SWIFT AND RENAISSANCE POETRY: A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Swift’s early poetic development is a somewhat puzzling affair. H e began ambitiously with several ventures, heavily influenced by Cowley, in the fashionable form of the Ode. A young man eager to make his mark would naturally choose this prestigious vehicle to demonstrate his technical virtuosity. Yet these bold poems in the grand manner were followed by a lean period of almost fifteen years, in which Swift’s only poem of significance was the domestic jeu d’esprit, ‘Mrs Harris’s Petition’. How can one explain this prolonged silence and apparent lack of self-confidence before the achieved maturity of Swift’s mock-heroic and mock-pastoral poems, ‘Baucis and Phile- mon’, ‘A Description of the Morning’. and ‘A Description of a City Shower’? The suggestion proposed here is that even in his earliest poems Swift felt uncomfortable with the inherited conventions of Renaissance poetry. Only when he had succeeded in distancing himself from these - an intellectual and stylistic turning-point evidenced in the programmatic ‘Elegy on the Supposed Death of Mr Partridge, the Almanac Maker’ which provides the focus of this article -was Swift able to articulate his natural poetic voice.

Brief reference to Dryden will help to illustrate some of the difficulties which a late seventeenth-century poet would experience with the established poetic conventions. The English Revolution had fragmented the traditional belief in a divinely ordered universe interrelated by an intricate web of latent correspondences, on which both political stability and Renaissance conceitful thought had depended. Nevertheless the traditional modes of thought and expression, although naturalistically incredible, were employed deliberately in Restoration propaganda. The hope was that this anachronistic usage might revalidate the former correspondential parallels between the King and God or Christ, thus implying tendentiously a divine authority for a particular polity or ideology. This pragmatic equivocation is characteristic of Dryden’s political poetry which avoids the unsympathetic awkwardness in the Metaphysical mode evident in his elegy ‘Upon the death of the Lord Hastings’ (1649) by self-consciously employing extravagant conceits as acknowledged fiction or poetic mythology.

Compare, for example, Dryden’s presentation of Charles I1 in ‘Astraea Redux’ (11.250-65) as the Christ-like son of God, bringing the new dispensation of mercy to a penitent land (where the conceit of the sympathetic response of the cliffs moving to meet Charles belongs to the displaced cosmology of natural subordination and harmony); stanzas 237-44, 260-71, and 286 of ‘Annus Mirabilis’ which show Charles as the guardian of his nation, sacramentally figuring God’s relationship with man; and ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ which parallels Charles with David as types of the divine ruler against whom Mon- mouthiAbsalom rebels, incited by the Satan-like promptings of Shaftesbury/ Achitophel towards a reenactment of Adam’s Fall. (A subtle touch is to make

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Achitophel as the spokesman for the republican ideology use the Biblical parallel to his own ends by presenting Charles not as God but as Lucifer (11.267-78) and by suggesting that Absalom rather than Charles is a type of both Moses and Christ (11.230-43).) See also Dryden’s parodic use of Biblical typology in ‘MacFlecknoe’, 11.29-34, 62-63, 87-89, 118-19, 214-17, casting Flecknoe variously as Elijah and as John the Baptist, to Shadwell’s Elisha and Christ (a delicately blasphemous innuendo which links the anointing appropriate to this poetic coronation with the etymological significance of Christ). The important point in these familiar examples is that Biblical figures are being manipulated for propagandist or satirical purposes in a chameleon- like manner, whose flexibility suggests that there is little residual belief in their validity as anything other than a convenient fiction.

It was in this milieu that Swift began his poetic career and Dryden’s self- conscious ambivalence towards the Renaissance world view and its appropriate poetic conventions are, I shall argue, paralleled in Swift’s early ‘Ode to the King’ (?1690) and ‘Ode to Dr William Sancroft’ (?1689-1692).

Swift’s tribute to Sancroft derives its force from his contrasting satire on the presumptuous atheists whose confidence in their own frail reason derives from a cynosural sense of their own importance. H e contrasts the sublime grandeur of the created universe, imaged nobly in Neoplatonic terms:

For this inferior world is but heaven’s dusky shade, By dark reverted rays from its reflection made;

Whence the weak shapes wild and imperfect pass. Like sunbeams shot at too far distance from a glass;

with the distorted view of science which literally upturns the divine order, offering a pallid representation of the divine ideas in its feeble tampering with the numinous mysteries of creation:

So when Cartesian artists try To solve appearances of sight In its reception to the eye,

The figures all inverted show, And colours of a faded hue;

Here a pale shape with upward footstep treads, And men seem walking on their heads; There whole herds suspended lie

