'Year Chases Year, Decay Pursues Decay'

Nominally a translation from the Latin of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is an autonomous poem in English, endlessly rereadable and fortifying for readers. Dr. Johnson completed his greatest poem on this date, November 25, in 1748, and sold the copyright to the English bookseller Robert Dodsley for fifteen guineas. At the age of thirty-nine, he was assembling his Dictionary (eventually published in 1755), and in little more than four months would publish the first of his 207 Rambler essays. 

Johnson told his friend George Steevens that he wrote the first seventy lines of “Vanity” “in the course of one morning,” having already composed them in his mind. In his 1977 biography of Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate writes: ‘That so concentrated a poem could be written with such speed indicates how much a part of the inner life it expresses.” In other words, Johnson was not so much composing as transcribing. Bate continues:

 

“The result is a poem that (as was once said of Burke) dazzles the strong and educated intellect far more than the feeble, and sways intelligent and cultivated readers as a demagogue.”

 

As a consideration of human nature, “Vanity” is realistically harsh and humbling. As a portrait of us it is unflattering. Reading it again with an open mind, one repeatedly comes to passages that confirm our moral conclusions about ourselves and others. We can trace the lineage of the poem to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling Johnson’s central lifelong theme. In his Dictionary, he defines vanity as “emptiness, arrogance, falsehood.” For vain he gives “fruitless, meanly proud, idle.” Asked for a synonym today, many would respond with “egotism,” “self-centeredness,” “pride.” Only the last avoids the modern clinical taint and retains the older, moral/spiritual sense.

 

“Year chases Year, Decay pursues Decay,

Still drops some Joy from with’ring Life away;  

New Forms arise, and diff’rent Views engage,   

Superfluous lags the Vet’ran on the Stage,

Till pitying Nature signs the last Release,           

And bids afflicted Worth retire to Peace.”