ascribed to his rise in social standing though without evidence.

Every Reader’s Pope

This is the fourth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes.



     Alexander Pope is a very great poet, but one like Horace in whom many nonacademic readers find little pleasure today. Even to those with some acquaintance with literary history, the eighteenth century is a dull spot between the Metaphysicals and the Romantics. Yet his mastery of the music of words, what Pound called melopoeia, is outstanding, and the wit he exercised in both sententiae and satire remains a marvel. Hazlitt’s description of him as a master of “the artificial style of poetry” is just and need not in itself imply a lower rank in the poetic big leagues. A further hurdle is that many readers today think of poetry as necessarily lyric since narrative, philosophical, topographical, and a dozen other sorts have virtually vanished since the Romantic Era, and these days most everyone is one sort of Romantic or another. Pope wrote long poems, long enough that I present only excerpts here.
     Pope’s Essay on Man is composed in the most well-wrought verse, its flow of heroic couplets an example (like tragic choruses) of literary form redeeming what might seem the cruel chaos of reality. It is unsurprising that the poet, who aimed, after all, for popular success, includes no distinctly Catholic dogma in his effort to “vindicate the ways of God to man,” but, in fact, he sounds little like a Christian. Many critics have concluded he was a deist as were many intellectuals of his era, but the point remains disputed. To me he sounds almost like a monist, even a Vedantist Hindu, in his explanation of the radical unity that underlies the Great Chain of Being.


IX. What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,
Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head?
What if the head, the eye, or ear repined
To serve mere engines to the ruling mind?
Just as absurd for any part to claim
To be another, in this general frame:
Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains,
The great directing Mind of All ordains.
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart:
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
X. Cease, then, nor order imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.
Submit. In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.


     The explosion of duality in such lines as “changed through all, and yet in all the same,” the pantheism of the divine soul that “Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,” the universal wisdom of the single imperative “submit,” all lead toward the conclusion that soothed so many in Pope’s day and since: “whatever is, is right.” In spite of Dr. Johnson’s sniffing, "Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised," the poem was widely read on the Continent as well as in Britain.
     Whether the poet really held orthodox views of any sect is unclear, but he never publically disclaimed his family’s Roman Catholicism which under the Test Acts of his day forbade Nonconformists of all sorts from university enrollment, voting, holding office, and even living in London. Since his adolescence he suffered from Pott’s disease which left him stunted, hunchbacked, and subject to numerous pains and problems. Still he made his way with his wit and his translations of Homer were successful enough for him to purchase his Twickenham property which he elaborated with gardens, grottoes, curious geological specimens, and a camera obscura, all as artfully planned as his poetry.
     Apart from the masterful and self-conscious craftsmanship of his own poetry, Pope wrote one of the greatest works of criticism in his Essay on Criticism. His ingenuity is particularly evident in the passage discussing sound effects and clichés. A veritable primer of poetic effects, the passage exemplifies each effect while commenting on it -- the pedestrian sound of “ten low words” or the interminable twelve syllables of the Alexandrine. Too few modern writers can even attempt to make the sound “seem an Eccho to the Sense,” while Pope does it so deftly his words bring a feeling of discovery and delight at every reading.


These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep.
Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught
With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.
Leave such to tune their own dull Rhimes, and know
What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow;
And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line,
Where Denham's Strength, and Waller's Sweetness join.
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance,
'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou'd like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some Rocks' vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.
Hear how Timotheus' vary'd Lays surprize,
And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise!
While, at each Change, the Son of Lybian Jove
Now burns with Glory, and then melts with Love;
Now his fierce Eyes with sparkling Fury glow;
Now Sighs steal out, and Tears begin to flow:
Persians and Greeks like Turns of Nature found,
And the World's Victor stood subdu'd by Sound!
The Pow'rs of Musick all our Hearts allow;
And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.


     The heirs of Romantic “spontaneous overflow” including Ginsberg with his dictum of “first thought, best thought” have lost Pope’s faith in imitation of classic models and indeed in the premise that had seemed self-evident in all the arts and crafts, expressed here in a persuasive simile: “True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.”
     Pope was well-known for fierce and biting satire in works like The Dunciad. So many of his targets have faded into obscurity that the import of Pope’s lines is now evident only with rafts of footnotes. Indeed, those without a classical education will fail to appreciate much of the play in his mock-heroic narrative The Rape of the Lock, but other passages require less mediation and provide greater immediate reward. Pope compliments the courtly ladies of his day, imagining them to be attended by groups of sylphs, a thoroughly unclassical concept. The term arose in Paracelsus’ alchemy and was popularized by Pope who asserts the whimsical proposition that deceased women can by no means have given up due to mere death their fondness for such “Vanities” as fancy carriages and card games. He details the various fates of those who had erred though bad temper, excessive complaisance, or prudery, noting the “light Coquettes,” apparently those who played their social role by the rules, “aloft repair,/ And sport and flutter in the Fields of Air.” From this vantage point they can defend the female against “the treach'rous Friend, and daring Spark,/ The Glance by Day, the Whisper in the Dark.” People, Pope says, may call their behavior “Honour,” but it is in fact due to the sylphs.


Know then, unnumbered Spirits round thee fly,
The light Militia of the lower Sky;
These, tho' unseen, are ever on the Wing,
Hang o'er the Box, and hover round the Ring.
Think what an Equipage thou hast in Air,
And view with scorn Two Pages and a Chair.
As now your own, our Beings were of old,
And once inclos'd in Woman's beauteous Mold;
Thence, by a soft Transition, we repair
From earthly Vehicles to these of Air. [1.50]
Think not, when Woman's transient Breath is fled,
That all her Vanities at once are dead:
Succeeding Vanities she still regards,
And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the Cards.
Her Joy in gilded Chariots, when alive,
And Love of Ombre, after Death survive.
For when the Fair in all their Pride expire,
To their first Elements the Souls retire:
The Sprights of fiery Termagants in Flame
Mount up, and take a Salamander's Name. [1.60]
Soft yielding Minds to Water glide away,
And sip with Nymphs, their Elemental Tea.
The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome,
In search of Mischief still on Earth to roam.
The light Coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair,
And sport and flutter in the Fields of Air.
Know farther yet; Whoever fair and chaste
Rejects Mankind, is by some Sylph embrac'd:
For Spirits, freed from mortal Laws, with ease
Assume what Sexes and what Shapes they please. [1.70]
What guards the Purity of melting Maids,
In Courtly Balls, and Midnight Masquerades,
Safe from the treach'rous Friend, and daring Spark,
The Glance by Day, the Whisper in the Dark;
When kind Occasion prompts their warm Desires,
When Musick softens, and when Dancing fires?
'Tis but their Sylph, the wise Celestials know,
Tho' Honour is the Word with Men below.


     Not only, it seems, is the credit given women for chaste behavior really due to their sylphs, the same aery creatures are equally the cause of infidelity. At their prompting, the ladies drift from one beau to another, as though all society were constantly changing partners in some grand dance figure, and Pope manages in his description at the same time to parody the well-known lines from his own version of Homer that Dr. Johnson had quoted in his Dictionary. The same acceptance the “Essay on Man” had recommended quite seriously (“Whatever is, is right.”) here reappears in comic restatement: “with Heav'n who can contest?”
     So naturally that the reader scarcely notices, Pope turns then to a wide-ranging satire on the theme of the moon’s inventory of lost objects. The sophisticated society of the beau monde which could appreciate The Rape of the Lock is also capable of manifold foolishness, and Pope sprays out a scattergun attack. In a single line the poet devastates heroic literature and the modern effete beaux of lesser wit than he. He proceeds to targets such as “Death-bed Alms” (presumably less meritorious than earlier donations) and “Sick Man's Pray'rs” which mean no more than the “Smiles of Harlots.” He then takes a rather metaphysical leap to conclude the list with “Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea” and “Dry'd Butterflies” before coming in for a heavy landing with “Tomes of Casuistry.” The thorough cynicism is levitated by his humor and delight, and the rueful and the ridiculous become one.


There Heroe's Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,
And Beau's in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases.
There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs,
There Heroe's Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,
And Beau's in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases.
There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs,
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs, [5.120]
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry., and the Tears of Heirs, [5.120]
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry.
Oft when the World imagine Women stray,
The Sylphs thro' mystick Mazes guide their Way,
Thro' all the giddy Circle they pursue,
And old Impertinence expel by new.
What tender Maid but must a Victim fall
To one Man's Treat, but for another's Ball?
When Florio speaks, what Virgin could withstand,
If gentle Damon did not squeeze her Hand?
With varying Vanities, from ev'ry Part,
They shift the moving Toyshop of their Heart; [1.100]
Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive,
Beaus banish Beaus, and Coaches Coaches drive.
This erring Mortals Levity may call,
Oh blind to Truth! the Sylphs contrive it all.
With such a Prize no Mortal must be blest,
So Heav'n decrees! with Heav'n who can contest?
Some thought it mounted to the Lunar Sphere,
Since all things lost on Earth, are treasur'd there.
There Heroe's Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,
And Beau's in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases.
There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs,
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs, [5.120]
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry.
But trust the Muse — she saw it upward rise,
Tho' mark'd by none but quick Poetic Eyes:
(So Rome's great Founder to the Heav'ns withdrew,
To Proculus alone confess'd in view.)
A sudden Star, it shot thro' liquid Air,
And drew behind a radiant Trail of Hair.
Not Berenice's Locks first rose so bright,
The heav'ns bespangling with dishevel'd light. [5.130]
The Sylphs behold it kindling as it flies,
And pleas'd pursue its Progress thro' the Skies.


     The piece concludes then as a summer concert on some holiday shore might with pyrotechnics as Belinda’s lock soars aloft, a miraculous comet of hair, an elegant and fanciful compliment that must have made the lady smile. The author was obliged to use an iron frame to sit upright in his last years, gamely joking about the picture he presented, and he jokes for us all, though we may be at present less discomfited. Pope indeed redeemed himself with taste and wit and language, proving not just his intelligence but his spirit as well, borne on high by imagination and force of will. His words may be so smooth as to seem glib or second-hand, but inscribed within Pope’s wonderful verses is the steady conviction that the stakes are high because the stakes are always high even while whiling away the day with pastimes such as the fooling with words called poetry.

