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Friends and Enemies in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift

1979; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.1979.0011

1938-6133

James Woolley,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Friends and Enemies in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift JAMES WOOLLEY I “I have been severall months writing near five hundred lines on a pleasant subject, onely to tell what my friends and enemyes will say on me after I am dead.”1 From Swift’s descriptions of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift in these or very similar words, over and over in his letters, it is evident that (however later critics may have described the poem) when he himself thought of it as a whole, he thought of it as a poem about friendship and enmity, and as a poem about what people would say of him after he died.2 Despite abundant commentary on the poem’s textual history, its structure, genre, irony, vanity, politics, religious lessons, and multiplication of identities, we still have not paid enough attention to the basic question of what it is about. Some discussions, moreover, have insisted too much upon finding Swift an exemplary poet and moralist. But Ronald Paulson, Marshall Waingrow , and David M. Vieth have spoken of friendship as a topic of the Verses; and I propose, without purporting to rescue the poem from the fascinated uneasiness with which we read it, or to explain away its rhetorical flaws, that a fuller recognition of Swift’s strong emphasis on friendship and enmity would correspondingly benefit our understand­ ing of the poem’s intended meaning.3 To that end, I seek to show how the poem emphasizes friendship of a particular kind; then, to illumi205 206 / JAMES WOOLLEY nate a crucial context of the poem in the details of Swift’s actual friendship and enmity with Queen Caroline and Mrs. Howard; and finally, to discuss some implications of this subject for the poem’s most vexed critical problem, which is the interpretation of the concluding eulogy on Swift. That the idea of friendship gives the Verses a loosely defined unity is suggested not only by Swift’s own repeated descriptions of the poem and by its epigraph, but also by the large outlines of its structure. The first of the three main sections, the proem (1—72), states and illus­ trates with some comic irony La Rochefoucauld’s bitter remark that “in the Adversity of our best Friends, we find something that doth not displease us.”4 (More accurately, this section demonstrates the slightly more palatable fact that we envy their good fortune.) The second section (73-298) loosely illustrates the maxim by showing how Swift’s friends will “find their private Ends” in his last illness and death, just as much as his enemies will. The final section (299-484)—the troublesome one—is a monologue, a eulogy on Swift, delivered by neither a friend nor an enemy but, we are told, a neutral—“one quite indiff’rent in the Cause” (305). Swift’s point is that he cannot expect the praise he deserves from a friend: the eulogy thus wittily and ironi­ cally underscores the statement about friendship made in the first two sections. The emphasis on friendship is further visible in the sheer number of times friend, friendship, and related words appear. The importance of the idea, not merely in this poem but in Swift’s verse as a whole, is suggested by the statistic that friend and related words appear more frequently in Swift’s verse than any other noun—a distinction Swift’s verse shares, to some degree, with Pope’s. By contrast, Josephine Miles has shown, friend is not among even the ten most recurrent nouns in the poetry of Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Her­ bert, Milton, Collins, Gray, Bums, Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Poe, Emerson, or Housman.5 Not all critics have observed the natural connection between friendship and the poem’s other main topic, Swift’s death. Swift is drawing upon a traditional expectation that a friend will speak in one’s favor when one cannot with tact and propriety do so oneself, and will Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift / 207 preserve one’s memory when the time comes.6 Friendship has indeed been seen as one of the few hedges against mutability which...