Ready to tumble down into the sky;‘

And catch the living landscape through a scanty light,

Swift’s strategy is to correlate the new science with dangerous innovation and a disregard for tradition in religious and political matters. The lack of reverence for creation apparent in this Cartesian rationalism is the counterpart to the iconoclastic ambitions of the Low Church party. Swift’s critique of the latter could be applied equally to the probing activities of the new science, displacing the older, Neoplatonic world view (11.245-50):

Some angel say, what were the nation’s crimes, That sent these wild reformers to our times;

Say what their senseless malice meant, To tear Religion’s lovely face;

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Strip her of every ornament and grace, In striving to wash off the imaginary paint:

The ‘imaginary paint’ is restored by Swift by describing Sancroft throughout in Neoplatonic terminology, equating Sancroft’s elevation to heaven with his attainment of his ‘essence fixed’ (1.7) and defiantly replacing him in the Platonic universe of concentric spheres, which the presumptuous new science had of course discredited (11.149-53):

Thus, primitive SANCROFT moves too high To be observed by vulgar eye, And rolls the silent year On his own secret regular sphere,

And sheds, though all unseen, his sacred influence here.

Lines 65-72 in which Swift attacks the Ptolemaic, geocentric view of the universe make clear that the anachronistic worldview in this quotation is adopted deliberately.2 Sancroft is described as ‘primitive’ both because of his adherence to traditional Anglican principles and by his corresponding place in a ‘primitive’ world view which can eulogize him poetically as a form of tutelary deity who emanates ‘sacred influence’ as Neoplatonic energy.

Thus Swift’s technique in this panegyrical ode turns on the employment for polemical purposes of an anachronistic world view with its attendant poetic conventions. Renaissance Neoplatonism, for Swift as for Dryden, serves as a poetically and politically convenient fiction. This self-conscious attitude towards inherited poetic conventions is further evident in Swift’s ‘Ode to the King’. The Baroque artist had felt no sense of incongruity in portraying for panegyrical purposes human subjects with classical deities or personified abstractions (compare, for example, Rubens’ politically astute Medici cycle). By contrast Swift’s uneasiness in this mode is all too apparent.

His royal panegyric depends on demonstrating William’s combination of ‘valour’ and ‘virtue’, attributes which together will enable ‘the hero [to] commence a god’ (1.30). T o this end Swift presents William, significantly through the implied distance of an artificial simile rather than a confident baroque conceit, as a hero from Renaissance romance, rescuing Fame from Death’s fort (11.33-38). Building on this allegorical opening, he then equates William with Tamburlaine, who in Swift’s version outdoes Marlowe’s hero by conquering not only Bajazet but even Death itself, the only opponent against whom Marlowe’s character had warred unsuccessfully (11.39-44).

This extravagant praise must have seemed excessive even to the youthful Swift, who in the next stanza withdraws rhetorical support from his poem by ironically reducing it to acknowledged fiction. Swift’s aim is to forestall criticism and to make the incredible tolerable, by himself emphasizing its artificiality. The opening lines offer a good example of Swift’s ambivalent approach (11.45-50) :

And now 1 in the spirit see (The spirit of exalted poetry)

I see the fatal fight begin; And, lo! where a destroying angel stands,

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(By all but heaven and me unseen,) With lightning in his eyes, and thunder in his hands;

Although extravagant flights of fancy would be expected in Pindarics, Swift’s qualifying parentheses suggest an inescapable distance from what he is recounting. He is as diffident with his mythological machinery as Milton was in the war of Heaven. In this context the metrical rapture sounds somewhat perfunctory and insincere and it is no surprise to find the epic pretensions of the stanza accompanied throughout by sober equivocation. One finds it difficult to accept at face value Swift’s account of the Battle of the Boyne (11.58-66)

H e spake, and a dark cloud flung o’er his light, And hid him from poetic sight,

And (I believe) began himself the fight, For straight I saw the field maintained,

And what I used to laugh at in romance, And thought too great even for the effects of chance,

The battle almost by great William’s single valour gained: The angel (doubtless) kept the eternal gate,

And stood twixt him and every fate;

The technique resembles Shakespeare’s interruptions of the dramatic illusion in The Winter’s Tale, designed to render acceptable through this aesthetic distancing what in everyday life would be dismissed out of hand as incredible.3 Its effect is, however, less felicitous and serves merely to accentuate Swift’s hesitant adoption of the mythologizing convention.

