Damned

James Marcus at House of Mirth was reading Cyril Connolly’s essay on Jonathan Swift, and yesterday posted lines from both writers. The quotation from a letter Swift wrote to his friend Charles Ford in 1708 is especially choice. Coincidentally, I have been working my way again through The Complete Poems of Swift, edited by Pat Rogers, which includes all 280 poems authenticated as Swift’s, only 50 of which appeared during his life. I first learned of this wonderful, brick-shaped edition through the English poet James Fenton, who read it during the journey he took with Redmond O’Hanlon that resulted in the latter’s book, Into the Heart of Borneo. Reading Swift in that jungle hell made exquisite sense, and no travel writer is funnier than O’Hanlon. Read them all, including the polymathic Fenton.

Many of Swift’s poems are occasional in the strictest sense, and require some critical apparatus to decrypt. They involve personalities, customs and details of politics and history lost on all but 18th-century specialists. Rogers’ to-the-point notes come in handy, but some of Swift’s poems are more general in their appeal and accessibility. Rogers tells us Swift first published “The Place of the Damned” as a broadside, in 1731 – five years after the publication of Gulliver’s Travels. He also clarifies the meaning of “flammed,” the last word in line 15, which looks like a modern typo: “deceived by a sham story,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is the poem:

“All folks who pretend to religion and grace,
Allow there's a hell, but dispute of the place;
But if hell may by logical rules be defined,
The place of the damned -- I'll tell you my mind.

“Wherever the damned do chiefly abound,
Most certainly there is hell to be found;
Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,
Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;
Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires,
Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars;
Damned villains, corrupted in every station;
Damned time-serving priests all over the nation.
And into the bargain I'll readily give you
Damned ignorant prelates, and counsillors privy.
Then let us no longer by parsons be flammed,
For we know by these marks, the place of the damned:
And hell to be sure is at Paris or Rome.
How happy for us that it is not at home!”

Marcus writes of the Swift letter he quotes, “Certain writers behave like grumpy old men from the moment they set pen to paper, especially knee-jerk misanthropes, whose disgust for the human race might seem unfounded coming from a relative youngster.” Swift was 41 when he wrote the letter Marcus cites. This poem he wrote when he was 67, and it is less redolent of scatological disgust than of his trademark saevo indignatio. It’s also notably less cloacal in its obsessions. To my taste, Swift’s pre-romantic clarity, his black humor, his fixation on the particulars of the social/political world, are invigorating – most of the time, at least. Read the first four lines of a poem titled “Ireland,” and see what you think:

“Remove me from this land of slave,
Where all are fools, and all are knave;
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for naught…”