This week's poem reminds me of why I did not pursue graduate studies in English. It is the sort of thing Ph.D. candidates have to thresh and winnow for dissertation fodder. They do this because all the really interesting poetry and literature have already been exhaustively combed through, and it is difficult to find anything new to say about those works. So they turn to vastly lesser lights like Christopher Smart, whose Jubilate Agno makes tedious, wade-through passages in other works (e.g., the Iliad's catalog of ships) seem positively engrossing.

The poetry in this work, if we can call it that, is about in the same proportion as gold is to a riverbed. By dint of tremendous effort it can be mined, but at some point a calculation has to be made about whether the enterprise will yield enough of the precious metal to be profitable. In my opinion, the pith of Jubilate Agno could be rendered in five or seven lines and leave the reader with enough breath for a sigh or an exclamation, some kind of reaction. But when I finished reading this passage I had no energy left even for that. I just felt my wits had been dulled by repetition, each line dragging whatever edge they had over a new stone, line by line, until the end. It's what I hated about litanies when I had to sit through them as a child at Catholic mass, and it is what I hate about them now.

Only my sense of irony got sharpened, as each line grows more ponderous than the last and, instead of engendering elation at the cumulative appreciation of the numinous, succeeds only in bringing the divine down to knee-level. There is no pace, no energy, no climax: nothing but repetition. When Smart should be getting to the short strokes, he gets longer, duller, and less immediate, pumping out great puffy clouds of fustian:

"Let Barak praise with the Pard -- and great is the might of the faithful and great is the Lord in the nail of Jael and in the sword of the Son of Abinoam"

This poem will be warmly received here, no doubt, and all the faithful will trot out their favorite poems about cats because they like their cats and may feel therefore that poems about cats are above criticism, or below it, or in some relation to it through which reason and taste may not be thought to apply, but I for one think this is drivel and doggerel — er, catterel. Whatever.

Well Robusto, I feel sure I won't convince you about the "great puffy clouds of fustian" you perceive in Smart's lines-- but I'll try to explain a couple of elements that make me disagree, using the line you quote.

First, I hear a generous comedy: the large terms and big gestures that you dislike, and that make you feel like a child pent up in church, are contrasted with beavers, prank, mice, all sorts of ordinary and not conventionally sacred materials. Smart means what he says, but he also likes grinning mischievously at the ordinary liturgical ways of saying it. The pard (a leopard, I take it) and the nail remind us that the Bible itself is not all decorum and dignity and priestly vestments.

Second, meaning. Smart is quite interested in violence and again refreshes Biblical material, the tremendous violence of Biblical narrative.He joins somewhat disparate elements-- the animal and the human, the military sword and the domestic nail (usually it's translated "tent-peg," I think)-- in a way that, as I hear it, tears away conventional orders of thing.

The proper names in this passage, and in the poem generally, seem to me much less straightforwardly heroic than the ship-names in the Odyssey. (Or the genealogies in the Bible.) There's an aware or self-aware absurdity in them, along with the absolute conviction that drives them.

Something like this comedy/conviction quality is what I take Allen Ginsberg to mean in the passage I quote in the thread started by David Gewanter. "Putting two words together that are unusual" says Ginsberg about Smart, Whitman, his own writing. That clashing or dissonant quality makes Smart's litany quite different from the Catholic service you recall, or from the Homeric catalogue of ships, I think.

Well as I have said, I don't expect to convert you to an enthusiast for Smart -- just want to respond, and make you feel welcome to the conversation. "Great puffy clouds of fustian"-- pretty good.

Thank you for your genial reply, and for welcoming me to the conversation despite my antipathy toward a poem you find worthy of serious discussion.

I infer from some of the things you say — "Smart means what he says, but he also likes grinning mischievously at the ordinary liturgical ways of saying it," etc. — that this poem may be some kind of lampoon, but you never really call it satire. I have two things to say about that: One is that satire is essentially one-sided, and its ultimate point-of-view is discoverable; it is like a trick mirror which, viewed from different angles, reveals entirely different images. But it does not reveal them both at the same time, and it ultimately decides for itself (as the viewer/reader must) which view represents reality.

