Plunging in the Southern Waves: Swift's Poem on the Bubble
1988; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 18; Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3508188
ISSN2222-4289
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoSwift's poem entitled The Bubble, written towards the end of the baneful South Sea year of 1720, is an altogether typical work.' By this I do not mean simply that it brings together a number of his characteristic strategies and verbal devices, enlisting a variety of different idioms (heroic, satiric, political, biblical, proverbial) and crossing tonal registers from flippant to corrosive. It is equally representative of much of Swift's poetry in that The Bubble takes on a large contemporary issue which formed the subject-matter for many contemporary effusions by writers great and small. Moreover, Swift chose a form, the broadside ballad, which was precisely the one most favoured by other writers dealing with the topic. The contrast with Pope here is marked. Pope waited several years before he tackled similar themes in a sustained fashion: the Epistle to Bathurst (1733) is a complex and richly orchestrated composition, not wholly remote from popular idiom but oblique and allusive rather than direct or univocal. For all the variety of its means, The Bubble is essentially monothematic. The rhetoric of Pope's Epistle enjoins a process of standing back, where that of Swift's poem embraces the topical, the immediate, the sense of the moment. The Bubble is composed in a familiar ballad stanza; it is significant that a shortened version soon appeared where the text is accompanied by a satiric print. The difference in method points to fundamental disparities in outlook and approach between Swift and Pope, which have been explored in recent years by Carole Fabricant, Ellen Pollak, and other scholars. In this essay the emphasis will lie on Swift alone, and it is the narrowly literary implications which will be relevant. What matters for my reading of the poem is that The Bubble belongs, as the Epistle to Bathurst does not, to the huge array of satire (graphic as well as literary) provoked by the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in the autumn of 1720. This is not just because the work was written at the height of the national furore occasioned by the Bubble; it is also a fact connected with Swift's choice of verse-form, metre, imagery, and reference. Hardly any poem in the canon better illustrates Swift's ability to occupy the same imaginative space as the Grub Street writers Swift derided; hardly any
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