Bedlam's Bard-- In Praise of Praising

April 11 is the birthday of Christopher Smart, a "religious" poet (according to Writer's Almanac) born in Shipbourne, Kent, England (1722).

This month we're reading a small fragment of one of his two major works of poetry--written while he was involunatarily committed to St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics (in Bethnal Green) for his "religious mania," which caused him to pray obsessively and in public.

The fragment about his cat Jeoffry is from "Jubilate Agno," (1763) a very long and unfinished poem in which he attempts to give thanks for absolutely everything. He starts this fragment, "For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him."

He then goes on to do just that...to consider Jeoffry in the context of how he serves the Living God. What follows is an absolutely delightful poem that has raised me out of many a sour or self-absorbed funk. I will link it here http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/661.html.

Here are just a few of the lines I love:

"For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life."

and....

"For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat."

and...

"For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion." and .....

I could go on and on but what I'd really love is for you to read it and love it too, and then tell me which are your favorite lines.

I'd also like to note a couple other fascinating things about Smart and this poem in particular.

1) His delight in the world, and his all-out, nothing-held-back stance of praise. This awes and motivates me at my core. He has invested his whole being into praising...to the extent that his work is to sing about a cat, and his reward is the lunatic asylum.

2) The courageous and vulnerable individual. Smart the man, the poet, the artist is wonderfully alive and visible in his writing about Jeoffry. We see his individuality in the observations he sees and in the playful and earnest way he describes the cat.

3) The community. This might be less visible. Surely he didn't fit into society, and he was undoubtedly suffering. But we can see his community in the form that he chose for his poem. His poetry is obviously informed by the Psalms, he displays his affinity for the Psalms writers and the church, although he expresses himself so radically as an individual that he doesn't fit easily in the church. Despite the struggles Smart had and my compassion for those struggles, I have to say I love how he comprehended at a deep level and then appropriated the form of the psalm for his own purpose.

We are all writing in a certain time and place. As I struggle to find the form for my writing, I find every poem I write is very directly influenced by the poems I read and the poets and thinkers I talk to. I hope I can be more influenced by Smart and other praisers like him.

Let me suggest you try to "consider"something...a cat, a dog, a child, a flower, a playground, a meal, a party, a rainstorm, a bird, an ocean, a friend....and note everything you possibly can about that very specific "servant of the living God."

Perhaps you will surprise yourself and end up finding how you too are a mixture of "gravity and waggery."


If you would like to read more of Jubilate Agno (and it's very, very long!) here's a link: http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/jubilate/ Don't try to print it unless you got lotsa time and paper, cause it's LONG. (By the way, it wasn't published until 1939.. that's almost 200 years after it was written.)


Happy Christopher Smart Day!

---Jenny