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For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry' by Christopher Smart - A Mouthful of Air
For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry' by Christopher Smart - A Mouthful of Air
EPISODE 50
‘For I will
consider my
Cat Jeoffry’
by
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Christopher
Smart
Mark McGuinness reads and discusses the passage ‘For I
will consider my cat Jeoffry’ from Jubilate Agno by
Christopher Smart.
E 00:00
Poet
Christopher Smart
Mark McGuinness
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‘For I will consider my Cat
Jeoffry’
From Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart
Podcast transcript
This is one of the most charming and delightful passages of poetry in
English, and yet there is a sad story behind it.
So if you are a cat lover like me then it’s hard to resist this poem. Every
time I read it I marvel again at Smart’s powers of observation, to capture
the many and charming aspects of his cat. And I can’t help thinking of
my own cat, who is sadly no longer with us. And if you have ever had a
cat in your life then I’m sure this poem will bring a smile to your face
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Now if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you will know I’m
always a bit wary of biographical readings of poems. I generally like to
focus on the poem itself rather than extrapolating links to what may or
may not have been happening in the poet’s life at the time of writing. So
I could quite happily just talk about the poem and Smart’s depiction of
Jeoffry, and all the marvellous details that he uses to capture the life of
his cat. And rest assured we’re going to get to that very shortly.
But I do think it’s worth giving you a bit of background to the poem,
partly because it adds a layer of poignancy and pathos, but also because
I think it partly explains how he was able to observe the cat so closely,
and to immortalise him for posterity.
So. By the 1750s Smart was living in London and publishing poetry and
satires and parodies in magazines, and had racked up considerable debt,
and it seems considerable ill-will in his publisher and father-in-law
John Newbery. In 1757 Newbery had Smart confined to a mental
asylum, St Luke’s, on the grounds of ‘religious mania’, and Smart spent
the next seven years in one asylum or another.
Ever since then, people have been debating whether or not Smart was
really ‘mad’ in the contemporary parlance, or in 21st-century terms
whether he was mentally ill, how severely, and what diagnostic category
he might be put in by a modern psychiatrist. And various ulterior
motives have been suggested for Newbery having Smart confined,
including debt, drunkenness, and disputes between the two over the
publication of Smart’s work.
I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not
noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as
lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he
did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.
On the other hand, Smart’s habit of insisting that people pray with him
clearly became an obsession, and there was one incident where he
prayed out loud in public in the park in such a way that everyone around
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him was alarmed and ran away, an incident he refers to in Jubilate
Agno:
For I blessed God in St James’s Park till I routed all the company.
For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the
watchman smites me with his staff.
My own sense of Smart is that whether or not he was mentally ill, he was
also a genuinely religious poet who may well have had a direct
experience of the divine and tried to express it or recapture it in some of
his poetry. Have a listen to this, which is from Jubilate Agno, a few
pages before the bit about Jeoffry:
It’s quite far out isn’t it? And the bits about about Alamoth and
Sheminith are pretty impenetrable. But then we get this amazing line:
‘For Flowers can see, and Pope’s Carnations knew him.’
And I actually Googled that line to see if anyone else had picked up on it,
and it turns out
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poet, really admired that line too. He said it was ‘better than Blake’. So
I’m pleased to discover that Ginsberg shares my good taste.
Anyway. Opinion is still divided about Smart’s precise state of mind. I’m
reminded of the possibly apocryphal story about the visitor to an 18th
century asylum, who asked one of the inmates how he came to be there,
and the inmate replied: ‘I said the world was mad, and the world said I
was mad; and they outvoted me.’
Because if you’re confined to a room on your own for years on end, but
your cat is in there with you, then you are going to spend a lot of time
looking at that cat and getting to know it in all its moods and actions
and aspects. And in this respect, Smart’s pain was literature’s gain,
because he really does seem to capture all aspects of Jeoffry, including
several imaginary ones. Wallace Stevens wrote a famous poem called ‘13
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, and as Smart’s description of Jeoffry
has 74 lines, we could easily call it ‘74 Ways of Looking at a Cat’.
