People who love both cats and poetry are almost certainly familiar with Christopher Smart’s lines beginning “For I will consider my cat Jeoffry“, much favoured by anthologists. How many, though, have gone on to read the (much, much longer) work from which they are excerpted, Jubilate Agno, one of the most extraordinary poems in the English language?
Smart wrote Jubilate Agno between 1758 and 1763 while confined in Mr Potter’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green. He was sent there due to a mania for praying in public, and his tendency to accost passers-by and insist they kneel and join him. The poem remained unknown and unpublished until an edition of 1939 entitled Rejoice In The Lamb : A Song From Bedlam, followed in 1954 by W H Bond’s revision, which gave order to the surviving manuscript. Jubilate Agno was never completed, and what Smart left us were four fragments.
The poem consists of over 1,200 lines, each beginning with the words “Let” or “For”. For example, Fragment A is all “Let”s, whereas in Fragment B the “Let”s and “For”s are paired, which may have been the intention for the entire work, modelled on antiphonal Hebrew poetry. It is, essentially, a “vast hymn of praise” to God and all his works. References and allusions abound to Biblical (especially Old Testament) figures, plants and animals, gems, contemporary politics and science, the poet’s family and friends, even obituary lists in current periodicals. The language is full of puns, archaisms, coinages, and unfamiliar usages. Dr Johnson, who was a friend of Smart’s, famously said “Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last”. Jubilate Agno is, if anything, “odder” than Sterne’s novel, and perhaps we are readier to appreciate it in the twenty-first century than when it was written.
The most recent edition is in Smart’s Selected Poems edited by Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh (Penguin Classics 1990), and the text is also available online.
Three years ago, it was suggested that I should do a special Christmas edition of my radio show on ResonanceFM. It took me about thirty seconds to decide that what the world needed was a recitation of Jubilate Agno in its entirety. One of the many wonderful things about ResonanceFM is how painless this was. I emailed Ed Baxter, the station’s programming director, with my proposal. Back came a three-word reply: “Make it so”. No meetings, listener focus groups, or any such blather. (Somehow I suspect it would take months to get passed – if at all – by the BBC.) I asked the wordsmith Germander Speedwell to share reading duties, and we recorded and broadcast Christopher Smart’s magnificent poem, as far as I know for the first time. And thanks to the magic of the internet, you can listen to it – all three hours – at your pleasure. Personally I recommend listening to the whole thing at least once a day, every day, forever and ever, Amen.
…so what do you think he was up to with all his Miss Midnight mularkey? Simple character play, or the manifestation of psychological over-compensation for being cuckolded?
three hours?! words fail. tested to destruction.
Let Pet Planet do wish-lists, and I’ll bless them with this poem.
I have to admit it’s funnier than the Dead Parrot Sketch.
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