In his poetic maturity Swift came to terms with the problem in several ways. He employed mythology as a satirical ‘fable’, as in ‘Prometheus’; burlesqued his own earlier difficulties, as in the delightful ‘Directions for a Birthday Song’, which explores superbly the insincere hollowness of formal panegyric through trenchant satire on Walpole and the Hanoverian monarchy; and exploited the imaginative possibilities of the Grub St. mythology. But all these self-conscious virtuosities required time to develop. The fascination of Swift’s ‘Elegy’ on Partridge is that it represents an intermediate stage in this process. For, I shall argue, in this poem Swift is gradually coming to terms with the imaginative exhaustion of metaphysical poetry and distancing himself from its mytholo- gizing conventions and fiction of a universe held together by sympathetic correspondences as the prelude to forging a new poetic idiom.

It was his subject, Partridge, who enabled Swift to do this. For Partridge’s astrology provided an amusing example of the Neoplatonic world view reduced to a debased absurdity. Swift accordingly seized the opportunity to resolve his earlier hesitancies about using as a poetic fiction both Neoplatonic cos- mology and metaphysical conceits by treating them at face value, in order to expose as charlatan superstition what in Swift’s earlier, more favourable view had been regarded as allowable poetic licence. The poem thus embodies some of the first hints of a shift away from metaphysical sensibility in poetry, delicately foreshadowing the Augustan scepticism towards Neoplatonic con- ceitful thought so memorably conveyed in Johnson’s Lives of Cowley and Milton.

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Swift apparently drew on Samuel Butler’s ‘character’ in Hudibras of the quack astrologer, Sidrophel. who combines trivial ventures into scientific experimentation with a hermetic mysticism which he shares with Hudibras’s squire, Ralph, an enthusiastic devotee of the inner light.‘ Ralph’s nonconfor- mism, Sidrophel’s charlatan mixture of scientific pretension and discredited delusions, and his dabbling in quack medicine and petty swindling, all reappear in Swift’s ‘Elegy’. It seems also likely that Swift took a structural hint from Butler. For just as Hudibrar fused parody of what to a rationalistic age appeared as unquestioning faith in superstitious absurdities with burlesque of another outmoded inheritance, the literary convention of the heroic poem, so Swift commandeered another Renaissance literary convention, the solemn panegyrical elegy, to cheekily undermine the period’s ideology by turning its own stylistic modes against itself. The ‘Elegy’ on Partridge is thus of consider- able significance. For, looking forward to the mature Augustan strategy of utilizing an established literary convention as the implicit norm from which the poet may then depart ironically, the basic structure of the ‘Elegy’ on Partridge is a subversion of the Renaissance elegy. Swift wittily employs a series of far-fetched ‘analogies‘, ‘resemblances’, and similes (in keeping with the correspondential world view of hermeticism) which are appropriate in their outmoded character to Partridge’s equally obsolete Ptolemaic astrology.5 In addition to these absurdly forced parallels, in true Scriblerian fashion Swift adduces a series of pseudo-syllogisms or burlesque aetiological myths which in their objectively detached narration form implicitly an ironic refutation of Partridge’s pretensions to learning. Having outlined the basic methodology of the ‘Elegy’. I shall now examine in detail the development of the poem.

The most obvious joke underlying the ‘Elegy’ derives from its place in Swift’s April Fools’ campaign against Partridge.‘ Unlike Partridge’s elaborate predictions in his annual almanac, Merlinus Liberatw, Isaac Bickerstaff‘s prediction of Partridge’s death has apparently come true. The poem thus opens jocularly with the bewildered reactions of the Bickerstaff circle, unable to credit not only the fulfilment of the prophecy but also the lack of cosmologi- cal upheaval at the passing of such a great man. These first 18 lines perform several important functions. Thcir conversational intimacy helps to achieve a rapport with the reader, inviting him to share in the stylistic debunking of Partridge conveyed by the bathetic register of ‘his crony stars’ (1.7), the deliberately clumsy syntactic form ’The sun has rose’ (1.11) with its anti- climactic tailpiece ‘and gone to bed’, and the Hudibrastic rhyme ‘Equatodmat- ter’ (11.17-18). But in addition to this stylistic demystification this opening framework also serves to introduce the protracted revelation of how misguided and anachronistic Partridge’s superstitious world view is, a theme which is to dominate the poem.