And part of the tragedy of Smart’s life is the fact that this poem was not
published until 1939. You know, he was anticipating the Romantic
movement and even some trends in 20th-century poetry, and maybe
this poem could have influenced those trends – but of course it didn’t
because it wasn’t published until two centuries later, when the world
had caught up with Smart.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God
upon his prayer.
And of course the description of Jeoffry ends with this outrageously and
hilariously short and expressive line:
Okay, so far so modern. When we look at Smart’s poem from this angle
he seems to be way ahead of his time. And yet, just like Hopkins, we can
also see Smart as drawing on a very old poetic tradition. So last month I
drew a line from Hopkins’ poem ‘The Windhover’, all the way back
through medieval poetry to Anglo-Saxon verse. And believe it or not, the
roots of Smart’s poem go back even further than that – all the way back
to the language of The Bible.
Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto the Lord glory and
strength.
Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name; worship the Lord in
the beauty of holiness.
The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory
thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of
majesty.
The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord breaketh the
cedars of Lebanon.
He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a
young unicorn.
The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness; the Lord shaketh the
wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the
forests: and in his temple doth every one speak of his glory.
The Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth King for ever.
The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his
people with peace.
This is magnificent, isn’t it? And we can hear, can we not, the
magisterial effect of the repetition of phrases such as ‘Give unto the
Lord’, and ‘The voice of the Lord’. It’s such a simple technique and yet it
is so powerful and effective here.
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hills; we shall never surrender.
Let Sosthenes rejoice with the Winkle – all shells like the parts of the
body are good kept for those parts.
Let Chloe rejoice with the Limpin – There is a way to the terrestrial
Paradise upon the knees.
Let Carpus rejoice with the Frog-Fish – A man cannot die upon his
knees.
Let Stephanas rejoice with Mormyra who is a fish of divers colours.
Let Fortunatus rejoice with the Burret – it is good to be born when
things are crossed.
So we can hear the repetition of that word ‘let’, and I think we can also
start to understand why the rest of Jubilate Agno is not as famous as the
bit about Jeoffry. But within the passage about Jeoffry, isn’t it amazing
how much work that little word ‘for’ is doing? It has that incantatory
quality that elevates the language effortlessly to the plane of the Psalms:
And because the word ‘for’, means ‘because’, every line in the
description can be read as referring back to the first one and justifying
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that first line. Smart is saying ‘these are the reasons why I am going to
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consider my cat Jeoffry; these are the reasons why my cat Jeoffry is
worthy of consideration’.
And if we look again at Psalm 29, then we can see another thing that this
text has in common with Smart’s poem, and that is the catalogue, the
enumeration, of the attributes of its subject. The Psalmist tells us about
the voice of the Lord: that it is upon the waters, that it thunders, that it
is powerful and full of majesty, that it breaketh the cedars of Lebanon,
that it divideth the flames of fire and maketh the hinds to calve, and so
on. It’s a wonderfully rich and varied list of attributes, that makes for a
magnificent and awe-inspiring description.
And it isn’t it delightful that Smart has taken this tradition of the
catalogue, that was used first in religious poetry and then love poetry,
and applied it to his beloved cat? You could almost say he’s turned it
into a cat-alogue! And he’s brought the catalogue full circle because this
is not just a poem about how lovely his cat is, but it is also a religious
poem in the tradition of the Psalms.
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‘For I will consider my Cat
Jeoffry’
From Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart
Christopher Smart
Christopher Smart was an English poet and satirist who was born in
1722 and died in 1771. He spent his early career at Pembroke College
Cambridge, before moving to London where he published poems, satires
and parodies in various magazines, and via the printing press of John
Newbery, whose stepdaughter Anna Maria Carnan Smart married in
1752. After falling out with Newbery, Smart was confined to mental
asylums for several years. After his release, his problems with debt
increased, and in 1770 he was arrested for debt and then imprisoned in
The King’s Bench Prison, where he died a few months later. His poetry
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was neglected after his death until the publication in 1939 of Jubilate
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