Ambivalence in Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence

     Most people have a decided preference for Paradise Lost over Paradise Regained and for the Inferno over Purgatorio or Paradiso. Blake’s explanation of this phenomenon in Milton would doubtless do for Dante as well: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
     Similarly, the first Canto of Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence, describing a sort of land of all play and no work, will strike the common reader as markedly livelier, more precise, and more beautiful than the second in which the noble knight Industry prevails. One of the last of the dream visions, composed in belated pre-Romantic archaizing diction and expert use of Spenserian stanzas, the poem details the dangers of indolence. The usage of that term in Thomson’s poem comprehends not merely selfish laziness and the extreme of accidie, long recognized as sinful, but threatens to extend to much of what might seem innocent pleasure, as well as to love and art. The simpler delights of indolence, though, begin with comfortable clothing. (XXVI) Even “repose of mind” of a sort associated with Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Buddhism is praised by the wizard of Indolence (XVI) as though mental equanimity could be born of pure idleness.
     In spite of his clear condemnation, the poet expatiates lovingly on the delights of the Castle which, in fact, operates on the rule of the Abbey of Thélème (and Drop City): “do what you will.” (XXVIII) The luxury is Oriental “Soft quilts on quilts, on carpets carpets spread,” (XXXIII), a richness like the “gay spendour” of “Caliphs old.” (XLII)
     The poet’s pose of moral rigor appears in a world so severely problematized as to be almost unlivable. The Castle of Indolence opens in a soporific dreamland of pastoralism in which, contrary to the experience of farmers of all ages, the very sound of the countryside “inclinèd all to sleep.” (IV) Yet the alternative seems to be an even uglier “savage thirst of gain” causing the rivers to run with blood. (XI) The crystal ball which, like Borge’s Aleph reflects the entire world, is called “Of Vanity the Mirror” (L) as though there were nothing further of any significance to be seen. It displays a miserly drudge at work, a spendthrift fool, quarrelsome academics (L-LII) and, vainest of all, war. (LV) Creation belongs to the devil, and his name is not Wickedness but Indolence.
     Reality, then, is so very dreary that Morpheus’ dreams are always “gayer.” (XLIV) All the ease-seeking “pilgrims” drink from the fountain of Nepenthe, implying that each must bear a burden in life as onerous as recollections of the Trojan War to its veterans in the tales of “Dan Homer.” Like Helen’s guests, it seems only forgetfulness under the influence of a strong narcotic can free one from “vile earthly care” and open the possibility of joy (XXVII). (Od. 4.220–221)
     Given an all-but-intolerable world, indolence, if a vice, is a charming and seductive one. Author and reader may linger in delectation of its joys, yet must condemn it in the end, just as the Pearl-Poet’s medieval Clannesse exhibited the side-show decadence of Sodom only to point a respectable churchly moral, and the New York Post allows its readers to observe the misdeeds of others without ethical peril. This leads to Thomson’s many lyrical nature passages as well as such shocking thrills as the dungeon (LXXIII) and the amazing stampede of hogs at the end. (Canto 2, LXXXI)
     But the empire of Thomson’s wizard includes territory beyond what is ordinarily considered the “failing” of indolence. Love, for instance, appears under his auspices only as aggression against a hypnotized maiden, who “sighing yields her up to love’s delicious harms” (XXIII) presumably because it would be too much trouble to be other than complaisant.
     Thomson’s persona would have the reader believe that Beauty has “a pale-faced court” (LXXI) whose “only labour was to kill the time.” (LXXII) The text, itself a poem and thus a “killer of time,” presents the villain, the wizard of Indolence, singing to his “enfeebling lute” (VIII, 8) as part of his snares to capture the unwary. In his song, stanzas IX-XIX, he promises that only he can relieve people’s weariness and sorrow, providing instead a “sea/ Of full delight.” (XII) Poetry and idleness are conflated, reminding one of Huizinga’s insistance that “Poiesis, in fact, is a play-function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it.” [Homo Ludens p. 119] Thomson’s wizard offers an escape from the sordid routines of practical life devoted to self-advancement: business (“to cheat, and dun, and lie, and visit pay”), law (whose practitioners “Prowl in courts of law for human prey”), or politics ( “In venal senate thieve”). All these are equated, in the end, with crime, with those who “rob on broad highway.” (XIII)
     The vanity of poetry is represented by the “man of special grave remark” who sang as sweetly as a morning-lark yet who “buried” these talents, (LVII) preferring to ramble among the flowers. Studying the heavens, he constructs “ten thousand glorious systems,” yet allows these “great ideas” to vanish without action. (LIX) There is a nature poet who visits, but will not remain, in the Castle’s precincts (LXV) and another, too lazy to actually write. (LVIII) The fruitlessness of these artists’ lives is mirrored in others: an unkempt recluse (LXI), a hedonist (LXII), hypocritical clergy (LXIX), and politicians (LXX).
     Only the idle poet who has renounced the common goal “to heap up estate” (XIX) can attain that dubious “repose of mind,” a condition in which emotion is tamed and decorative, tending to please rather than “torture” or “deform” man. (XVI) In practice the transmutation of reality in art is what makes life livable, or, at any rate, worth living.
     Acceptable to many readers as the point may be, it is itself delivered as part of a “witching song.” (XX) There can be no doubt about the diabolical and deceptive character of the “watchful wicked wizard” who snatches victims with his “unhallowed paw” to sequester within the “cursèd gate.” (XXII)
     The contradiction persists to the end. In the second Canto, Industry is the antidote to the evils of Indolence, yet, if one works only to acquire goods, what of the dark picture of the resulting vicious competition in Canto 1? This noble knight displays his prowess in successful practice of the arts. (2, VII) Where then is the condemnation of poetry as vain?
     The literary text has extraordinary capacity to express opposition, ambivalence, contradiction, and indeterminacy. Thomson’s poem is the most accurate embodiment of the problematic, conflicted dualities from which people generate the activities of daily life. I myself and may be the reader as well, walk a ridgepole. In my own case, delighting in Thomson’s “soft-tinkling streams” (XLIII), and impatient with the drudgework of writing in the hours before I head off to a foreign land, I suppose I am one with the “bristly swine” (Canto 2, LXXXI) of the poem’s conclusion. Yet, at the same time, as constructor of this essay (as Thomson was of his poem and you of your reading), I also resemble the heroic Knight of Arts and Industry. The tension between the two is as essential to life as the Fall to history, positive electrical charge to negative, or, for all I know, matter to anti-matter. Out of this delicate balance emerges a new poem, a new reading, a new thought.

Thematic Continuity in the Development of the Poetry of Christopher Smart

The Jubilate Agno and the Minor Poems

This is likely to be the oldest work that will appear. Nothing has been updated. I felt sympathy for Smart's heterodoxy and wanted to show that his "madness" was only an exaggeration of his original nature.

I. Introduction
II. The Theme of Nature
III. God and the Concept of Spiritual Perception
IV. Smart’s Self-Image
V. The Jubilate Agno
VI. Conclusion
Notes and Bibliography

I. Introduction

     Christopher Smart has long been considered a curiosity. Tosspot and saint at once, he is most widely known as the wild-eyed madman who prompted a few generous witticisms from Dr. Johnson and who was thought to have inscribed his one great work, the "Song to David," with a key on the wainscoting of his cell in Bedlam. Stead's discovery of the text of Jubilate Agno has inspired a large body of criticism and scholarship itself and has displaced, due to its curious form and content and shifting canons of literary taste, the central place in Smart’s oeuvre occupied by the "Song" for several centuries. To this date nearly all writing on Smart's work has been concerned with one or the other of the two. While this concentration is quite proper — the two late poems will probably always be considered Smart's best — it has led to an unfortunate neglect of the other poetry. The Seatonian poems on the attributes of God, "To the Reverend and Learned Dr. Webster," and the "Hymn to the Supreme Being," for instance, are early works which offer not only an admirable poetic line and striking imagery, but also a rich source for understanding Smart's concept of nature and his peculiar theological notions, ideas that control the Jubilate Agno, though the latter’s form may put off readers with its apparent opaqueness, rambling, and the issue of madness. The Jubilate with its astonishing catalogues may also mislead critics into complete submersion in a vast sea of background material.
     The Jubilate Agno is beautiful, partly because, paradoxically, everything is lucid there. The conventional orthodoxy is not there eliminated, but transformed and expanded without inhibition, and the poet’s independently creative speculation is unfettered, revealing the poet's vision nakedly, if not always clearly. Although the contrast between Smart's sanity and madness as they were officially recognized in his own time is evident in his poetry as well as his life, one may find a significant measure of ideological continuity in the texts of his work throughout his career. The major change was a turn to the ritual grandeur of a prophetic style, accompanied by a correspondingly inflated self -image (the counterpart of the persecution he felt), and a more bold and detailed interpretation of nature, but even these characteristics are contained in embryo or intimated in the early poems. Smart’s idea of nature leads directly to his idea of God. In his self-image, the filter through which the reader must see his thought, one finds the thematic core of his work, the assumptions that underlie his most beautiful poetry. A study of Smart's entire body of work in these terms would be productive in restoring the balance of critical attention among his poems and in illuminating early and late, “sane” and “mad” work. This paper is a contribution in that direction.
     Although I mentioned several specific poems above because they contain the greatest amount of generally useful information, they do not define this study in any meaningful way, and I have felt free to cite other poems whenever it was helpful. Proceeding along almost exclusively thematic lines in a discussion of the earlier poems, I shall come to the Jubilate Agno with sufficient data for a critical reading in the terms I have outlined. Smart was an incredibly learned man: his intimacy with the Bible (including the Apocrypha) marks nearly every page; he was familiar with the classics (doubtless strengthened during his studies at Cambridge). His religious evolution led through Pythagoras and Freemasonry to the Caballah while he was, as well, conversant with the principal theologians of his own time. His curious and manifold interests brought him to range through books of travel and natural history, the more fantastic, the better, all the while shopping for images.
     I can only regret the limitations of this study, but my first concern is inevitably with the text. Other scholarship, directed at influences and sources, can investigate his wide-ranging images and point out that what the “mad” poet chose to focus on in the world. Much of his data which may strike the modern reader as bizarre and idiosyncratic had been quite sanely set down by others, and not so nobly, or expressively, at that.


II. The Theme of Nature

     Smart's earliest delineation of nature uses that most conventional of eighteenth century devices, an abstract personification, complete with classical name,[1] Philomela. In “On the Omniscience of the Supreme Being,” one of the prize poems from Cambridge that are structured as poetic essays in blank verse, she is the regenerative power that advances in the spring and retreats for the coming of winter like Persephone. Smart praises her intricate and efficient workings and the beauties of the creation.
     Ignoring for the moment the extended attack on man's search for knowledge and particularly on Newton that follows, this is quite acceptably orthodox, and the emphases on order and on life as energy are hardly remarkable, but this is a pair that Smart puts through many changes ending in the heretical, but which he maintains throughout his life. Order appears in the “Omniscience” poem as systems and patterns and the design of instinct as evidence for the meaningful direction which controls the harmonious interaction of natural forces. Life is generation, movement, animation, emotion, and finally, love.
     Philomela here is a craft which God flies and which he inspires directly with perfect wisdom.


