John Lee Clark

JONATHAN SWIFT'S DEAF POEMS

I first learned about Jonathan Swift's deafness from a Deaf Irishwoman with whom I was staying during my senior year in high school. She was explaining her Meniere's disease, which she proudly said that Swift had too. It involves dizziness and is often accompanied by varying degrees of deafness. Swift was quite deaf, definitely in one ear, by the time he wrote Gulliver's Travels, which may be one reason it contains some of the best, funniest descriptions of body language ever written. But I was barely aware of his poetry. Despite my deep interest in everything related to deaf poetry, I never got around to looking into it until recently. I'm glad I did, because there are three poems of his worthy of our attention.

Reviewing his Complete Poetical Works, I quickly understood why Swift's verse hadn't presented itself to me earlier. For the most part, it's awful. It is his prose we want. His poetry did have its readers during his lifetime, and a few high-tolerance readers continued to dip into it after his death, but with ever-decreasing frequency. Now? Well. If you need a dare you can taunt someone with, in the gleeful knowledge that it cannot be done, you may go with this: "My house, two cars, and my entire IRA savings if you can read the Complete Poetical Works of Jonathan Swift, Volumes I and II, without your brains melting."

However, I was able to transverse reasonable stretches of his thudding verses and to utilize search features to cut to points of interest. One thing I was wondering was how often he used the word "silence." I've been tracing the connection between silence and deafness or deaf people in British poetry, which was well-established by the time the Romantic poets came along. Keats and Wordsworth more than anyone else dwelled on capital-S Silence, and their references to it are clearly examples of what Christopher Krentz calls "deaf presence." That is to say, even if Keats and Wordsworth weren't thinking of deafness or deaf people at all, they drew on loaded meanings that—for better or, more often, for worse, —represented and influenced how society at large misunderstood deafness. I say misunderstood, because being deaf has nothing to do with that kind of silence. For hearing people during the Romantic age, silence was a blissful relief from "all that racket," but it almost always turns sinister if it goes on for too long, and it becomes oppressive and conjures up Death.

But Swift came from an earlier period, and to further distance him from the Romantics, he was a satirist. Even so, I wanted to know if, in writing about his deafness, he saw silence as an appropriate term. The text indicates that, no, he did not. What he did use quite often, simply by being a writer writing in the English language, was "silent." The roll of "silent years," gazing "in silent wonder," turning to the "silent shades," bailiffs taking "their silent stands," and my favorite, "With silent scorn Vanessa sat." What intrigues me is that most of these references were made in his earlier poems before 1724, the point after which he began mentioning his increasing deafness.

After that, "silent" hardly made an appearance, but the word "silence" did, a few times. Yet none of these words were used in connection to his deafness. In his 1728 poem "In a Letter to a Person of Quality," for example, there is even "the God of Silence," but here it refers to composure, which flies away along with "fair Discretion" and "modesty with blushing face" when "overweening Pride" intrudes. Post-1724, Swift wrote multiple poems in which his deafness figures, but the language is never romantic. Instead, he had great fun with deafness as a subject, using it to poke fun at others and himself. He was so liberal in this that he did something I believe is unique. In "Written at the Castle of Dublin" (1699), penned long before he thought of himself as deaf, people are bad-mouthing Swift:

With these is Parson Swift,
Not knowing how to spend his time,
Does make a wretched shift,
To deafen them with puns and rhyme.

Here, Swift is a puns-and-rhymes machine that drives everyone "deaf." After becoming deaf, though, he would recycle this joke, such as complaining in a poem that as a curate, among many other duties, he has to preach "three congregations deaf." It's possible that this is an example of his gift for self-awareness and self-deprecation in that, here, he admits to being the classical type of non-culturally deaf person who rattles on because he can't follow what others may want to say.

