Energy and Order in the Poetry of Swift by A.B. England (review)

HUMANITIES 419 It is only honest to admit to unease about my response. Disliking the last three books one has reviewed gives rise to qualms. This one is different from the others. So many books give the impression that graduate school has failed to compensate for deficiencies in earlier education and native wit. Asals's book suggests, rather, that high intelligence and sound learning have been confounded by the solemnities and extravagances of higher education: the heady over-ingenuity of the gladuate seminar; the need to have a thesis, to hammer it home, to wear one's learned sock with a difference. Perhaps it is fairest to offer a specimen and let the reader judge. In the place, Magdalene, which is the commonplace of the Church, words are grouped together and brought together in an equivocacy which is absolute and ablative. 'Mother' - 'dearest Mother ... / The mean, thy praise and glorie is' - is 'Church: 'Magdalene Herbert: 'Marie Magdalene: attached side by side (without connecting syntax), in one. Sin-tears-wash-feet, emblems of the original Mary Magdalene, are given one place together with the Church and its idiom of one-both and with the lexical set of particular concern to George Herbert: language-dress-Mother. All this is one word, 'Mother' - poetry, Church, equivocacy, sacramentality - condensed locatively, by virtue of the commonplace and its implied apposition: ablative equivocacy has no firmer basis than that of a 'place' shared in a word ('Mother' - Magdalene, Church; 'steps' - feet, street), and it is a fairly characteristic mark of the poetry of George Herbert. (P 101) The reader who finds that enlivening and enlightening as well as 'almost mathematical' and 'a mixed genre of theology-criticism' (p 111) will perhaps be prepared to overlook those occasions when Herbert's meanings are wrenched to fit Asals's thesis (ALAN RUDRUM) A.B. England. Energy and Order in the Poetry of Swift Bucknell University Press I Associated University Presses 1980. 241. $18.50 A.B. England's reading of Swift's poetry is the fourth book in as many years on this aspect of the dean's literary career. And the Associated University Presses (Delaware this time) have justbroughtout yet another, a collection of essays, some by the authors of the book-length studies, one by England himself. The dust jackets of the collection and of England's own book have the same portraitofSwift, in the same place, with the same grey background, nearly the same contrasting colour in the stripe, and a similar typeface. The sense of an industry is hard to avoid. England acknowledges at the outset his debt to c.J. Rawson for 'the criticism he has published during recent years.' This criticism has often 420 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 brought fresh air into stuffy Augustan places, although Rawson, in his writing about Swift, does so by insisting on some of those elements of the mind and art that many contemporary critics have tried to banish into nineteenth-century shades. Rawson thinks, for example, that the alarming exuberance of the Tale ought to be heard as the author's, not as the discontinuity of the Hack. Currently interested in the literature of violence, in itself and as it can illuminate the eighteenth century, Rawson is thus not constrained to seek out form and norm; indeed he finds part of the excitementin the energiesgenerated by distressed rhetoric and image. The titles of four of England's five chapters, '''Wild Excursions",' 'The Subversive Image,' 'Enumerations, MisceJlanies, and the Irreducible Particular,' and 'The Design under Stress' (the last perhaps meant to echo the subtitle of Rawson's book on Fielding) suggest his sense of what he caJls in one place a certain 'radical unruliness' in Swift's work. Even in the penultimate chapter, 'The Ordering Design,' we hear ofdramatizations of scenes that ask for a 'fuJI rendering of the chaotic multiplicity of detail.' While SteJla may make it possible for Swift to 'make it seem that the structural harmony of the poemin a sense derives from the harmony ofher nature,' this poem and a few others like it look to be exceptions to the overaJl rule. (For me, at least, they are less interesting than the unrulies...