Mounsey, Chris. "Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno." Blackwell Companion to 18th-Century Poetry. Ed. Christine Gerrard. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 290-302.

He is Sr. Lecturer in English at University of Winchester, England, and the author of Christopher Smart, Clown of God. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2001.

Madman or not?

not:

1) written at the same time as the Song to David, and it's never questioned for its sanity

2) like Song of David, Jubilate turns Hebrew Psalms into English verse

3) "no other evidence to corroborate a diagnosis of insanity. On the other hand, there is much to suggest that Smart was simply one of many victims of the madhouse system, where abuses were rife, and through which unwanted or annoying relatives and business associates could be disposed of for a price, with no questions asked" (290)

4) many others in his congregation were known to "pray continuously" in the streets etc.

5) "we discover on closer scrutiny that the JA is marked by as careful an internal and external coherence as are the other works. But, unlike the conventionally metrical poems, the [based on Hebrew psalmody] JA does not give up its secrets easily." (290)

"The JA testifies to its authorship by a Cambridge academic with an extraordinary facility in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, science, religion, and philosophy" with a "penchant for associative wordplay within and between languages" (290)

Why is it is so obsessively focused on certain topics: natural histories of plants, animals, and minerals?

in his asylum years Smart had only 6 books to consult

1) the King James Bible

2) Ainsworth's Latin Thesaurus

3) Salmon's guide for London pharmacists (in Latin)

4) Hill's Useful Family Herbal

5) Miller's Gardener's Dictionary

6) Hill's History of Plants

Mounsey uses the same interpretive steps we outlined from Bishop Butler, Anglican theologian, steps I claimed characterize all good developed close readings, whether sacred or secular:

definitions or individual words; those words in their immediate context in a sentence; that sentence-context in larger contexts like paragraphs, chapters, verses ; the context of other most relevant texts; the context of the "text" of history; the test of matching specific interpretive details to the general tenor of the whole

Jubilate Agno's General Tenor

the poem is "a cryptic crossword puzzle with the world outside as its grid"(291)

"Indeed, there are at least two contextual ways to read each line of JA, one from biblical reference, and the other from contemporary reference" (297)

for example,

"We are taught how to read the lines [in A4], that is, we are told we must bring Old testament lessons up to date and use them as metaphors for contemporary problems . . . we can see the way in which the bible and cotemporary become inextricably linked" (296)

definitions, titles (interpreting individual words)

title Jubilate Agno - regoice in the lamb (as Christ) via Psalm 100 Jubilate Deo - rejoice in God

the title already begins the shift Smart must make from Old to New Testament: "David can rejoice in God, since he writes with divine inspiration. Smart rejoices in the Lamb, which is an earthly reference to Jesus, who is the human form of God, from whom he gets his human inspiration." (294)

Relevant interpretive contexts

Biblical (both testaments); contemporary history and biography (his imprisonment; his politics AND his church life)

Unorthodox yet an Anglican still

Smart attended St. George the Martyr, a High Anglican congregation in London

yet his method of worship is "everyday, secular, and material. You praise God merely by living and breathing" (294)

He puts himself (in JA) in the position of the Anglican priest; but Anglicans believed ONLY an ordained minister could say the words of the services effectively" (293)

JA responds to this problem: "we can read the JA as Smart's preparation for, and self-maintenance outside religious service. During his years in the asylum such preparation and self-maintenance might have gone on for some time, since there is no record of there being a chapel in the asylum" (293)

how to read the hierarchy of animals

The Anglican priest in his church, Stukeley, listed in his commonplace book a hierarchy of creatures from animate to inanimate much like the one found in JA: man, 4-footed beasts, snakes, sensitive plants, fish, birds, insects, fire, air, water, metals, stones. His congregation, and all Anglican ones performed the canticles as antiphonal (call/response) songs similar to the antiphonal style of the psalms in Hebrew.

further

· Mounsey offers strong line-by-line close readings of exactly the same first 6 lines we did in class.

· He ends with an arcane and fascinating reading of the cat section as a reply to Isaac Newton's claim, published only posthumously in 1754, that Jesus was not divine (the Arian heresy)