The second is an objection to the poem's use of hoary Biblical references as stand-ins for real creativity. Only the most avid readers of the Bible (which Smart's contemporaries no doubt were) would be nudged in the pleasure-zones by allusions to their comprehensive knowledge of The Book of Judges, but the rest of us can only blink and yawn. Even the best of the Biblical thunderers — Milton comes to mind — can't really make this sort of thing eternal, at least not in the way Shakespeare does for the canonical stories he turned under his pen.

Anyway, I appreciate that you do take this poem seriously, and I read it in that spirit. I remain unmoved, but I hasten to add that this is an unusual response to the poems you have chosen to illuminate for us. Thanks.

rob, I for one am not going to trot out any cat poems because this week's poem is not a cat poem, but a religious poem. And I love Smart's exuberant catalogs as much as I do Whitman's. Both almost convince me that I am indeed divine in my humanness, just as Jeoffrey is divine in his catness.

I also love Smart's wordplay, his mock-seriousnes, his outrageous jumps in logics, his combination of facts and myths and outright fabrications, his (yes!) whimsy.

I just finished re-reading Edward Hirsch's wonderful essay on this poem in his How to Read a Poem. He concludes his essay with W G Auden's statement in "Making, Knowing, and Judging" --

Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct -- it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.

I'm a great admirer of the poem, and I'd add one reflection to the arguments others have made about it, or on behalf of it. Both Smart's poem and Whitman's catalogues look on the page as if they'd be simple to imitate. In fact they're not, and from time to time I have a student who proposes doing an imitation of one or the other, and almost all the time the imitation doesn't work; the balance is off, the diction is off, the rhythm is off, the scale is off etc. "Great clouds of fustian" are, I think, relatively easy to produce; for me, the fact that Smart is so hard to simulate indicates something about the imaginative discipline he's working with.

Thank you for the reply, Lawrence, but your comment on its difficulty puts me in mind of Johnson's reply when told that the passage a violinist had been butchering had been very difficult: "Difficult?" he said. 'I wish it were impossible."

Well, MaryAnn, yes it most definitely is a cat poem. A poem that purports to be about a cat (a named cat, no less), is described by scholars as having a cat as the subject, and which discuss some aspect of catness in each and every line, is by definition a cat poem. Whatever else it may be about, it is at least about that.

Now, you make the case that this is a religious poem, and that this aspect is what you really like about it. I have to ask: do you really like the tired bombast of biblical references? Does this poem really move you closer to the divine in a way that a poem that was only about a cat would be capable of doing? I can conceive of a poem about a cat that was not only good but vital. And it so happens that I am in a particular mood to be swayed by a really, really good poem about a cat at this particular point in my life. Our own cat, Raven, was just diagnosed with lymphoma and is not expceted to last more than a month. Needless to say, I am very sad about this, and my wife is devastated. I would like nothing more than to be able to bring her a cat poem that is a joy and a comfort. To me, this poem is neither. If it can be said to "praise all it can," then what it is capable of is very slight. And I certainly don't read the religious connotation of "praise" into what Auden said.

At first read I thought this poem playful and frivolous... but I find a richness on a deeper read. There are references to eastern religions, and a sacrosanct equation of the cat with the Christian divine: "For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying." I think of this as a sabbath day. There are other passages that reference the bible (10 cat commandments), the cat as a divine being, but also the cat as demonic. If I think of a mystic in a nut house, his writing a poem about the "oneness" of things separated as good & evil makes sense.

As for the simple pleasure of the sounds of the poem, I like the way he has the reader hiss like a cat:
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.

Robusto, I've been thinking about your sentences in response to me:

I infer from some of the things you say — "Smart means what he says, but he also likes grinning mischievously at the ordinary liturgical ways of saying it," etc. — that this poem may be some kind of lampoon, but you never really call it satire. I have two things to say about that: One is that satire is essentially one-sided, and its ultimate point-of-view is discoverable; it is like a trick mirror which, viewed from different angles, reveals entirely different images. But it does not reveal them both at the same time, and it ultimately decides for itself (as the viewer/reader must) which view represents reality.