Lines 5 and 6 in their affected puzzlement raise the issue succinctly:

Strange, an astrologer should die, Without one wonder in the sky;

‘Strange’ indeed if, like Partridge. one adheres to a cosmology which sees an interrelationship between microcosm and macrocosm.’ In terms of Partridge’s

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world view, which is presented with dead-pan objectivity throughout the poem, disturbance in man’s life should be paralleled correspondentially by upheaval on a universal scale. But all the unnatural portents which the Renaissance mind would expect on such an occasion - ‘meteor’, ‘eclipse’, ‘comet’ (11.9-10) - are conspicuous by their absence. Swift’s joke is improved if one recognizes his verbal and metrical borrowings from Hudibrus. The wits are ironically made to share the superstitious credulity evident in Sidrophel’s absurd misinterpretation of a child’s kite as a falling star which portends the end of-the world (11.3.425-28):

Bless us, quoth he! What dreadful wonder Is that, appears in heaven yonder? A Comet, and without a Beard? Or Star, that ne’r before appear’d?

Unlike Christ’s death (a parallel characteristic of the extravagance of some Baroque conceits, which is used to suggest Partridge’s sense of self-import- ance) the death of the astrologer is attended by no ‘dreadful night at noon’, while the sun defiantly continues its progress, walking through Aries at ‘fit’ periods - a punning reference to its madness-inducing presence there on 1 April and a hint that such a position is ‘fit’ or appropriate to Partridge himself, a man beset by delusions.

This urbane glimpse of the light-hearted scepticism of Bickerstaff‘s circle is followed in lines 19-62 by a tongue-in-cheek celebration of Partridge’s achievements. The stylistic norm behind this section of the poem is the eulogy in Renaissance elegy of the multi-faceted activities and worthy achievements of the deceased.’ But far from fulfilling the reader’s conventional expectations of panegyric, Swift instead introduces into this context with deliberate incon- gruity two other Renaissance genres: the expostulation and the epigrammatic exposure of an impostor.

Swift begins his ironic eulogy of Partridge by raising again in lines 19-22 the cavilling doubts which have surfaced in the introductory section, as the prelude to their putative refutation by astrological learning:

Some wits have wondered what analogy There is ’twixt cobbling and astrology; How Partridge made his optics rise, From a shoe-sole to reach the skies.

Several important themes are rehearsed in these overture-like lines, which Swift will interweave in the complex wordplay of the elegy. The ‘wits’ we have met in lines 1-18 are understandably confused not only by Partridge’s ability to combine the disparate trades of cobbler and astrologer, but also by his implied assertion of a correspondential parallel or ‘analogy’ between mundane life and the astrological spheres (cf. use of ‘resemblance’ in line 40). For following the fragmentation during the seventeenth century of the Renaissance world view, Partridge’s complacent faith in apparently discredited beliefs seems dubious. Swift’s elegy provides two implicit reasons for Partridge’s seemingly irrational behaviour: firstly, through a submerged pun on ‘cobbling’ in the sense of ‘join roughly or clumsily’, it demonstrates that although

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Partridge vindicates his beliefs to his own satisfaction they are nevertheless, from a more detached viewpoint, a botched job;9 secondly, i t suggests (in lines 21-22) that this extreme levelling Protestant has ambitious ideas above his station, which elevate him through megalomania, just as their eccentric absurdity (compare the astronomers in the ‘Ode to Dr Sancroft’) reveals his distorted world view.

Lines 23-30 neatly demonstrate this point [my italics]: A list the cohhlers’ temples ties, To keep the hair out of their eyes; From whencc ’[is plain the diadem That princes wear, derives from them; A n d therefore crowns are nowadays Adorned with golden stars and rays: Which pfainly shows the near alliance Betwixt cobbling and the planets’ science.

Characteristically Swift is here conducting several themes simultaneously. The phrases I have italicized form a sort of mock syllogism, intended to reveal the fatuity of Partridge’s implicit attempt at scholarly self-justification. Equally significantly, there emerge more elaborate hints of Partridge’s tendencies towards political levelling. His derivation of a diadem (whose ‘stars and rays’ comically suggest a connection or Partridgean ‘analogy’ with the astrologer’s proper field of interest) from a cobbler’s list indicates that Partridge is blurring the distinction between royalty and commoners, not only questioning divine right but even implying that cobblers (as the older stock in whom the mark of authority was first invested) perhaps have a greater title to the succession than the princes whom they serve.”’ The pun on ‘cobbling’ as clumsy botching is apparent in lines 29-30 which form an ironic judgement on Partridge, particularly if one notes an echo from Dryden’s ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (1.163; my italics]:

Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally’d

a phrase which significantly refers to the levelling ambitions of the Whig, Shaftesbury .

The gleeful burlesque continues in lines 31-40, which present at ironic face value further instances of Partridge’s scholarly confusion in the absurd derivation of Bootes from boots (an aberration of which the real Partridge was actually guilty!) and of shoe horns from the crescent moon.” The similes between Partridge and an ‘owl’ or ‘bat’ further expose his irrationality. Like these creatures of nocturnal obscurity (figurative terms in colloquial usage for pompous fools) Partridge relies on an inner light to guide him - in his case abandoning reason for the delusive proniptings of his own enthusiastic ‘fancy’.

