The Day of Judgement

With a whirl of thought oppressed,
I sink from reverie to rest.
An horrid vision seized my head,
I saw the graves give up their dead.
Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
And thunder roars, and light’ning flies.
Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
The world stands trembling at his throne.
While each pale sinner hangs his head,
Jove, nodding, shook the heavens and said,
‘Offending race of human kind,
By nature, reason, learning blind;
You who through frailty stepped aside,
And you who never fell, through pride;
You who in different sects have shammed,
And come to see each other damned;
(So some folks told you, but they knew
No more of Jove’s demands than you);
The world’s mad business now is o’er,
And I resent these pranks no more.
I to such blockheads set my wit!
I damn such fools — Go, go, you’re bit!

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is known and loved for prose satires such as A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels – though “prose” can seem a dull term for the Anglo-Irishman’s virtuosity, his sinewy flights of imagination and constantly re-charged dazzle of intellectual energy. If there’s poetry in his prose, the claim works the other way: Swift’s poems are unusually alive because of an undertow of realism more often associated with prose. Introducing Swift’s poems for the Poetry Foundation, the anonymous critic comments on their generally “spare” nature and lack of “technical density” but adds: “One could argue as well that Swift makes up in power what he lacks in density: that the strength of the impression created by his directness gives an impetus to prolonged meditation of a very high quality. On these grounds, valuing Swift for what he really is and does, one must judge him a major figure in poetry as well as prose.” Swift, for me, packs a complicated, sharply responsive self into his poetry and in that, although he frequently took the side of the classical ancientsagainst contemporary critical argument, he becomes a pioneer modern: persona and living person are fundamentally in touch.

The Day of Judgement begins in the guise of personal narrative, perhaps drawing on the dream-vision tradition, but quickly moving into nightmare as the speaker gives up the “whirl” of thoughts that oppresses him and falls asleep. Instantly, the reader is plunged in the “horrid scene” of Judgement Day. Swift would of course have been familiar with the various biblical depictions of this scene: sample Revelation, Chapter 20, for the general idea.

Jove, AKA Jupiter, was the chief of the Roman gods and, by good fortune for the future Dean of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, the name is associated with the Hebrew word for God when transliterated as “Jehovah”. His “terrors” are briefly but effectively unleashed with verbs that intimate the battlefield (thunder “roars”, light’ning “flies”). Swift has an enjoyably rebellious way with verb-tense in these earlier couplets. Having switched from the present to the past tense, he sustains the past for five lines, then, for the sake of immediacy, switches to the present: “Amazed, confused, its fate unknown, / The world stands trembling at his throne.” The vastness suggested by “the world” brings the overwhelming massiveness of Jove’s throne almost into our sightline. But some finer detail is picked out, too, in the subsequent contrast between the “pale sinner” who “hangs his head”, and Jove who “shook the heavens” merely by “nodding” his.

Jove is the speaker now until the end of the poem. His depiction of humankind suggests one of those moments when Swift surprises himself by agreeing with Thomas Hobbes, who, in Leviathan, saw man as a species of brute, and the social artefact produced by the drive for survival, monstrous. Swift, though, improves on the fiercely Hobbesian range of sinners, “by nature, reason, learning blind”, with figures from his own ethical principles, discerning culpability among the seemingly innocent: “You who through frailty stepped aside, / And you who never fell, through pride …”)

After this, Jove seems to lose his temper. Couplets eight and nine might almost be read as a brief note on the anti-Dissenter discourse in A Tale of a Tub. With no loss of power, his diction getting earthier as his temper rises, Jove adds to the list of the eternally punished, “You who in different sects have shammed / And come to see each other damned; / (So some folks told you, but they knew / No more of Jove’s demands than you.)”

In the final couplet, Jove’s thunder and lightning have a Swiftian flavour but no less daunting effect: “I to such blockheads set my wit! / I damn such fools — Go, go, you’re bit!” The sinners, sinning above all through folly, are done with. They’ve been hit as well as “bit”, they bite the dust. It’s a fine, flashing way to end the poem. Swift, the great thunderer and lightning-whirler of language, has the last immortal, comic-angry word: “you’re bit!”