When Philomela, e'er the cold domain
Of cripled winter 'gins t’advance, prepares
Her annual flight, and in some poplar shade
Takes her melodious leave, who then's her pilot?
Who points her passage thro’ the pathless void
To realms from us remote, to us unknown?
Her science is the science of her God.[2]


The intimacy of this Philomela with God, her virtual identification with him, implies Smart's idea that nature is unfallen and perfect, the visible testament of God to man.
     Others of his time expounded various theories to explain the flaws in the world's organization [3], but Smart felt perfect allegiance to the sentiment of his early friend and mentor, Pope, “Whatever is, is right.” Pope, however, had composed this sententia with a more restricted meaning: that the world is a perfect part of an inscrutable larger plan, and its apparent imperfections merely demonstrate its lower order of reality. Smart, on the other hand, literally believed that the world was without flaw. Smart’s persona, the exemplary poet Orpheus, declares “that all things form'd were good.” [4] God "all things form'd, and form'd them all for man," [5] Though he is fallen, man still has the rich plenitude of nature to enjoy and praise, a task he does not adequately perform. When Smart wrote “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, learn to live,” [6] he is asking man to conform with the divine pattern and complete God's harmony.
     Those who most nearly fulfill this role (in pastoral convention at any rate) are the rustics.


Fav’rites of Heav'n! to whom the general doom
Is all remitted, who alone possess
Of Adam's sons fair Eden” [7]


Earthquakes and other natural disasters made skeptics of many, but for Smart even these catastrophes are the most magnificent witness in praise of the Lord. [8] In his view man cannot properly criticize, but only wonder and adore. This is the only way in which man, who has been somewhat out of step since his expulsion from Eden, can rejoin the created universe in its perfect harmony.
     The perfection of nature legitimizes Smart's catalogues of animals, plants, and minerals that appear in many of his poems. [9] The tendency is encyclopedic and universal, with the whole of the vast variety of creation by its very nature singing paeans of thanksgiving.


I speak for all — for them that fly,
And for the race that swim;
For all that dwell in moist and dry,
Beasts, reptiles, flow'rs and gems to vie
When gratitude begins her hymn. [10]


Smart is not thanking God for the world's plenty; the world itself is thanking the divine for its very existence. Like many aspects of Smart's work, the leaning toward the encyclopedic appears in humorous form in his magazine work. The title-page to The Midwife is an extravagant example of the comedy of plenitude we associate with Rabelais. [11]
     Smart uses several image systems to express the world's harmony. The most frequent is that of music and the dance. [12] God is an organist and the world reflects his cadence. Smart's light songs for the hay-makers and mowers, “A Morning-Piece” and “A Noon-Piece” describe all nature first waking and then reveling in music with the idealized rustics in perfect step. In contrast the effete and idle Trelooby of the fable, “The Country Squire and the Mandrake,” rides about the woods wasting his time, an avaricious and socially harmful clown who cannot tell what is going on around him. “But what is musick to the deaf?” [13]
     Smart’s nature is a unity containing great variety and prodigious energy. The idea is expressed in images of a swarm or multitude or of liquefaction or water [14] which apply either to nature itself or by association to other perfect things: love, the soul, or sublime thoughts, for example. Movement is exalted then as a correct step in the dance, a turning within the swarm, or an aspect of brilliant light. This applies to the mental world and the objective world outside equally, for Smart made little distinction between the two.


III. God and the Concept of Spiritual Perception

     The enlivening source that animates the swarm images is God, and God's essential characteristic is love. Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge neo-Platonist divine, spoke in these very terms when he warned the members of the House of Commons to practice love that “we may tune the World at last to better Music,” [15] adding that truth follows love. Similarly, Smart considers Christian love a prerequisite for meaningful observation and interpretation of the world. If one is to "taste the present, recollect the past, /And strongly hope for every future joy,” [16] one must first hear preached “seraphic love.”
     The vigorous Christian love Smart recommends is emphatically and specifically based in Christian transformation of Mosaic law. “To the Reverend and Learned Dr. Webster, "for instance, opens with a long and dramatic portrayal of the sweeping change wrought by the all-inclusiveness of Christ's redemptive powers. The positive joy is overwhelming, leaving man to “love, to praise, to bless, to wonder, and adore.” [17] While his fellow poet (and religious maniac) Cowper trembled at the thought of judgment and watched the carefree living with amazement, Smart never doubted his salvation and virtually refused to confront the fate of the wicked. The judgment scene at the end of "Eternity" has no mention of the damned and one looks in vain for moral commands. Of his own spiritual rebirth after a serious bout of illness, Smart says, “He pitying did a second birth bestow/A birth of joy — not like the first of tears and woe,” [18] in this way paralleling the Biblical progress.
     In his translation of the psalms Smart willfully distorted the text, softening the harsh passages and systematically changing revenge to mercy and justice to love.


The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance:
He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
(Psalms, 58:10, King James translation)

The righteous shall exult the more
As he such pow'rful mercy sees,
Such wrecks and ruins safe on shore,
Such tortur'd souls at ease. [19]


     Smart described this bold revision on his title page as an attempt to translate “in the Spirit of Christianity.” “In this translation,” he went on, “all expressions, that seem contrary to Christ, are omitted, and evangelical matter put into their room.” [20] The central implication of Smart's emphasis is a substantial heresy: the thought that all men are saved, an idea that he was not yet willing to state outrightly. His rules for virtue are simple and far from moralistic. “A Contemplation of God's Works, a generous Concern for the Good of Mankind, and an unfeigned Humility, only, denominate Men wise, great, and good.” [21] The world, though he calls it a "machine” [22] (a commonplace in the age of Newton) is animated by God's love and it has meaning only in a spiritual perspective. Smart dramatizes the omnipresence of God by anthropomorphizing the creatures and forces of the natural world. In Smart's theology God himself adopts passions in order to better administer his creation.


Thou God of goodness and of glory, hear!
Thou, who to lowliest minds dost condescend,
Assuming passions to enforce thy laws.
Adopting jealousy to prove thy love. [23]


     God's play-acting extends even to the oak of the "Immensity" poem, which "His lordly head uprears, and branching arms/Extends," [24] inviting the conclusion that God is in it four lines later.


Wherefore, ye objects terrible and great,
Ye thunders, earthquakes, and ye fire-fraught wombs
Of fell volcanoes, whirlwinds, hurricanes,
And boiling billows hail! in chorus join
To celebrate and magnify your Maker,
Who yet in works of a minuter mould
Is not less manifest, is not less mighty. [25]


     But the various parts of the creation celebrate their maker in specific ways. The magnet, for instance, has a sympathetic love and "wooes the yielding needle,” [26] the bees are a model of organization, [27] and the bird teaches the poet his craft, not simply by his melody, but by the fact that he is praising God. [28] Man must take instruction from the brutes. [29] Nature proves God in its existence, in its patterns and designs, and in its individual events which, when invested with a human nature, illustrate religious truths. Love of the creator and the creation (the two are virtually identical in Smart) as a moving emotional force, opens the door to any genuine religious response and to the entire train of Christian virtues.
     Outside of these terms, knowledge itself is irrelevant to man's condition and, in fact, really impossible in a meaningful sense. Smart's vignettes of vain fools (in many poems) include not only the sot and the money-grubber, but also the secular scholar and scientist. His prototype of the fruitless researcher is Newton who, for all his disclaimers and pious theological tracts, persists as a demon of mechanistic determinism for several eighteenth century writers. [30] Smart significantly referred to Newton as alogos, [31] a curious term to use in denouncing a strictly scientific investigator. The word, of course, means contrary to reason, which turns the wheel full circle with the poet, the representative of inspiration, vision, and the irrational, accusing the physicist in effect with sloppy thinking.
     Smart is quite serious and will document the charge, but the word carries other meanings of equally great importance. In a religious context it would refer to a negation of God's creative  both in the creation of the world and the figure of Jesus Christ and for the poet, the craftsman of the word, it has further connotative weight. Ignorant of religion and art, Newton is incompetent to judge the world around him, since he will inevitably fall into the same sort of error as those who call the energetic, driving patterns of behavior of the animals instinct, [32] while for Philomela, or perfect nature, “Her science is the science of her God," [33] since "Knowledge gave her golden key to Israel's king.” [34]
     The attack on Newton may be traced through the course of Smart's career, beginning in light but pointed scoffing at a well-known figure who enjoyed at the time something of a vogue. In the magazine he edited and, in large part, wrote The Midwife, Smart has an article entitled “The Necessity for keeping one's Friend in one's Pocket, demonstrated on the Principles of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy,” [35] which is more a satire on avarice and false friendship than on Newton, but which, coming after the attack on Newton in “Omniscience,” indicates the thematic sublimation that is typical of the magazine articles. [36]
     A footnote to the Hilliad, though similarly facetious, is more suggestive. “Music flows. 'Persons of most genius,’ says the Inspector, Friday Jan. 26, Number 587 ‘have in general been the fondest of music; sir Isaac Newton was remarkable for his affection for harmony; he was scarce ever missed at the beginning of any performance, but. was seldom seen at the end of it.’ And indeed of this opinion is M. Macularius; and he further adds, that if sir Isaac was still living, it is probable he would be at the beginning of the Inspector's next song at Cuper's, but that he would not be at the end of it, may be proved to a mathematical demonstration, though Hillario takes so much pleasure in beating time to them himself,..." [37] It does not seem an imposition on the text to read the note as ridicule of Newton's real disharmony, for all the smooth operations of his clockwork universe, arising from his distance from God, here represented (as with the country squire) as a dead ear to music. The obscurity of perception which prevents his simple appreciation of earthly music, casts doubt on his ability to call the celestial tune.
     The real argument in this early skirmishing is centered in Smart's immanent God, who informs every corner of the world, revealing himself in patterns and emotions. If Newton perceived some rudiments of the first (neglecting the interpretation), he missed the second altogether. In what may be direct reaction to Newton's Opticks, Smart describes the phenomenon of refraction in anthropomorphic terms. “E'er yet Refraction learned her skill to paint,/And bend athwart the clouds her beauteous bow.” [38] Here refraction is an accommodation of light, God’s most glorious work, to a level meaningful to man as a witness of its maker in the rainbow. Smart's view is more accurate to his experience and more efficient in conveying human information; a scientifically described event is virtually without use except in technology.
     The issue between the two is essentially epistemological: what does one really see and what does one create in sight? Smart talked about the clarity of his vision and the obscurity of others’, but, of course, his vision was highly personal, as was, one would guess, Newton's. Before continuing my discussion of their differences I must call attention to Smart's attitudes on two related themes: the subjectivity of experience and the balance between reason and imagination.
     Any visionary or symbolic view of the world will be more likely to be called subjective than a self-consciously scientific position. Again with this question the reader sees the wandering ironies of the magazine work suggesting themes that reach full development in the prophetic thunder of the Jubilate Agno. In the introduction to his book of wit and epigrams An Index to Mankind he takes for his guide Pope's dictum “The proper study of Mankind is man,” [39] and states, “I call a man home to his own Heart, to make him reflect on himself, by viewing as in a mirror what he is.” He continues to an explicit declaration of principle. “If a man goes wrong, pursuing money or position, he is lost to that which is the Essence of all Reality, HIMSELF.”
     Application ranges from the simple and trivial, “The Pleasure of Eating lies not in what you eat, but in yourself: Therefore Exercize makes Delicacies,” to full-blown spiritualism, sometimes to the point of magic and the occult, in Jubilate Agno, such as his solution to a problem that Berkeley also discussed, the apparently increased size of the sun and moon when they are near the horizon.
     He recognized at the same time that there are a number of realities which one must reconcile before asserting a private vision as literal truth. Smart is often commended for a peculiar directness of expression gained by identifying object and analogy; that is, he saw no difference between the object as it appears to the scientific observer and the object's imaginative corollary. [40] While this is true, it does not mean that he was confused. In his fable "Reason and Imagination," he represents the view of science (reason) and imagination (poetry) and also the divine overview. He addresses Kenrick, to whom the fable is dedicated.


