'The Soul None Dare Forgive'

You know what you’re in for just by reading the title and acknowledging the author: “A Love Song in the Modern Taste” (1733) by Jonathan Swift. For once, the excremental stuff is absent. The poem amounts to a catalog of clichés about love, a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day card. Here is the first of its eight stanzas: 

“Fluttering spread thy purple pinions,

Gentle Cupid o’er my heart;

I a slave in thy dominions;

Nature must give way to art.”

 

No scatology. Just the beau of Vanessa and Stella mocking the conventional romantic sentiments of the day. Pat Rogers, editor of Swift’s Complete Poems (1983), likens the poem to one of his prose works, Polite Conversation (1738), in which he mocks the banality and garble of so much talk, as in “I won’t quarrel with my bread and butter” and “I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.” Rogers notes of the poem: “The joke lies in slotting together so many familiar ideas in a more or less coherent sequence.”  

 

Swift’s most notorious exercise in scatology, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” written in 1732, was his most popular poem with the public during his lifetime, reproduced as a pamphlet and reprinted in newspapers in both England and Ireland. Readers familiar with Swift’s “cloacal obsession” (a phrase once applied by critics to another Irishman, James Joyce) will know what to expect. Strephon is investigating the dressing room of his “goddess,” Celia, after she has spent five hours at her toilette: “And first a dirty Smock appear’d, / Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear’d . . .”

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Swift devotes 144 octosyllabic lines to Strephon’s inventory. His growing sense of disgust mirrors the reader’s. When he spies a “reeking chest,” he lifts the lid and the contents

 

 “Send up an excremental Smell

To taint the Parts from whence they fell.

The Pettycoats and Gown perfume,

Which waft a Stink round every Room.”

 

Some poets might conclude the poem with those lines, but not Swift. He continues:

 

“Disgusted Strephon stole away

Repeating in his amorous Fits,

Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”

 

Swift the lover, writer and man is the subject of J.V. Cunningham’s “With a Copy of Swift’s Works” (written in 1944; published in The Judge is Fury, 1947; collected in The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, 1997):

 

“Underneath this pretty cover

Lies Vanessa’s, Stella’s lover.

You that undertake this story

For his life nor death be sorry

Who the Absolute so loved

Motion to its zero moved,

Till, immobile in that chill,

Fury hardened in the will,

And the trivial, bestial flesh

In its jacket ceased to thresh,

And the soul none dare forgive

Quiet lay, and ceased to live.”

 

“The soul none dare forgive” complements Swift’s self-penned epitaph: “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (“Where savage indignation no more can lacerate his heart”). In his gloss on the poem Steele writes: “Because of the rebarbative nature of his satire, Swift was reviled as no other major English author had been or has been since.” Nor was Cunningham a writer of conventional love lyrics. Here’s an epigram Swift might have signed his name to:

 

“Here lies my wife. Eternal peace

Be to us both with her decease.”

 

And this:

 

“I married in my youth a wife.

She was my own, my very first.

She gave the best years of her life.

I hope nobody gets the worst.”