'Punners and Rhymers Must Have the Last Word'

On this date, June 13, in 1713, Jonathan Swift was installed as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, the city of his birth, a position he would hold for thirty-two years, until his death in 1745. In a July 8 letter to Esther Vanhomrigh, known to Swift as Vanessa, he writes:

“At my first coming [to Dublin], I thought I should have died with discontent; and was horribly melancholy, while they were installing me, but it begins to wear off, and change to dulness.”

The rhythm of that sentence and its deferred punch line remind me of Evelyn Waugh, who planned to write a biography of Swift. In Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper (1992), Waugh tells his friend he has just read Nigel Dennis’ Jonathan Swift: A Short Character (1965), and observes: “I found many affinities with the temperament (not of course the talent) of the master.” Swift’s prose, vivid and terse, often surprises his readers. He’s blunt but seldom predictable, unlike so many polemicists and would-be satirists. He favors homely details. From the same letter to Vanessa:

“I am now fitter to look after willows, and to cut hedges, than meddle with affairs of state. I must order one of the workmen to drive those cows out of my island, and make up the ditch again; a work much more proper for a country vicar, than driving out factions, and fencing against them.”

Swift is the most instructive of writers for other writers. I refer young writers to him when they ask for advice on the craft of prose or verse. Here are the opening lines of “The Dean Of St. Patrick's to Thomas Sheridan” (1718), written as a response to a “trifle” his friend had sent him:

“I cannot but think that we live in a bad age,

O tempora, O mores! as ’tis in the adage.

My foot was but just set out from my cathedral,

When into my hands comes a letter from the droll.”

Recall, this is written by the dean of the National Cathedral of the Church of Ireland, founded in 1191:

“Hum - excellent good - your anger was stirr'd;

Well, punners and rhymers must have the last word.”