Thou reconcil'st with Euclid's scheme,
The tow'ring flight, the golden dream,
With thoughts at once restrain*d and free.
* * * *
Let not a fondness for the sage,
Decoy thee from a brighter page,
THE BOOK OF SEMPITERNAL BLISS,
The lore where nothing is amiss,
The truth to full perfection brought;
Beyond the sage's deepest thought:
Beyond the poet's highest flight. [41]


     Both the poetic and scientific view are fallible, and even a successful mingling of the two is of little importance when compared to the certainty and urgency of the religious view. (Imagination is portrayed entirely apart from religion, indicating Smart’s conviction that his own work was derived from the infallible divine source.) In this light the metaphors and symbols of the early poetry which become concrete fact in the Jubilate may reasonably be supposed to have been literally intended from the first. [42]
     Smart's epistemology grows directly from his acceptance of a symbolic, spiritual reality as final, as the most real. D.J. Greene, in an excellent essay, [43] points out the close affinity between Smart's position and Berkeley's. He notes numerous passages in Berkeley as close parallels for Smart's implicit ideas. “The red and the blue which we see are not real colors, but certain unknown motions and figures which no man ever did or ever can see.” The skepticism is not entirely acceptable, however, for all men have a strong faith in their sensory impressions. Berkeley goes on to deliver a rhapsody on beautiful and affecting sights and sounds (the most convincing) and is finally forced to conclude, “There must be some other mind in which they exist.” The axiom “esse est percipi” is not fully satisfying to him, until one posits a mind of God, in effect, restoring the material world, but as a subjective experience of the divine. Not only does reality essentially exist in an image in God's mind, but it exists also in the images in men’s minds. Impressions, then, are the final truth for man. In another passage Berkeley concludes, “I say that there are no causes, properly speaking, but spiritual, nothing active but spirit.”
     Though there seems to be no evidence that Smart was familiar with Berkeley, the similarity is clear, even to the point of imagery. Though an image for the ineffable might seem to be arbitrary always, both Berkeley and Smart chose movement and energy as the most appropriate. Placing final reality for men on relativistic experiential grounds in a way out-materializes the materialist. The man who thinks the sun to be the size of a guinea and the man who sees it as the heavenly host singing “Holy, holy, holy!” are on equal ground, and so is the scientist standing with them who claims that it is enormous and 93.000,000 miles away, because each has only his impressions as evidence. If any distinctions could be drawn, the scientist would be the weaker for his dependence on abstractions like perspective and measurement, [44] and the mystic would be the stronger for his claim to direct experience of the God who controls the system. Thus Smart agreed with Berkeley that if the sun seems larger near the horizon, the most reasonable conclusion would be that it is, indeed larger.
     Smart, of course, went much further than Berkeley. He anthropomorphized the sun to explain why it was larger. He read the whole book of spiritual reality and proclaimed his findings with a frightening fervor. Later 1 will demonstrate the assumption and elaboration of a theory very like Berkeley's in the Jubilate, but for the minor poetry, it illuminates the living, spiritual world that Smart already inhabited and the odd certainty of his pronouncements. The natural world and the spiritual are one, and the one is directed in every part toward God.


IV. Smart’s Self-Image

     It was not just in his keen perception of spiritual reality (the images or ideas of God's mind) that Smart considered himself close to God. Image systems associated with the poet and his God are strikingly similar. The idea, based on man’s creation in the image of God, could be more traditional than heretical. Cudworth, for example, said that the good man was divinity incarnate and that Christians who lead holy lives are mystical Christs. [45] Smart's approach to a Christ-like identity came by two related routes: as a poet (a singer-creator-prophet) and as a humble and persecuted man. Each role functions in Smart’s poetry apart from identifying the voice of the poems
     Smart defined his nature as a poet and a creator partially through the image of impression or stamping out as a creative process, an idea that may have been fixed in his mind by his close association with John Newbery's printing shop. Far from imitation, the impression is a forming anew; it is bringing order from chaos and an image from a blank tablet. In “Eternity” Smart speaks of God's making the world in innumerable systems "All stampt with thine uncounterfeited seal," [46]
     In the introduction to his verse translation of Horace (1767) he speaks in similar terms of his own technique as a poet. "Impression, then, is a talent or gift of Almighty God, by which a Genius is empowered to throw an emphasis upon a word or sentence in such a wise that it cannot escape any reader of sheer good sense, and true critical sagacity.” [47] The traditional comparison between poet and God could be explicit only on one side for the public Smart. He was not willing to proclaim his role as prophet, much less as deity, until madness had robbed him of mental inhibitions, but he frequently spoke of God as a poet. In "Eternity" God is “GREAT POET OF THE UNIVERSE,” “Architect,” “Artificer,” etc. In "Immensity" he is Artificer divine. "His name is written on every atom of the creation which “shot to existence” only “at th’inspiring word.” [48]
     Though the word forms things by defining them and giving them existence apart from chaos, song is necessary to bring life. Smart links the role of poet as singer to the idea of the entire creation, by its very existence, constituting a song of praise to God. The motif of the song bringing life appears in three different forms: as God awakening life with the divine word, as one aspect of the creation awakening the rest, or as the poet singing life into the world. In order to strengthen his self-images Smart worked in terms of earlier figures with whom he associated himself, thus lending credence to what amounted to a self-glorification by masking it in antiquity and diverting attention from his own time. For the life-giving singer the figures are David, Orpheus, and, in one poem, Purcell. These associations lent authority and legitimacy to Smart’s artistic preoccupations.


Orpheus, for so the Gentiles call'd thy name,
Israel's sweet psalmist, who alone could wake
Th’inanimate motion. [49]


     At the opening of “Immensity” Smart asks only that his glory, lute, and harp be roused, [50] In the “Hop-Garden” a David-figure appears as a rustic swain. [51] The “Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day” states generally of music that it can “lifeless rocks to motion start” and make “trees dance lightly from the bower,” [52] Purcell can “sing the subject into life.” [53] The divine analogy is the music of the spheres which constantly plays to maintain motion in the universe. [54]
     It has already been seen that, at the very least, Smart made himself the spokesman for man and nature in their praise of God, a role associated with some of the most important elements of the prophetic, almost messianic voice that would later preoccupy him. In the works under consideration he displays another typically prophetic trait: an enthusiastic nationalism combined with an equally enthusiastic universalism. For the Biblical prophets Israel is a chosen nation, although (for most of the prophets) there is one God for all the world. [55] He assigns homely virtues to the English, plain speech, plain clothes, hard work, in contrast to the continent and France in particular which he calls effete and dandified. [56] The dichotomy extends even to drinks. The English hop (which makes “buxom beer” [57]) shall exact homage from the French vine. [58] His caricatures of the nations enable him to work out his nationalism in terms of dedication to nature. “For simple nature hates abuse,/And plainness is the dress of Use,” [59] the tobacco-pipe tells the bag-wig. The theme of nationalism appears in other, more serious forms, as in the reference to Europe as “the seat of grace and christian excellence,” [60] but the whole system is dominated by the far more frequent (and logical) assertions of unity and brotherhood, [61] such as the opening lines of “The English Ball Log, Dutch Mastiff, and Quail.” “Are we not all of race divine,/Alike of an immortal line?” [62]
     Within the context of his national group, Smart associated himself with famous warriors as an Englishman and as a servant of the Lord. [63] Besides reinforcing the vigor and militancy of his poetry, this identity with the host of Biblical soldiers supported him in what he thought to be his persecution. He did not lack for contemporary heroes, though, addressing poems to Admiral Pocock and General Draper (who had gained fame for having captured Havana and having taken Manila, respectively). Smart glorifies them as Christian heroes, a designation which may fail to convince the modern reader but which, for Smart, represented the continuity into his own time of the Biblical line of noble and active virtue. In “Goodness” he calls on Europe to assume the armor of the Lord, and in his “Epistle to John Sheratt, Esq.” Smart imagines himself an embattled ship, saved only by tactical maneuvering. [64]
     The fact is that Smart often identified with embattled figures. Just as the Biblical prophets are not recognized in their own country, he thought himself unreasonably ignored or actively set upon. One is surprised to hear that when Admiral Pocock returned after his triumph, he was ignored.

