'For Every Peeping Fop to Jeer'

“Who that had wit would place it here,

For every peeping fop to jeer?”

The lines are from Swift’s “Verses Wrote in a Lady’s Ivory Table-Book.” The object in question is, the OED tells us, “a notebook.” Swift used the word in his Journal to Stella: “He thanked me for telling him, and immediately put his name in his table-book.” In Swift’s poem, the lady’s table-book is open for inspection, “Exposed to every coxcomb’s eyes, / But hid with caution from the wise.” Swift’s strategy is to mock the lady with her own words: “Here you may read (Dear Charming Saint) / Beneath (A new Receipt for Paint.)” That is, makeup. The lady may be beautiful, but her notebook reveals her as trivial-minded as an adolescent. To expand its meaning beyond Swift’s context, the couplet at the top might be applied to anyone who chooses to write in public without being able to write. Does such a person have “wit”?

In The English Spirit: Essays in History and Literature (1945), A.L. Rowse includes “Jonathan Swift.” He states the obvious – that Gulliver’s Travels is the only book by Swift that “the world has chosen.” For most readers, he remains a one-book author, which is a shame because Swift is brilliant throughout his work, in prose and verse. Once again, Rowse states what ought to be self-evident: “The poetry of Swift is, it would appear, an esoteric taste. There is hardly anyone who in our literary history, so far as I can call to mind, who had a liking for Swift’s poetry.” He names Yeats as an exception, and explains that the indifference to Swift’s verse may be explained by “the dominance of the romantic tradition in our literature.” This makes sense. If Shelley or Emerson is your idea of great poetry, you’re unlikely to appreciate “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Rowse makes an admirable defense of Swift:

“There is so much in his poetry that should appeal to  this age: the uncompromising intellectualism of his attitude to his experience, its essential hardness, realism, absence of illusions, its force, clarity and candour, its complete self-consciousness. There is no reason why his poetry should be an esoteric taste, except that the romantic tradition formed an idea of what poetry should be, an extremely rarefied and confined one, excluding much of our experience, and imposing that view upon the rich and natural variety of the subject matter of poetry.”

Things have changed somewhat, at least in the margins, though romanticism remains contagious. J.V. Cunningham and Louise Bogan, both of Irish descent, learned from Swift and wrote poems about him. He’s everywhere in Joyce and Beckett. Turner Cassity, master of the couplet, may be Swift reborn, and I detect the Irishman's ghost among the better contemporary writers of light verse, which is often quite dark.