Swift’s ironic eulogy reaches its climax in lines 57-62, which are peppered with delightful ambiguities and wordplay:

Besides, he could confound the spheres, And set the planets by the ears: To show his skill, he Mars would join To Venus i n aspect malign;

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Then call in Mercury for aid, And cure the wounds that Venus made

Taken at face value these lines form a glowing tribute to a man of truly superhuman abilities, whose power is capable of ‘confounding’ (that is, ‘di- scomfiting’ or ‘overthrowing’) the spheres. (One recalls Swift’s early praise in his ‘Ode to the King’ of William 111 as a Tamburlaine figure.) But on closer examination ‘confound’ is more readily understood in the senses, ‘To spoil, corrupt’ (OED l.c), ‘To throw into confusion or disorder’ (OED 5 ) and ‘To mix up in idea, erroneously regard or treat as identical, fail to distinguish’ (OED 7). The lines are accordingly a witty demonstration of Partridge’s scientific incompetence. His ‘confounding’ of the spheres, or inability to distinguish them, is of course the distorted product of a clumsy mind in pursuit of macrocosmic analogies or resemblances; but the result, unlike the ordered harmony of Renaissance Neoplatonism, is the mock-heroic strife of line 58, which reduces the constellations to brawling citizens. Partridge’s astronomical ineptitude further succeeds in opposing Venus and Mars ‘in aspect malign“l and the result of this domestic turmoil is that Partridge as quack doctor is called in to administer Mercury as a cure for venereal disease.

These lines are a pivotal section in the ‘Elegy’. While forming the pinnacle of Partridge’s terrestrial achievements, they also look forward (in Renaissance elegiac tradition) to the deceased’s dignified reception by welcoming deities. But as a prelude to Partridge’s apotheosis, the bathetic, mock-heroic tone already signals to the reader that this convention also is to be subverted.

Lines 63-72 recount how Partridge’s soul is elevated And is installed as good a star As any of the Caesars are.

This mock apotheosis (the reference to the Caesars suggesting Partridge’s ambitions) is merely the prelude to another transformation. The extreme Protestant saint becomes with Swift’s metamorphosing energy a kind of Patron Saint of Cobblers:

Triumphant star! Some pity show On cobblers militant below, Whom roguish boys in stormy nights Torment, by pissing out their lights; Or through a chink convey their smoke, Enclosed artificers to choke.

The wit lies in Swift’s superimposition onto Renaissance elegy of the world of the nonconformist sects.” He is parodying lines 59-64 of Cowley’s ‘On the Death of Mr Crashaw’:

Hail, Bard Triumphant! and some care bestow On us. the Poets Militant Below! Oppos’ed by our old En’emy, adverse Chance, Attacqu’ed by Envy, and by Ignorance, Enchain’d by Beauty, tortur’d by Desires, Expos’d by Tyrant-Love to savage Beasts and Fires. *‘

The link in Swift’s mind is presumably that both the poet and the nonconformist

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astrologer are subject to fits of ‘enthusiasm’, which convince them of their prophetic role. Cowley’s poem concludes by drawing a parallel between Crashaw as Elijah and Cowley as Elisha, to whom the elder prophet has passed on his ‘mighty Spirit’ of inspiration. The fact that Dryden had also employed this trope in ‘Macflecknoe’ (11.214-17) by presenting Flecknoe as Elijah and Shadwell as Elisha must have made its satiric potential vividly apparent to Swift, while the fact that Swift now freely parodies Cowley, the chief influence on his early Pindaric Odes, demonstrates Swift’s conscious attempt to break free from inherited stylistic conventions.

Swift’s prose account of Partridge‘s death offers a further pointer towards his intentions here. It notes wrily ‘on his Death-Bed he declared himself a Nonconformist, and had a fanatick Preacher to be his spiritual Guide’.lS Swift’s Anglican wariness of Partridge’s religion assumes the ironic strategy of elevating Partridge to the prophetic importance which in his own eyes he commands, while this implicitly suggests a bathetic contrast between the reality and the high-flown pretensions.