And yet how silent his return
With scarce a welcome to his place –
Stupidity and unconcern,
Were settled in each voice and on each face.
As private as myself he walk'd along, ,
Unfavoured by a friend, unfollow'd by the throng. [65]

      In the “Ode to General Draper" the statement of the same theme is grotesquely elaborated. Smart -devotes four long stanzas out of ten to a description of what would have happened had the hero met no public adulation. The list goes on in the most unlikely way: he would have had no statues or paintings of himself, no honorary degree, no salute with guns and fireworks, no toasts, no name in fashionable society, etc. The heroes, however, do not care, because they as Christian patriots “for the general welfare stand or fall,/And have no sense of self, and know no dread at all,” [66] These are among the more indirect indications of a theme that recurs very frequently in Smart.
     One needs no clinical training to observe and describe a paranoia involving delusions of both persecution and grandeur and finally centered in the religious terms of a martyr complex. Only scattered suggestions of the theme of persecution can be found in the early poems. The subject of Smart’s “On an Eagle,” written during his Cambridge years, is clearly an image for Smart himself. This “imperial bird” has been caged “in this servile cell/ Where Discipline and Dullness dwell.” He is “so grov'ling! once so great!” “Thou type of wit and sense confin'd,/ Cramp'd by the oppressors of the mind,” “while more than mathematic gloom./Envelopes all around!” [67] The poem is in part, of course, a jeu d 'esprit, and every undergraduate can sympathize.
     Again, in the poem “To The Reverend and Learned Dr. Webster,” Smart assumes that Webster's Christian virtue will attract envy and malice, but only a snail coterie of admirers. He outlines the inversion of values in modern times in which the evil are rewarded and the good ignored. The high-spirited witty pleasantry in “The Author Apologizes to a Lady for His being a Little Man” seems somewhat ominous in this light, particularly in view of the reappearance of the theme in Jubilate Agno. [68] Smart frequently depicted small animals defending themselves against great enemies. Probably also to the point is the dominance of themes of persecution in the Biblical prophets and the Psalms. [69]
     This point completes my survey of the major themes of Smart's minor work. [70] They often operate as assumptions that underlie the meaning of the text rather than as outright assertions. The interrelationship of the images and themes is complex, resulting in a coherent, if eccentric, vision. The vindication of the significance of what may seem a cumbersome and unlikely progression of ideas is in their importance in Jubilate Agno.


V. The Jubilate Agno

     The intricacy with which the themes of the minor poetry inform the Jubilate Agno, in certain passages, at least, may be illustrated with a single line.


Let David bless with the Bear — The beginning of victory in the Lord -- to the Lord the
perfection of excellence -- Hallelujah from the heart of God, and from the hand of
the artist inimitable, and from the echo of the heavenly harp in sweetness
magnifical and mighty. [71]


     David cites his slaying of the bear to convince Saul that he is capable of facing the challenge of Goliath, evoking the Smartean image of the militant Christian warrior, here associated with David in the roles of soldier and hunter. Hunting images that represent much the same idea as the warrior images are common in Jubilate Agno, but are sometimes turned about so that Smart is the hunted beast. The hallelujah and the following clauses recall the themes of the artist as Orpheus, God as artist and music as harmony. Ambiguities: appear in the series God-nature-man: which plays the heavenly harp? Which is the artist inimitable? They are nearly equivalent, in any event, but perhaps the best reading of the line is as one of the orderly progressions of which Smart was so fond in which the first would be only God himself, the second the man as an artist and the third, the whole of nature. The echo may then be understood in terms of the image of impression; the word of God having stamped nature with its reality, it is, in a way, a repetition, or concrete echo. At any rate, the line nicely illustrates both the continuity and development of thematic material in Jubilate Agno. Many elements reappear, extended, changed, or evolved in ways that one could not expect from the earlier works alone. As well, then, as an aid to explication, the patterns which I have traced in the minor poetry defines a contrast with Jubilate Agno, partly in terms of sanity and madness, but more importantly in poetic and philosophica1 speculation.
     Commentators on the manuscript of Jubilate Agno, in the five fragments detailed by Mr. Bond, is, tend to call it “a marvel” or, more simply, a remarkable document. It has been described as little more than a mere diary, a spiritual doodle-pad, with which Smart occupied himself in order to pass the dull days at the asylum. It has been established that, as he approached the end, both of his confinement and of the manuscript, he wrote a regular one line a day as a device for keeping track of the time, and it is also known that the last entry corresponds with his last day in the mad house, following which he apparently thought no more of his work and certainly never considered publishing it. To be sure, there passages of little interest to anyone and many of the transitions are so abrupt as to indicate a total carelessness with regard to structure that casts doubt on the value of the whole as an artistic production. However it is hardly more discursive and eccentric than, say, Pound's Cantos (which this age has half-digested, at least) and the reader finds many passages that demand no apologist or special interest to evoke attention and admiration. Whatever the verdict may on the whole once it is as fully understood as possible, writers after Stead have found general agreement that it is neither a mere curiosity, nor is its primary significance either biographical or as a motherlode for the poetic inspiration of the Song to David. For the immediate purposes it is especially useful as a source for liberated thought and expression; the poet in his confinement felt greater freedom to make explicit what his earlier had only suggested.
     His breakdown and incarceration may well have prevented him from producing other poems of the kind he had done before, perhaps reaching new heights, but the unfortunate conditions that led him to be locked up also made possible the composition of poem that was dramatically innovative in both form and content. All social conventions, including the conventions of literature, are more easily set aside in solitude (and all the more in a mad house). Further Smart would naturally proceed with greater independence in a work that he thought (at least after the first fragment) would never reach eyes other than his own. This, besides the doors that were opened (though many, too, were closed) by the disjointed and associative mental frame that one might reasonably guess accompanied Smart's mental healthy crisis, allowed him to proceed without timidity or hindrance. The same factors that formed his greatest failures made possible some of his most beautiful poetry. The poem's fragments are well enough distinguished from one another to suggest, as most informative and convenient, a reading and analysis of each separately before general conclusions are possible. This method will orient the reader in the over-all structure of the poem at the same tine as it furthers my own specific aim of indicating continuity with the earlier work.
     Smart wrote during his college years that “free souls, fed with divine repast” should “taste the present, [72] and Fragment A, in the terms of the metaphor, is a veritable feast. Drawing from a long list of popular books of natural history and travel, from his classical sources and particularly from the Bible, he pairs animals with scriptural characters and derives a moral or image from each in the typical line of the fragment. Building in this way, he constructs a hymn of thanksgiving, setting down concretely and in great detail the universal praise that he had earlier suggested, in which each part of the creation (in this section, each beast) plays a distinct role.
     His earlier use of this idea had seemed a poetic conceit, or a momentary enthusiasm, but it was potentially possible as an article of religious faith. Whereas before natural patterns and instincts were a adduced as a proof of God, and certain animals were images for illustrating moral precepts, now he exults in the very definition of each animal as a type. He justifies his technique:


Let Mishael bless with the Stoat -- the praise of the Lord gives propriety to all things. [73]


Thus, in a way, definition itself may be seen as evidence that everything has a place in a divine design. The animal may be merely described and commended.


Let Chalcol praise with the Beetle, whose life is precious in the sight of God. [74]


Or the implication of design may be more pronounced.


Let Abiathar with a Fox praise the name of the Lord who ballances craft against strength
and skill against number. [75]


By ordering natural history in terns of praise Smart can grasp it as a meaningful expression of the divine. There are a number of ways in which the elements of the line formula may be related. The Biblical figure may be naturally associated with an animal in a story that has a moral of its own.


Let Abraham present a Ram, and worship the God of his Redemption. [76]


The association may be original with Smart but follow the Biblical association of the character or animal, [77] or the natural animal itself may inspire the line apart from scripture. For some lines there seems little or no relation at all between man, beast, and theme.


Let Shallum with the Frog bless God for the meadows of Canaan, the fleece, the milk and
the honey. [78]


Appropriately the first named in this microcosm of the creation is Noah.


Let Noah and his company approach the throne of Grace, and do homage to the Ark of
their Salvation. [79]


“Salvation obviously refers to the successful weathering of the flood, but Biblical typology regularly associates it with Christ’s redemptive powers, especially here since it seems identified with the throne of grace, hinting at the conflation of God and his creation. The idea is strengthened by the deliberate pun on the Ark as a ship and the Ark of the Covenant.

Let the Levites of the Lord take the Beavers of the brook alive into the Ark of the
Testimony. [80]

Bond follows Stead in calling the line confused, but there seems little doubt of its pointed intentionality. The object which contained God and that which contained the multiplicity of animals are identified. Except for a few habitual nods to Christ and salvation there is nothing in the fragment inconsistent with a pantheistic joy in the things of this world and this life. Though it would be wrong to suspect Smart of conscious heterodoxy, the spirit of his religion has very emphatically taken this direction.

A new image system which appears very frequently throughout the whole poem is a group centered around the ideas of movement, variety, and intricacy. This springs from the same sensibility and plays somewhat the same role as the earlier images of swarms, multitudes, and liquefaction, and both imply praise expressed in abundant vitality.


Let Ahimelech with the Locust praise God from the tyranny of numbers. [81]

Let Jeduthun rejoice with the Woodlark, who is sweet and various. [82]


     Probably part of the import of the identification of the two arks is in further developing the idea of Christ’s sweeping transformation of the Old Testament. The Ark of the Testimony had been rather forbidding with only a priestly caste allowed to approach it, and violators, even those ignorant of their crime, were struck dead on the spot, but now all creatures are contained within it. The priest has been changed from an official of the sacrifice into a servant of the “Lord and Giver of Life,” [83] and, as if to emphasize the universality of God's love, he includes animals that are not in the Bible at all (such as the beavers), and he calls the tortoise, who had been condemned under the old law as unclean, “food for praise and thanksgiving.” [84] He explains these changes in a later line.


Let Ebed-Melech bless with the Mantiger, the blood of the Lord is sufficient to do away
the offence of Cain, and reinstate the creature which is amerced. [85]


     Whereas earlier the thrust of the redemption theme had been toward man, now Smart turns to the natural world, perhaps reflecting something of an alienation and escape from human society. Smart blesses a prodigious number of friends in the course of the poem, but nowhere does he generally rejoice in mankind, nor does he repeat his earlier visions of their universal salvation. The tone is already more personal, and alarming pathological tendencies are beginning to appear in half-concealed form.
     A significant number of the animals of this section seem related as self-images to Smart’s persecution/grandeur complex. Low, ugly, or small animals find a glory in God that they never receive from men. Insects and reptiles are prominent in an unbalance that can only be explained in this way. Likewise, themes of defensiveness and solitude are common.


Let Samuel, the Minister from a child, without ceasing praise with the Porcupine, which
is the creature of defence a stands upon his arms continually. [86]

Let Nathan with the Badger bless God for his retired fame and privacy inaccessible to
Slander. [87]


     An atmosphere of high tension between bipolar oppositions supports such attitudes. The animals have natural enemies identified with the Adversary as opponents to be outwitted. The challenge is immediate whereas in Smart's earlier works the devil had been very rarely, if at all, present. Here he is tricked by a rabbit and confused by a child. [88] Many of the other verges imply or state similar relationships, and maybe half imply some power struggle, but the rest are filled with the purest benedictions and the most ingenuous pleasure.
     The tone of the warrior of the Lord, the voice of David before the battle, appears in the many lists of Old Testament generals among the names, the introduction of hunters, and the undirected ferocity of lines like the following.