For me, the categories "lampoon" and "satire" don't apply to this kind of comedy, which is more self-directed than satirical and more awestruck than lampooning. Hard to describe, but Smart's laughter has a cosmic or global quality, to my ear. The level of spiritual truth is so large, yet so pervasive in ordinary little things, that considering it, and trying to give him an account of it, makes him laugh. I think the Biblical names make him laugh, and Jeoffry's capers also make him laugh. And fill him with awe.

Robusto, You need to spend some serious time with a cat! Then you'd understand the exalted delight Smart feels--and passes on to his cat-obsessed readers. Really, living with cats--if they're as wondrous as MY cats, anyway--is constantly wanting to extol their gloriousness and yet you know how foolish it would sound.

This very morning, for example, Rosamunde, after marching up and down the bed several times (as she always does in preparation), had plopped herself down beside my head for a belly rub, and when I couldn't sufficiently rouse myself to do anything but put my hand there (NOT a legitimate rub), she looked at me patiently, the way, you know, maybe a parent would do with a stubborn child, and then readjusted her belly so that her meaning was clear.

Cats in their animal habits are very serious about the things they do, and one constantly wants to find a human analogy for that seriousness, which in itself is a comic habit. Smart captures both that comedy and the glorious source of it. I love this poem.

Robusto, You need to spend some serious time with a cat!

But ascherr, as Rob said earlier in this thread --

And it so happens that I am in a particular mood to be swayed by a really, really good poem about a cat at this particular point in my life. Our own cat, Raven, was just diagnosed with lymphoma and is not expected to last more than a month. Needless to say, I am very sad about this, and my wife is devastated. I would like nothing more than to be able to bring her a cat poem that is a joy and a comfort. To me, this poem is neither.

ooops.Missed that part.

Well, maybe that's why this poem doesn't appeal to him: it's about a happy, healthy cat, to be exulted in. Not one to be mourned.

My sympathies.

Maybe, robusto, you need to write your own poem for your cat, for your particular cat. I did that--an essay, not a poem--for my cat of 17 years, who died last year, and it made me feel a little bit less terrible. ~apollinaire

For the sake of variety, another dissent:

The audacity of Smart's poem was more recognizable when it was written, I imagine. Today it seems to represent a gauzy idea of spirituality fairly commonplace: the spirituality of someone who does not believe in anything in particular. With a cat's life as an example of how to live, can it address the classic difficulties we identify as peculiarly human? Yes, I know--that is the audacious part. We humans take our differences from cats too seriously. There is a yearning in Smart's poem, comparable to Keat's yearning in Nightingale--to be like Jeoffrey, to serve God as Jeoffrey does--but Keats, unlike Smart, grows up before the end of his poem. Or does this audience merely find poignance--that sincerity--in the energy and irony of the false comparison? I can see that. Can it be there is still pleasure in poking fun at the liturgy of a church assailed from all sides? Even now, compared to the church, the comforts of comedy are pretty thin, our sense of humor mostly limited to the foolishness of other people. If we must make fun of ourselves, I would offer another familiar poem, Jonson's To Heaven, which is at once devout, introspective, comic, and full of dread.

Mark, good to have you chiming in.

I get your general idea: the mystical/reportorial assertions of Smart appeal to you much less than the Jonson's firm, beautifully thought-through moral examination of his own torments. Dread and introspection in Jonson's great poem, a frenzy of outward attention in this one.

But I think"gauzy" and "does not believe anything in particular" are unconvincing descriptions of Smart's lines. He pretty clearly believes in certain principles of celebration and observation, and far from "gauzy" the texure of both language and attention are dense, energetic-- in my view, more strobe-like than filmy. And I don't think the point is yearning to be like Jeoffry but to praise him, as a significant reality :each creature a portal into the mystical nature of creation. The cat, the mouse, the beavers, are a supplement to, or critique of, conventional liturgy. Smart is stringent and obsessed, not a mere New Age gauze-meister!

I am really on the fence about this one, Robert, but the distinctions you make, as they always have, definitely sway me to the other side, if I haven't quite fallen off. Somehow babies and cats fall into a similar category as objects of awe for me, to which I feel an innate resistance. And yet the poem of praise is such an important and rigorous task for an artist, I think--my skepticism rises along with my longing to be convinced.

Anyway, thank you for the gracious response.