Thus Swift plays on the antithesis between the ‘Church triumphant’, that portion of the Church which has overcome the world and entered into glory, and the ‘Church militant’, still engaged in a terrestrial contest with the powers of evil. Just as Partridge had earlier viewed cobblers as comparable in dignity and station with princes, so here cobblers attain an ironic dignity as as yet uncanonized saints. The phrase ‘Enclosed artificers’ has associations of a religious, enclosed order, while its high-flown register conveys Partridge’s conceited view of his trade. Departing from Cowley’s self-conscious lament at the amorous tribulations of ‘Poets Militant’, Swift elaborates in lines 74-78 a burlesque saint’s life or Puritan spiritual autobiography in which the boys’ pranks are transformed initially into divine trials of the Job-like endurance of ‘cobblers militant’, and then a mock-heroic version of the fiery furnace.

Swift’s inventive wit then measures Partridge against a different literary convention (11.79-80) :

Thou, high exalted in t h y sphere, Mayst follow still thy calling there.

The quibble on ‘calling’ in the sense of (self-appointed) ‘spiritual vocation’ forms a link with Partridge’s Puritanism in the previous section and looks forward, in the sense of ‘secular trade’, to the account of Partridge’s celestial cobbling in lines 81-94. The principal concern of these lines is, however, with Partridge’s exaltation to the Platonic sphere which is in keeping with his outmoded world view. The literary convention here is well established in classical, medieval and Renaissance literature (compare, for example, Chau- cer’s elevation of Troilus to ‘the holughnesse of the eighthe spere’ and Jonson’s tribute to Shakespeare:

But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere Advanced, and made a constellation there!

Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage)“

and had been employed at face value by Swift in his ‘Ode to Dr Sancroft’,

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discussed earlier. Its function here, however, is to underline the discrepancy between the solemn dignity which the convention implies (and which is in keeping with Partridge’s megalomaniac ambitions) and Partridge’s glaring inappropriateness for such lavish panegyrical treatment.

If one compares two great Renaissance elegies, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Marvell’s ‘Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings’ the norm from which Swift is satirically departing becomes apparent. Milton’s shepherd persona movingly celebrates Lycidas’s reception in heaven:

There entertain him all the saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet societies That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.”

While in Marvell’s poem Hastings, like Troilus, Shakespeare, or Sancroft, looks down from his ‘crystal palace’ and beholds the names of the blest in the ‘Eternal Book’ in a characteristically baroque mingling of Neoplatonic and Christian traditions. Hastings’s dignified welcome by the deities provides a representative example of what the reader of this genre would conventionally expect:

The gods themselves cannot their Joy conceal, But draw their Veils, and their pure Beams reveal: Onely they drooping Hynieneus note, Who for sad Purple, tears his Saffron-coat; And trails his Torches th’row the Starry Hall Reversed, at his Darlings Funeral.’x

Instead of this decorum, however, Swift deliberately indulges a vein of indelicate jibing, fusing sexual innuendo with the minute and trivializing references to mundane experience which one finds in Renaissance mock- elegy.” The sympathetic efforts of the deities to provide Partridge with materials for his cobbling have the effect not of elevating him to their ‘exalted’ level, as in Renaissance elegy, but instead of reducing them to his sordid lifestyle, implicating them (as in lines 59-62) in the vulgar jesting and sexual licentiousness which, it is implied, is the staple of Partridge’s lifestyle as low tradesman and quack doctor.

The wit here lies in Swift’s deliberately extravagant, ‘analogical’ association of incompatibles. Just as earlier, in Partridge’s distorted mind, a list could become a diadem or a crescent moon a shoe-horn, so here Ariadne’s hair becomes a cobbler’s ‘ends’, Sagittarius’s dart an ‘awl’, while Vulcan forges not a sword but a ‘paring knife’ before he is cuckolded by Venus’s liaison with Partridge.’” The confused lucubrations of a mad astrologer are vividly realized in this bizarre, dream-like projection of the sexual and astrological ‘fancy’ which characterizes the man. Partridge’s confounding of celestial order is given a final incidental illustration when by his interfering presence the number of zodiacal signs is increased to thirteen, an inharmonious number whose numerological imperfection demonstrates the epigone Partridge’s mangling of Neoplatonic cosmology into debased confusion.

The final fourteen-line epitaph has a similar framing effect to the opening

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of the poem. For having demonstrated Partridge’s absurdity through satirical departures from the Renaissance elegy, by pseudo-scholarship and by an ironically qualified distortion of Renaissance hermeticism, Swift finally con- fronts the actual corpse stripped of its ideal pretensions and firmly relocated in his own Moorfields milieu. As in the introductory section of the elegy, the ironies are pointed by a disingenuous persona whose phrases form a tissue of ambiguities which apparently praise, but in fact cumulatively debunk.