Let Joshua praise with the Unicorn -- the swiftness of the Lord, and the strength of the
Lord, and the spear of the Lord mighty in battle.
Let Abishai bless with the Hyaena -- the terror of the Lord, and the fierceness of his
wrath against the foes of the King and of Israel. [89]


     Smart begins to think of himself as a martyr, of giving himself up as a sacrifice just as Christ himself was a sacrifice for all men.


Let Savaran bless with the Elephant, who gave his life for hi s country that he might put
on immortality. [90]


     As Devlin explains (his knowledge of the Apocrypha has cleared several obscurities), Savaran "occurs ... in the deutero-canonical book of Maccabees (I, vi, 43-46) where it is related how ‘Eleazar surnamed Savaran’ slew the elephant from beneath and was entombed by its fall: ‘Eleazar also surnamed Savaran . . . put himself in jeopardy, to the end that he might deliver his people and get himself a perpetual name.’” [91]
     For all practical purposes the Fragment Bl abandons Smart’s plan to produce a new liturgy. Though he may have been referring to the Jubilate Agno when he wrote, “For I pray to the Lord Jesus to translate my MAGNIFICAT into verse and represent it,” [92] the concerns of the responsive "for" verses in this section are so personal and autobiographical, so “confessional” in the modern sense, that their author could not have considered them fit for publication. The "Let" and the "For" verses are usually closely related, with one either providing an example or metaphor for the other, or conditioning each other in a variety of ways. [93]
     The fragment is best read in three major divisions. The verses 1-51 are a kind of manifesto stating Smart’s prophetic stand, now fully realized; 52-156 elaborate on his position adding genealogical and personal matter as documentation to substantiate his claim to the prophetic mantle and to suggest his models in the past, and also including some autobiographical material that seems not to further the themes of the poem at all. From 157-258 (the end of the section), Smart takes off on a remarkable flight, a Smartean treatise on science in which he details a spiritual physics that challenges Newton on his own grounds.
     He begins his ''here I stand" declaration with sonorous grandeur and a good deal of prophetic arrogance, echoing the words in which Savaran's self-sacrifice was described.


For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory
of the name of the Lord. [94]


A few lines later he uses the Biblical formula for describing a sacrifice to apply to himself.


For my existimation is good even amongst the slanderers and my memory shall arise a
sweet savour unto the Lord. [95]

There is no longer any doubt in Smart’s mind that he has been especially selected as “the Reviver of ADORATION amongst ENGLISH-MEN.” [96]

For I have adventured myself in the name of the Lord and he hath mark'd me for his own. [97]

The self-image as one in a line of prophets directly stemming from the Bible leads to an outrageous fantasy.

For if Pharaoh had known Joseph, he would have blessed God & me for the illumination
of the people. [98]


     Summoning the strength of Biblical language he can regard himself with powerful and lyrical pathos in some of the poem’s strongest lines.


For I am come home again, but there is nobody to kill the calf or pay the muslck. [99]

For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God. hath sent me to the sea for pearls. [100]


     For the first time he feels confident enough in his Lord that he directly indicts his persecutors. [1-1] He assigns the cause of their enmity as charitably as he can to ignorance. Here one cannot discount the possibility of rumors about his wife's fidelity, [102] a theme that will grow in Smart's mind as the poem goes on.
     Again animals that are lowly and despised are found in the “let” verses, while others provide examples of subtlety, animation, or swarms. [103]
     Smart formally assumes the prophetic mantle in a ritual repudiation of his earthly inheritance in favor of the complete and exclusive fatherhood of God, a decision that recalls Christ's giving up his mortal parents in the temple. He begins to perform traditional prophetic roles: cautioning his nation in its governmental policies, giving moral instruction and predicting the apocalypse. He calls England to peace, “that all the guns may be nail'd up save such as are for the rejoicing days,” [104] commends the postal service, and recommends civic improvements for London, finally declaring himself
"in behalf of LIBERTY, PROSPERITY and_NO EXCISE.” [105] A line like the following may seem a proof of madness in its comically bathetic triviality.

For I bless God for the Postmaster General & all conveyancers of letters under his care
especially Allen & Shelvock. [106]

     But it seems more profitably read both as a fulfillment of the prophet's obligation to his nation and as another form of Smart's preoccupation with complex harmonious movement within a system. In the large numbers of letters moving about in an orderly way one sees an image not unlike that of circulation of blood or sap, [107] The vision of a grand system within apparent chaos fascinated Smart and for him stood as an image of the cosmos itself. For Smart the garden was an image of simultaneous order and randomness, and he recalls the Eden-like memories of his childhood on a country estate with great nostalgia and prophesies a similar environment for the London of the future. [108] One thinks of Blake's New Jerusalem.
     The earlier themes of his affinity with Christ, his prophetic and warrior-like nature, and his English nationalism are guarantors for him of his spiritual credentials. Following the example of the Biblical genealogies, he traces his line back to Christ [109] and then to Abraham. [110] In between he includes Junius Agricola, [111] the Roman governor-general of England whom he identifies with St. George, [112] considering both to be Warrior-Martyrs whose names happily have the same meaning of farmer. The association allows him to imagine himself slaying the dragon. [113] In a more puzzling association, he adds to the associative chain, identifying Agrippa with Agricola. [114] He translates his own given name to associate himself with Simon of Cyrene [115] as a direct servant of Christ and a fellow victim of undeserved suffering. He also takes an interest in his descendants beyond that of any indigent and imprisoned father. [116] He feels confidence that the next generation will carry on the work and further glorify the name of the Lord. [117] In these and other ways, Smart was modeling his acts on his reading of the Biblical prophets.
     The idea of reading all nature in a divine light was unexceptionable as long as Smart noted instances of God’s design and even when he used the specific and various bestial characteristics as praise, but his spiritual physics (despite its debt to Berkleyan rhetoric) seems quite fantastic, almost magical. Cudworth had described the physics of heaven and hell and had developed extended metaphors based on the movements of the heavenly bodies, [118] but Smart takes the analogy for the literal truth and discusses not only general principles of movement and force, but also contemporary problems and current issues in the field. Earlier he had used refraction and magnetism as images, when the reader might assume he was forcefully asserting only a rhetorical truth. He now positively declares, “nothing is so real as that which is spiritual,” [119] He calls fire and air “spirits,” [120] but adds that all that exists is centered in spirit [121] and life.


For MATTER is the dust of the Earth, every atom of which is the life.
For MOTION is as the quantity of life direct, & that which hath not motion, is resistance. [122]


     This sufficiently widens the definition of spirit to include everything in the creation, an inference that Smart will take pains to justify.
     Since the world is, in his view, structured with such vitality in every part by an omniscient God, who had man foremost in mind, each part also has a message.


For EARTH which is an intelligence hath a voice and a propensity to speak in all her
parts. [123]


This conviction gives added strength to the series of praise by definition; simply by being itself an entity cries out the word of God.


For a man speaks HIMSELF from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet.
For a LION roars HIMSELF compleat from head to tail.
For all these things are seen in the spirit which makes the beauty of prayer. [124]


     As Smart offers fanciful explanations of tides, centrifugal and centripetal force, capillary action, electricity, the suction pump, and many other phenomena, his utter disregard for conventional received ideas makes him seem wildly eccentric. Stead notes a similarity between Smart's theories and those of Derham's influential Astro Theology and Physico Theology, [125] and many others writers set forth similar claims, though in a more modest and orderly way. For Smart it was the final logical reduction of his lifelong belief in the immanency of God’s word and his tendency to anthropomorphize nature.
Smart's early conviction that all was to be adored, even earthquakes and floods, with the unique exception of man's error must have struck some of his readers as somewhat facile, but in Jubilate Agno he confronts the problem of evil again and suggests a solution that at once represents a totally different idea, though grown from his original view. [126] Smart rarely uses the devil's name, [127] preferring him the adversary instead, a name which connotes a negative principle, “For Adversity above all other is to be deserted of the grace of God.” [128] Whereas he had refused to mention the damned in his judgment scene in “Eternity,” he now explicitly doubts eternal damnation.


For there is a forlorn hope ev'n for impenitent sinners because the furnace itself must be
the crown of eternity. [129]

For HELL is without eternity from the presence of the almighty God. [130]

For the furnace itself shall come up at the last according to Abraham’s vision. [131]


     In Abraham's vision in Genesis, mentioned by Smart a number of times in thoughts almost exactly like the one quoted, the furnace is a pledge from God, proof that the Jews will be redeemed and reach the Promised Land in the end. Smart applies the pledge to the damned, in a typically bold inversion substituting the wicked for God's chosen people out of his own unbounded generosity.
He deals with the problem of evil itself similarly, incorporating it into the one grand unity.


For he hath fixed the earth upon arches and pillars, and the flames of hell flow under it. [132]

For Resistance is not of GOD but he -- hath built his works upon it. [133]

For Eternity is a creature & is built upon Eternity . [134]


     The world seems in these rather cryptic lines to be completely unified with evil as a part of the structure, a necessary support, part of the underpinnings of the universe, the Whole of which is operating in harmony. Smart had. written in his “Immensity” poem that God shines with perfect radiance in heaven, but he added that one should also know "that nor in Presence or in Pow'r/ Shines he less perfect here; ‘tis man’s dim eye/ That makes th’obscurity. He is the same,/ A1ike in all his Universe the same.” [135] This acceptance of evil as part of God, along with his leanings toward pantheism, and his almost blasphemous pride are all elements in his thought that the reader must assume he developed to a large extent outside his conscious mind (Smart was never one for critical self-analysis, anyway), and which he never suspected brought him to the very edge of heresy, if not further.
     He made even more unorthodox statements leaping the gap from mysticism to occult magic, but never without a basis in his system. He claims that flowers have inhabitants and, in fact, that Jesus blessed them, but it is clear that he is speaking of the individual genius or unique quality of the flowers and of their lives as part of the divine word. [136]


For the flowers have their angels even the words of God’s Creation. [137]


The idea is not so far distant from the mandrake of his own fable addressing the vain squire with righteous indignation, saying:


For the prayers of good men are therefore visible to second-sighted persons. [138]


This vision follows the experience of the spirituality of all things, corporeal or not, and the subjectivity of vision.
     Smart thought of sound as particularly spiritual and of music as its greatest height. Having used music before as a symbol of the harmony of the universe and as its enlivening force, [139] he now states the bases for these images in powerfully direct terms. Within the physics section of Bl he includes a digression on music in which he describes heaven as an orchestra and God as a great harpist (like David and Orpheus). Finally, he explicitly associates music with the creative divine word.


