'Punners and Rhymers Must Have the Last Word'

“I cannot but think that we live in a bad age, / O tempora, O mores! as ’tis in the adage.” 

The Latin tag is proverbial, deriving from Cicero’s Catiline orations: “O times, O manners!” It’s the template for all lamentations. Jonathan Swift is repeating it in the opening lines of “The Dean of St. Patrick’s to Thomas Sheridan.” It’s part of a series of poems he exchanged with his friend Sheridan, the Anglican divine and father of the better-known Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright. Swift signs the poem:

 

“From my closet,

Sept, 12, 1718,

just 12 at noon.”

 

One tends to sympathize with Swift. Civilization seems to be corroding around us. Anti-Semitism is again fashionable, our leaders embarrass us, literacy plummets, crackpot theories abound, students learn little or nothing of history. But is the world really as bad off as it was in, say, 1939, when some of the worst people in the world were ascendant?

 

Usually, Swift is the hot-headed one, often savage in argument, the man who gave us his “Modest Proposal” and that great indictment of humanity, Gulliver’s Travels. To Sheridan he writes:

 

“Hum—excellent good—your anger was stirr’d;

Well, punners and rhymers must have the last word.

But let me advise you, when next I hear from you,

To leave off this passion which does not become you;

For we who debate on a subject important,

Must argue with calmness, or else will come short on’t.”

 

Swift, Sheridan and others in their circle are sharing what they call “trifles” – verses that include riddles, rebuses, puns. Among friends, one can be as mordantly doom-minded as one wishes while not offending anyone and having a pretty good time.