The phrase, ‘five foot deep’, introduces probable wordplay. ‘Five-foot’, once a popular name for a species of starfish, punningly transmogrifies the astrologer into a helpless fish hopelessly out of its true element. The sense of incongruity which this association transfers to Partridge’s prone indignity ‘on his back’ undercuts (together with the humorous struggle against circumstan- tial adversity evoked by ‘to his best’) the potentially pious implications of lines 97-98 in which Partridge looks up with misplaced confidence to the stars both as astrologer and as Christian in expectation of salvation.

Having physically located Partridge, the narrator now invites a tribute of grief from those who have been the man’s living associates. There is indeed unfeigned regret in those whom Partridge has left behind, but in a more satirical sense than he would wish. The funereal lines 99-102 evoke humorously the tearful reactions of victims disappointed by Partridge’s various fraudulent activities: the quack ‘pills’21 (‘customers’ probably has the secondary sense here of ‘prostitutes’), the imaginatively constructed ‘almanacs’, and the ill- fitting ‘shoes’. The visitors to the grave include those who sought astrological advice in one sense of ‘fortunes’, but also doubtless a string of frustrated creditors seeking ‘fortunes’ of an altogether more material variety.

The final half-dozen lines are again charged with irony, both syntactic and semantic. Paraphrased at face value, they would read something along the lines of ‘Don’t despair, Partridge’s extraordinary powers live on beyond the grave’; a less charitable re-casting would be, ‘You may as well cut your losses; he’s as inefficacious dead as he was alive’. As frequently, in line 105 Swift mingles a proverbial reinforcer, ‘to be willing to give one’s ears’, which is intended to strengthen emotively the veracity of a statement, with an undercutting phrase (in this case ‘pawn my ears’) which has unfortunate associations both with penalties for petty crime and a Grub St., hand-to- mouth existence in keeping with Partridge’s implicitly shady activities as an advertised recoverer of stolen goods.

This syntactic deflation is abetted by the usage of ‘virtue’ in line 104. It is being implied, with eulogistic extravagance, that Partridge embodies ‘virtue’ in its primary sense of ‘The power or operative influence inherent in a supernatural o r divine being’ (OED 1). In other words Partridge is someone who, like Sancroft on his sphere, is portrayed as emanating a beneficent energy appropriate to his Neoplatonic world view. (The alchemical usage of ‘virtue’ as ‘occult efficacy or power’ (OED 9.a) may also be involved here, further undermining Partridge’s scientific knowledge.) But the fact that the reader, being tipped the wink by the narrator, is aware that this ‘virtue’ is powerless is in keeping with the elegy’s systematic refutation of Partridge’s outmoded faith in a world view founded on microcosmic and macrocosmic

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correspondences, Neoplatonic energies and Ptolemaic cosmology. The final line of the elegy fittingly places Partridge in his Grub St. context.

His apotheosis has not been upwards to the heavens, but rather (as line 68 foreshadowed) downwards to ‘[mend] shoes in hell’. There is a reminiscence here of Dryden’s ‘Macflecknoe’, lines 212-17, which merges the visual image of the overreacher of emblematic tradition with what is implicitly a metaphorical hanging, an appropriate and familiar punishment for the Grub St. charlatan.

Swift’s ‘Elegy’ on Partridge is thus more than a trivial occasional poem. It follows a relatively jejune period in Swift’s poetic career after his initial series of ‘Odes’ which were heavily indebted to Cowley. He had been experimenting with the mock-heroic in the drafts of ‘Baucis and Philemon’, but it was, I feel, the impetus of the ‘Elegy’ on Partridge which enabled him to proceed further into the Grub St. world of his mock pastorals. For in his April Fools’ joke on Partridge Swift had finally broken free from his uneasy inheritance of the poetic conventions of the seventeenth century and begun to establish a genuinely new poetic idiom.