For GOD the father Almighty plays upon the HARP of stupendous magnitude and
melody.
For innumerable Angels fly out at every touch and his tune is a work of creation. [140]


     The angels of this line are, like the angels of the flowers, simply the types of the earthly objects. Smart, however, is running out of energy at this point, and he begins to almost arbitrarily assign significances. Maintaining the oracular tone that was at first consistent with his content, he mixes the profound images I have just described with the trivial, such as colloquial advice on the best strings to use for certain instruments. While such lines do serve the purpose of hammering away at the non-exclusionary nature of his concerns and his vision (in the last extremity, either tragic insanity or mystical profundity, everything is of equal importance, [141] at the same time they present a pitiable image of his mental disintegration and prefigure the carelessly random resignation of the last pages of the manuscript.
     He restates the theme of Christ's transformation of the Old Testament in his familiarly sweeping terms, contrasting the absolute negation of Ecclesiastes’ stoicism as the highest pre-Christian philosophy with the complete affirmation of Christ.


For Solomon said vanity of vanities vanity of vanities all is vanity.
For Jesus says verify of verities verity of verities all is verity. [142]


     Christ's statement (in the present tense) is completely unqualified, not even presented as love or mercy, but as an endorsement without reservation or exception, “All that is, is true,” and the reader can only infer, if only from the energy of the line, that, all is good as well.
     The progressive disintegration in the poem's structure continues and accelerates in Fragment B2 in which lines and passages succeed one another with very little justification. Smart sets himself orderly projects in interpreting the universe and methodically carries them out, including comparatively less information for the critic as the poet's mind begins to relax into unambitious and almost meaningless occupations. He performs two exercises on the alphabet, traces modern counties to their progenitors among the Biblical tribes, assigns virtues to the planets, etc. [143] His nationalism, still present despite his universalism, has centered on the French whom he identifies with the Moabites, and he indulges in innuendo against his wife whom he identifies with both because of her Roman Catholicism. But the break-down of order not only allows a fall into randomness and pettiness but also clears the way for candid statements of several philosophical concepts on which his poetry is based, which until this point were not fully explicit.
     Induction and deduction are equally relevant because God is immanent in man as well as in the world.


For the Argument A PRIORI is GOD in every man's CONSCIENCE.
For the Argument A POSTERIORI is God before every man’s eyes. [144]

For the Life of God is in the body of man and his spirit in the Soul. [145]


     Repudiating Locke, he comments “For an idea is the mental image of an object,” [146] and man cannot be without God because ideas such as that of the divine are innate, a part of the structure of man. In “Immensity” he had found God's signature everywhere as evidence of the great design. In Jubilate Agno he finds it literally everywhere in the form of the Hebrew letter Lamed, which Smart thinks visibly and physically present on every item of the creation as the emblem of God's idea which constitutes its being. Distinctions between things are a direct reflection of the differences in their divine ideas. [147]


For there is a model of every beast of the field in the height.
For they are all intelligences & all angels of the living God. [148]

For in the divine Idea this Eternity is compleat & the Word is a making many more. [149]


     The idea that the entire universe is an idea in the mind of God is an almost perfect Berkeleyan conclusion and one that gives new force to Smart's image of stamping. The image appears twice in this section, [150] once as God's stamp and once as Smart's. His interest in uniqueness, then, grows from the idea that God's stamp defines by bringing something out of nothing, an emblem from a blank page, paralleling his own technique in writing.
     I have already noted the tendency in Jubilate Agno to renew old images by considering them literal and concrete. In this fragment Smart resumes his light imagery with the original (and conventional) connotations. Here the identification of God with light is so strong that he extends it to shadows (which he says are of Satanic origin) and eclipses (the operations of the devil). Again, though, having condemned shadows, he then inverts this meaning, referring to them as a pledge from God of the time when there will be no darkness. [151] Having condemned eclipses, [152] he then says that they are totally Christ’s. [153]
     In the C Fragment, he revives the image of Orpheus with the novel idea that he played by blowing upon the strings.


For this will affect every thing that is sustaind by the spirit, even every thing in nature. [154]


     This recalls the image of the Aeolian harp in the previous fragment. As the harp of God played by the breath of God, its improvement presages better times, just as David’s harp suggests that “it will be better for England and all the world in a season.” [155] This close analogy hints, though not certainly, that perhaps David (or Smart, his modern counterpart) will be the instrument by which God improves the world and brings eventually the apocalypse, a messianic function that would complete the work of the first Christ.
     Apart from this suggestion the fragment has little of interest or relevance. The relationship between the "let” and the “for” verses has broken down, and Smart pursues more occult recreation: another alphabet exercise, an explanation of the secret meaning of numbers, etc. He also proclaims some authentic prophesies, predictions of the future. Most are very general, describing an increased sense of holiness and God's presence among the people, or idiosyncratic -- an extended passage dealing with the horns that men once had, which they lost by sin, and which will return.
     The D Fragment is much calmer. Though it has very little information (Smart was clearly using his manuscript as a device to keep track of the days by this time), its lines suggest resignation and, if respite from the fevered religious and personal outcries of the first four fragments is any indication, a return to sanity. His self-image has fallen from the heights of quasi-divinity to a modest ambition. “The Lord magnify the idea of Smart singing hymns on this day in the eyes of the whole University of Cambridge.” [156] Even his ominous, diabolical enemies were apparently trying now to obtain his release. [157] Smart was now just putting in time.


VI. Conclusion

     Nearly all the wild-eyed fantasies of the Jubilate Agno grew from embryos in the minor work. The only real additions are derived from occult interpretation which itself is consistent with the spiritual and symbolic, visionary viewpoint that he established very early in his writing. His delineation of the world of spiritual reality that is a major theme of the Jubilate is a natural and direct extension of the images that fill the poems on the attributes of God. The self-image of the English prophet of song, beset by opposition, became less acceptable as it emerged while the poet struggled to cope with the problems of his life. Presented at first by hints, analogies, and indirections, it, flowered as a. sonorous voice speaking Biblical cadences until it sank at last in fatigue. The early ideas of unfallen nature, nature's god of life and growth, and man's ability to interpret the world did not vanish; they receded like the earth beneath a rising airplane. Throughout Smart’s career the reader finds images of light, music, and impression, and of the whole of nature raising praise to the Lord. Often he failed to distinguish between the imaginative and poetic on the one hand and the concrete and scientific on the other. For Smart conventional literary devices and personification became actors in a spiritual reality. His notions of God and Christ broadened until they became all-inclusive as he developed emphases toward which he had been drawn since the beginning.
     xHe said of himself in the preface to his prose version of Horace, “The following version is the work of a man who has made poetry, perhaps too much, the business of his life. [158] But his ideas are strikingly modern in his insistence on subjectivity and in his congenial brand of pantheism; his personality, which is reflected on every page of his verse, is, for the most part charming and generous, if eccentric; and his vision is irresistibly attractive in its resounding affirmation.





1 Philomela’s story appears, for instance in the Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

2 Christopher Smart, The Collected Poems, ed. by Norman Gallan (2 vol., London: Routledge & and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1949), I, 233. All references to Smart's poems are to this edition, the only one approaching completeness, (though it unfortunately has no line numbers), with the exception of Jubilate Agno, for which I have used Bond's edition, which is obviously preferable to Stead's for its revealing arrangement of the manuscript. Following references to Callan will use the form "Callan, vol., page no."

3 For instance, Burnett's idea that irregularities in the earth's surface provide evidence for its fall, paralleling man's. Whether expressed with such physical evidence or not, the conventional view regularly regarded nature as fallen.

4 Callan, I, 24I.

5 Callan, I, 242.

6 Callan, I. 235.

7 Callan, I, 147.

8 See also "On the Power of the Supreme Being."

9 The idea appears in "On the Goodness of the Supreme Being," Song to David, Jubilate Agno, "Hymn VI," "Hymn to the Supreme Being," and many other passages.

10 Callan, II, 797-798. See also beginning of "On the Immensity of the Supreme Being."

11 The title page announces that it contains, "all the Wit and all the Humour and all the Learning
and all the Judgement that has ever been or ever will be inserted in all the other magazines or
the magazine of magazines or the grand magazine of magazines or any other book whatsoever: so
that those who buy this book will need no other.”

12 See for instance "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day," 136.

13 Callan, I, 56.

14 It : may be .worthy of note that this image series is a Jungian symbol for the unconscious. Other examples are "A Noon-piece" (liquid rays), "On the Eternity of the Supreme Being" (swarming thoughts), "On the Power of the Supreme Being" (maze), "Ode on 3t . Cecilia's Day" (swimming orbs), "On an Eagle" (flowing stream), and "The Author Apologizes to a Lady for His being a Little Man" (pent-up spring).

15 Ralph Cudworth, Sermon to the House of Commons (New York, Facsimile Text Society, 1930).

16 Callan, I, 222.

17 Callan, I, 246.

18 Callan, I, 247.

19 Callan, II, 522.

20 Quoted in E. G. Ainsworth and Charles Noyes , "Christopher Smart: A biographical and critical study,” University of Missouri Studies XVIII, 4 (l943), 122.

21 Mrs. Mary Midnight [Christopher Smart], An Index to Mankind; or Maxims selected from the wits of all nations for the benefit of the present age and of posterity (London: J. Newbery, 1751), 16.

22 Callan, I, 237.

23 Callan, I, 244.

24 Callan, I, 229.

25 Callan, I, 238.

26 Callan, I, 238.

27 Callan, I., 235.

28 Callan, I, 227.

29 Callan, I, 235.

30 One thinks immediately of Blake. Perhaps it would be appropriate to note briefly a few of the many correspondences between the two poets: symbolic and visionary interpretation of the world, anthropomorphizing, charity and concern for the poor, prophetic arrogance, Blake's image of ”corrosion” and Smart's of “impression.” The two are quite comparable though their poetry is entirely different.

31 Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, ed. by W. H. Bond (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 113. Following references to Jubilate Agno will give the fragment name and line number, as here, B2, 650.  I quote from Jubilate Agno here because I must establish Smart's notion of the spiritual reality which is not explicit earlier, though it operates as an implicit assumption.  Smart, incidentally, refused to use Greek accents, claiming, "For the ACCENTS are the invention of the Moabites, who learning the GREEK tongue marked the words after their own vicious pronuntiation."
B2, 398.

