Where’s the Poker?
The poker lost, poor Susan storm’d,
And all the rites of rage perform’d;
As scolding, crying, swearing, sweating,
Abusing, fidgetting, and fretting.
“Nothing but villany, and thieving;
Good heavens! what a world we live in!
If I don’t find it in the morning,
I’ll surely give my master warning.
He’d better far shut up his doors,
Than keep such good for nothing whores;
For wheresoe’er their trade they drive,
We vartuous bodies cannot thrive.”
Well may poor Susan grunt and groan;
Misfortunes never come alone,
But tread each other’s heels in throngs,
For the next day she lost the tongs;
The salt box, cullender, and pot
Soon shar’d the same untimely lot.
In vain she vails and wages spent
On new ones – for the new ones went.
There’d been (she swore) some dev’l or witch in,
To rob or plunder all the kitchen.
One night she to her chamber crept
(Where for a month she had not slept;
Her master being, to her seeming,
A better play fellow than dreaming).
Curse on the author of these wrongs,
In her own bed she found the tongs,
(Hang Thomas for an idle joker!)
And there (good lack!) she found the poker,
With the salt box, pepper box, and kettle,
With all the culinary metal. –
Be warn’d, ye fair, by Susan’s crosses:
Keep chaste and guard yourselves from losses;
For if young girls delight in kissing,
No wonder, that the poker’s missing.
CHRISTOPHER SMART
Note: Vails – profits
****
“We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,” Wordsworth wrote, alluding to Thomas Chatterton. Those lines strike me as painfully applicable, also, to Christopher Smart, another “marvellous boy” who ended badly. That said, compared with Chatterton, dead at 17 with so much of his promise unfulfilled, Smart had his glorious years. He also managed to sustain his poetic development, though not his fortunes, to the end. He died aged 49 in 1771, the year after Chatterton’s suicide.
Smart’s psalm-like eulogy to his cat Jeoffry is known to the most casual anthology-dipper, but his achievement turns out to be complex and varied. The earlier poetry, like this week’s Fable, is rooted in his classicism. The final work of his career, both the Jubilate Agno and A Song to David, look forward to Blake and Romanticism.
Smart’s fate, like Chatterton’s, was shaped by newly harsh commercial circumstance. Ross King writes of Smart in the Glasgow Review that “by the time he abandoned his career at Cambridge and arrived in London in 1744, the old paternalistic set of relations between author and benefactor had ended and the age of the bookseller had begun”. The brilliant, dissipated young poet and wit-about-town who would be incarcerated for religious mania, (see Johnson’s delicate and kindly observations) and die penniless in debtors’ prison, fought valiantly to earn his literary living in Grub Street. He served the fickle and pugnacious muse of commercial success with versatility and sparkle.
The 18 Fables, the fourth of which is Where’s the Poker?, are the product of a mixed marriage of classicism and populism. They were written around the time Smart was translating Phaedrus, the first-century Roman poet who rendered Aesop into Latin. Many were first published in the Midwife or the Old Woman’s Magazine, a successful publication that was largely Smart’s work, and in which he adopted the persona of Mrs Mary Midnight, a midwife. As described in King’s essay, Smart also played Mrs Midnight on the London stage, and was considered to be better at portraying a woman than David Garrick.
Smart’s fables are in octosyllabic couplets, a metre once favoured by Chaucer’s friend John Gower and used by Samuel Butler for the mock-heroic Hudibras. Smart’s fables, often concerned with deflating grandiose illusions, also participate in the mock-heroic. Modest characters or objects (the rag, the pipe, the scrubbing brush) are awarded the last word in argument with those considering themselves superior, while the humble beings are also gently mocked by their own eloquence.
Where’s the Poker? typically plunges straight into the action, with the servant, Susan, in a whirl of emotion about the household objects she has mislaid. Attributing the losses to theft, she performs “all the rites of rage” – a term in itself a mock-heroic subversion of the concept of ritual. Her voice is a familiar fount of ill-directed blame: “Nothing but villany, and thieving; / Good heavens! what a world we live in!” The further disappearance of the household objects, even when replaced, outrage and perplex her sense of herself as a “vartuous body” grievously wronged. It’s only because she decides one night to sleep “in her own bed” that she finds the missing objects, deposited there by “idle joker” Thomas, presumably a fellow servant.
Susan, it transpires, has been sleeping with her master for the last month. Yet the “moral” Smart draws does not seem seriously concerned about feminine promiscuity: “Be warn’d, ye fair, by Susan’s crosses: / Keep chaste and guard yourselves from losses; / For if young girls delight in kissing, / No wonder that the poker’s missing.” It seems in fact as if he might be laughing at the whole notion of moral-drawing, despite the passing recommendation of chastity. “No wonder, that the poker’s missing” is a joyfully silly and comic anticlimax, though readers today might read the image as additionally symbolic. If the rise of the female writer is part of an emasculating crisis for Smart’s age, as King argues, a missing poker could encode some more serious loss of fire-power.
Where’s the Poker? was recommended by Sheenagh Pugh. All Smart’s Fables are delightfully readable, down-to-earth and lightly balanced between the genial and the barbed.