Alan Robinson University of Lancaster

1. ‘Ode to Dr William Sancroft’. 11.21-24, 27-36, in Jonathan Swift: the Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth, 1983), p.61. All subsequent quotations are from this edition, and accordingly only line references will be given in the text. Compare Swift’s reconciliation of the new science with an older organic view of nature in keeping with a religious view of man’s condition in ‘Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple’, 11.159-77, in The Complete Poems. p.59. Dryden’s majestic use of the old astrology in his elegiac Ode to Mrs Anne Killigrew and two Odes for St. Cecilia’s Day suggests that the reader’s generic expectations of sublimity in the Ode form were a factor in prolonging its poetic currency. See The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (1966), V. 2. 27-29, 57-59, 62-64; V. 3. 94-95, 115-18. Compare the accounts of Ralph in Hudibras, I . 1 . 519-616, and of Sidrophel in 11. 3. 205- 322, 399-482. Swift had chosen his target well. Partridge’s Opus Reformarum; or, a Treatise ofAstrology (1693) and Defectiu Geniturarum: Being an Essay toward the Reviving and Proving the True Old Principles of Astrology, Hitherto Neglected, or, at Leastwise, not Observed or Understood (1697) contain lengthy and outspoken defences of the Ptolemaic system. Compare Pope’s jesting description of Partridge as an ‘Egregious Wizard’ (The Rape ofthe Lock, v. 139), a phrase which further evidences his reduction by the Scriblerians to a superstitious mage. See G. P. Mayhew, ‘Swift’s Bickerstaff Hoax as an April Fools‘ Joke’, Modern Philology, 61 (May 1964). 270-80. Compare Hudibras, 11. 3. 225-34, 295-96. Compare, for example, Jonson’s ‘Elegy on My Muse. the Truly Honoured Lady, the Lady Venetia Digby’, 11.155-98; Vaughan’s ‘Elegy on the Death of Mr R.W.‘, 11.31-50, and ‘To the Pious Memory of C. W. Esquire’, 11.23-74; Dryden’s ‘Upon the Death of the Lord Hustings’, 11.15-52, and ‘To the Pious Memory of [ . . . I Mrs Anne Killigrew’, 11.71-148. For an earlier equation of ‘cobbler’ and ‘botcher’ see All’s Well that E d r Well. ed. G. K. Hunter (1967), IV. 3. 180. Partridge’s Opus Reformarum contains a eulogistic nativity of that ‘Great Man’. Oliver

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Cromwell, presenting him glowingly as the servant o f both Parliament and the nation, and a bastion against Popery. The title pages of his annual almanacs measure time from the ycar of ‘our Deliverance by K. William from Popery and Arbitrary Government’. Swift returned later to Partridge’s own variety 01 aetiological myths about the moon in ‘The Progress of Beauty’ (11.89-92):

While Partridge wisely shows the cause Efficient of the moon‘s decay. That Cancer with his poisonous claws, Attacks her in the Milky Way

Partridge’s astronomical ignorance is mingled with a probable reference to his dabbling as a quack doctor; unlike his former mentor. Gadbury (in lines 93-96 of ‘The Progress of Beauty’). Partridge diagnoses fair Diana‘s wasting condition not as venereal disease but rather breast cancer. Compare Hudibras, 11. 3. 527-33 and Paradise Losr. VI. 313. Partridge’s Protestant extremism is notable. for example, in his Advice to the Protestants of England (?1688] , and his Mene Tekel: Being arr Astrological Judgement on the Great and Wonderficl Year 1688 [. . ./ Shewing rhe Approaching Catastrophe of Popery in England. Abraham Cowley. Poems, ed. A . R. Waller (Cambridge. 1905), p.49. Bicker,w$/’PaperA and Pamphlets on rho Church, e d . Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1940), p.155. ’Troilus and Criseyde’, V, 1809 in The Works of Geolfrey Chuucer, ed . F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (1966), p.479; ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author. Mr William Shakespe- are’, 11.75-78, in Ben Jonson: Poems. ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford. 1975). p.310. Compare Jonson’s use of the trope of stellification in ‘To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair. Sir Lucius Cary and Sir [-I. Morison’, 11.75-99, in ed. cit . . pp.236-37. ‘Lycidas‘, 11.178-81, in The Poems of John Milton. ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler

Lines 41-46. See The Poems and LetrerA of Andrew Marvell, edited by H . M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed. , revised by P. Legouis and E. L . Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 1971), I , 5. Compare, for example, the opening particularity of Marvell’s ‘Tom May’s Death’, ed. cit., I , 94. although the acerbic tone of that poem is of course foreign to Swift’s more urbane satire on Partridge, and Milton’s twu punning elegies on Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, ed. tit., pp.124-26. For examples 01 Swift’s other work in the genre of satirical elegy, see the elegies on Demar, Boat. and the more directly ud hominem ‘character’ of Marlborough (ed. cit., pp.214-15, 238-39, 242). With the irreverent tone here compare Hudibras. I . 1. 583-94, 11. 3. 239-50. 451-58. Merlinus Liberalus. Partridge’s almanac for 1708 which formed the basis for Swift’s prose satire on Partridge. contains a lengthy advertisernent for that ostensible panacea, ‘Partridge’s Purging Pills’, billed as ‘principally intended for the Dropsey and Scurvey’, but also ‘excellent in the Gripes of the Bowels and Stomach, Tympany, Sciatica. Worms, Running Pains, Ulcers, Scabs, Itch, nay, and the Leprosy also, i f taken often and in order [...]’.

(1968). p.253.