32 Callan, I, 232.

33 Callan, I, 233.

34 Callan, I, 234.

35 Christopher Smart, The Midwife, III (1751), 28.

36 One finds, for instance, a humorous discussion of Bedlam and religious fervor, sympathy for those in debtor's prison, many concealed self-portraits, and lists of natural curiosities presented as amusing.

37 Callan, I, 180.

38 Callan, I. 234.

39 Index to Mankind, I , 3, 4, 66 for this quotation and the others in the paragraph.

40 Callan, I, xxx. He mentions several others who have pointed this out.

41 Callan, I, 82. Note there is no warning against devoting oneself too much to poetry.

42 If they were not, and the hostility to Newton strongly suggests that they were, the hypothesis of a spiritual reality as the final reality, would be a conclusion of Smart's later years alone, and the earlier intimations only mental preparation of the way.

43 E. J. Greene, "Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists and the Poets," JHI XIV, 3 (June, 1953) 327-352. The quotations and much of the argument of the next paragraph are derived from this essay .

44 Greene notes that Berkeley liked to call Newton and Locke mystics for their belief in substance which he thought "a vain conceit."

45 Cudworth, 34.

46 Callan, I, 224. The image reappears in Song to David. Similar images are the rustic’s footprint in the Hop-Garden (Callan, I, 159) and elsewhere.

47 Quoted by Ainsworth, 138. See also Jubilate Agno, B2, 404.

48 Callan, I, 223, 230.

49 Callan, I, 240.

50 Callan, I, 227.

51 Callan, I, 153.

52 Callan, I, 137.

53 Callan, I, 141.

54 There are several interesting and rather puzzling instances of interplay between nature and man that imply that each is influenced by the song of the other as well as by its own song. Nature imitates herself (Callan, I ,229), she mimics the poet (Callan, I, 137) and learns from him (Callan, I, 100). The idea of David forming nature and influencing the course of earthly events will appear in Jubilate Agno where the musical activity of God, nature, and poet will be very closely related.

55 For instance, in “The Tea-pot and Scrub-Brush,” “The Tobacco Pipe and Bag-Wig,” the end of the Hop-Garden, and the poems to the military heroes.

56 The hostility to France has biographical associations, as well. Smart felt an increasing suspicion of his wife's fidelity which became alternately resentment and tenderness in Jubilate Agno. He identified her with France because she was a Roman Catholic.

57 Callan, I, 144.

58 See the conclusion of the Hop-Garden.

59 Callan, I, 48.

60 Callan, I, 243.

61 Among the numerous other examples are the statements on nature's unity, the generosity of “The Horatian Canons of Friendship”, etc.

62 Callan, I, 59.

63Callan, I, 243.

64 Callan, I, 213.

65 Callan, I, 14.

66 Callan, I, 14.

67 Callan, I, 14. See also “The Fair Recluse,” and “The Power of Innocence.” These poems describe embattled women who, by their righteousness and defensive stance, suggest elements of Smart's self-image. Women were often considered, as in Clarissa, models of Christian fortitude under stress. It is probably coincidental that Smart used among his pen-names The Female Student, Nellie Pentweazle, and,
of course, Mary Midnight, whom he portrayed in his satirical entertainment, “The Old Woman's Oratory.”

68 Bond, Bl, 45.

69 David and Goliath would seem a natural theme, but it appears only once, deeply buried in a single line of Jubilate Agno.

70 I have omitted some of the humorous and occasional verse and the whole of the Song to David for reasons of space alone.

71 Bond, A, 41.

72 Callan, I, 222.

73 Bond, A, 79.

74 Bond, A, 38.

75 Bond, A, 24.

76 Bond, A, 5.

77 Bond, A, 32. The next reference is to Bond, A, 98.

78 Bond, A, 9.

79 Bond, A, 4.

80 Bond, A, 16.

81 Bond, A, 62.

82 Bond, A, 107.

83 Bond, A, 2. See also the satyr of Bond, A, 67. Likewise the satyr in the Bible (Isaiah 13:21), a sign of God’s departure, becomes in Jubilate Agno a legitimate member of God’s legion.

84

85 Bond, A, 89. This line removes Negroes from a subordinate position. Ebed-Kelech is the good Ethiopian.

86 Bond, A, 44.

87 Bond, A, 45. Other lines supporting the theme are A, 29; A, 38; A, 51; A, 54; A, 73; and elsewhere.

88 Bond, A, 22 and Bond, A, 90. For the latter Bond gives a slightly incorrect verse reference. It is in the 8th verse that the child is associated with the snake. The note should read Isaiah 11:8.

89 Bond, A, 26 and Bond, A, 35.

90 Bond A, 80.

91 Chrisopher Devlin, Poor Kit Smart, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1927), 108. The incident was, of course, during a military campaign..

92 Bond, B1, 44.

93 For instance, Bond finds in the "let" verses of lines 46-51 an "undercurrent of bitterness" which rises to a climax against his family because of the stag (whose horns suggest cuckoldry), and symbols of stupidity and greed which I fail to find. The other animals fit well into the pattern of defensive self-images, and their enemy is no more well-defined here than elsewhere. If anything the stag and "Wittal" night reflect his suspicion of his wife.

94 Bond, B1, 1.

95 Bond, Bl, 3.

96 Bond, B2, 332.

97 Bond, Bl, 21.

98 Bond, Bl, 27. Smart came to believe in a kind of instantaneous time. See Bond, B2, 329.

99 Bond, Bl, 15.

100 Bond, Bl, 30.

101 Bond, Bl, 43; Bond, Bl, 74; and elsewhere.

102 For example, Bond, BI, 115.

103 These themes are now so pervasive that I will no longer cite lines. They end only when the "let" verses become meaningless.

104 Bond, Bl, 4.

105 Bond, 31, 107.

106 Bond B1, 22.

107 See Bond B2, 341.

108 Callan, I, l6l.

109 Bond, Bl, 73.

110 Bond, Bl, 144.

111 Bond, 31, 137.

112 Bond, 31, 54.

113 Bond, 1, 58.

114 The reference is probably not to the Biblical Agrippa, as at least one commentator (Albert Kuhn, see bibliography) claims. Bond does not identify the reference, but he later notes a similarity between Smart's numerology and the system of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (see Bond, page 125, note two). The occultist is, I think, a more likely candidate than St. Paul's judge.

115 Bond, 31, 162.

116 Bond, B1, 70 and elsewhere surely indicate nothing more than normal paternal concerns.

117 Bond, Bl, 100.

118 Cudworth, 50-56..

119 Bond, 31, 258.

120 Bond, B1, 263.

121 Bond, B1, 184.

122 Bond, Bl, 160-161.

123 Bond, B1, 234.

124 Bond, Bl, 228-230.

125 Noted by Bond, following Stead. Bond, B1, page 67, note 4.

126 K. M. Rogers and others have demonstrated a similarity between certain of Smart’s ideas and those of Caballistic literature, which he may have encountered in college or through his associations with Freemasonry. Most of their parallels are not convincing and could equally have been derived from purely Christian traditions (e.g. Caballistic writing has God creating by saying his own name), but the idea I outline in the following paragraphs (which I think has not been discussed before) is distinctively Caballistic..
127In fact he says, “Let Jonas rejoice with the Sea-Devil, who hath a good name from his Maker." Bond, B1, 199.
128 Bond, B2, 328..

129 Bond, B2, 330. Also Bond 31, 176.

130 Bond, B2, 322.

131 Bond, B1, 293.

132 Bond, B1, 158.

133 Bond, Bl, 162.

134 Bond, hBl, 170.

135Callan, 1, 227-228. Emphasis mine.
136 Bond, Bl, 105. Later the reader finds that the inhabitants can talk, and, in fact, that the flowers knew Pope. Bond, B2, 568.

137 Bond, B2, 500.

138 Bond, Bl, 240.

139 Bond, Bl, 245.

140 Bond, Bl, 246-247.

141 Analogues for this concern with triviality in the middle of the deepest religious context exist in the Oriental Taoist and Ch'an traditions.

142 Bond, B1, 287-288.
143 These passages do, of course, reveal certain other things, for instance, sources in occultism and lines similar to passages in the Song to David.

144 Bond, B2, 359-360.

145 Bond, B2, 375.

146 Bond, B2, 395.

147 This is very similar to the Platonic theory of forms.

148 Bond, B2, 678-679.

149 Bond, B2, 329

150 Bond, B2, 363 and Bond, B2, 404.

151 Bond, B2, 311.

152 Bond, B2, 313.

153 He also further concretizes this music imagery into a classification of the sounds of the heavenly organ, associating instruments with rhyme words, another analogy with the poetic process.

154 Bond, C, 56.

155 Bond, C, 58.

156 Bond, D, 148.

157 Bond, D, 159.

158 Smart, Christopher (trans,), The Works of Horace (London: J. Newbery, 1756), iii (introduction).


Works Cited
I. Smart's work
A. Editions of the poetry
Jubilate Agno, ed. W. H. Bond (Cambridge: Harvard, 1954).
The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart, ed . Norman Callan (two vol.,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1949).
Poems, ed . Christopher Hunter (Reading: F. Power and Co., 1791).
Rejoice in the Lamb, ed. W. H. Stead (London: J. Cape, 1939).
Selected Poems by Christopher Smart, ed. Ruthven Todd (London: Grey
Walls Press, 1947).
B. Journals and translation
The Mid-Wife.
Smart, Christopher (under the pseudonym Mrs. Mary Midnight). An Index
to Mankind. (London: J. Newbery, 1751).
Smart, Christopher. The Works of Horace. (London: J. Newbery, 1756).
The Universal Visitor and Memorialist.

II. Criticism and other sources
Abbott, C.B. “Christopher Smart's Madness,” PMLA , XLV (1930), 1014-1022.
Ainsworth, E.G. and Charles Noyes. “Christopher Smart: a biographical and
critical study,” University of Missouri Studies, XVIII (1943).
Cudworth, Ralph. A Sermon to the House of Commons. (New York: Facsimile
Text Society, 1930).
Devlin, Christopher. Poor Kit Smart. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1962).
Greene, D. J. “Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists, and the Poets,” Journal of the
History of Ideas. XIV (June, 1953), 327-352.
Hunsberger, B. “Kit Smart’s Howl,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary
Literature, VI (Winter, 1965), 34-44.
Rogers, K. M. “The Pillars of the Lord: some sources of A Song to David,”
PQ, XL (1961), 525-534.
Shepard, Odell, and Paul Spencer. “Christopher Smart, Free and Accepted
Mason,” JSGP, LIV (1955), 664-669.
Todd, Ruthven. Tracks in the Snow (London: Grey Walls Press, 1946).