His "deaf" poems deal with deafness primarily in the context of sounds, especially undesirable sounds from which he is now free. The first poem presented below, "The Dean's Complaint, Translated and Answered" (1734), is an example of this simple but fun mode. The second poem presented here, "Sent by Dr. Delany to Dr. Swift," is far more complex and enters deeper into social matters. In it, he locates deafness within the discourse on ailments. This is the theater of the body, where, according to Deaf cultural perspectives, deafness doesn't belong. There are many reasons for Swift's placement of deafness on the axis of the body, including the time period and lack of Deaf cultural discourse at that time, but it's worth noting that he experienced physical pain in addition to his bouts of dizziness. One of the more famous images of him in the annals of literary gossip has his left eye swelling to twice its size and his friends fighting to keep him from clawing it out. And there is his close friendship with Alexander Pope, whose very short and hunchbacked figure surely inspired reflection on the body.

The third and last poem here is a remarkable one for the purpose of both Deaf and disability literary studies. "Dr. Swift to Mr. Pope" finds the two writers staying together but unable to converse well with each other. So Swift read and doodled while Pope worked on "The Dunciad." Swift's main joke is that he should get half the credit for the great poem because, had he been fit for conversation, Pope wouldn't have had a moment to write. In highlighting the communication divide, however, Swift doesn't just point to his ears, he also points to Pope's weak voice. (As a boy of three, Pope had a near-fatal encounter with an enraged cow that tore into his throat.) This is interesting because, later on in deaf history, deaf people and their deafness would be blamed for any failure to communicate. Either they had to speak or lipread or they were cast aside. Deaf advocates would protest against this and insist, as did Albert Ballin in his 1933 polemic The Deaf Mute Howls, that hearing people should learn sign language and share the responsibility of including Deaf people into society. Of course, Swift wasn't thinking anywhere near these lines, but implicit in his pointing to both himself and Pope is that the solution would come from both of them also. Fortunately for Swift and Pope, their friendship—like many relationships in eighteenth century Europe—was conducted primarily by correspondence.

"Dr. Swift to Mr. Pope" is not the first poem written by a disabled poet addressed to another. Two centuries earlier, Pierre Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay, two deaf French "vernacular" poets, had written poems to each other. But "Dr. Swift and Mr. Pope" may be the first poem addressed to someone with a different disability, which I think is an important distinction because of what came later in disability poetry and elsewhere in the disability communities. In 1835, for instance, John R. Burnet published a poem called "An Address of the Deaf and Dumb to the Blind" that debated which group should pity the other. Other disabled poets wrote about other disabilities or conditions of life, framing them as worse than their own. This was a way for the poets to try and position themselves on the same side with abled people, where they could nudge them and say, "Isn't that awful? Aren't we lucky that we aren't ______?" The blank would be filled with a social category that the poet and her ideal readers didn't belong to. A blind poet isn't deaf, an invalid poet isn't a woman, a crippled poet at least ins't black. Such obsessing over where one stands in relation to white male ableed hearing supremacy is in stark contrast to what we find in "Dr. Swift to Mr. Pope," where the only suggestion of rank-fixing is in Swift's oblique complimenting of Pope as the better poet of the two.

THE DEAN'S COMPLAINT, TRANSLATED AND ANSWERED

DOCTOR. Deaf, giddy, helpless, left alone.
ANSWER. Except the first, the fault's your own.
DOCTOR. To all my friends a burden grown.
ANSWER. Because to few you will be shewn.
          Give them good wine, and meat to stuff,
          You may have company enough.
DOCTOR. No more I hear my church's bell,
          Than if it rang out for my knell.
ANSWER. Then write and read, 'twill do as well.
DOCTOR. At thunder now no more I start,
          Than at the rumbling of a cart.
ANSWER. Think then of thunder when you f--t.
DOCTOR. Nay, what's incredible, alack!
          No more I hear a woman's clack.
ANSWER. A woman's clack, if I have skill,
          Sounds somewhat like a throwster's mill;
          But louder than a bell, or thunder:
          That does, I own, increase my wonder.

SENT BY DR. DELANY TO DR. SWIFT,
IN ORDER TO BE ADMITTED TO SPEAK TO HIM WHEN HE WAS DEAF

Dear Sir, I think, 'tis doubly hard,
Your ears and doors should both be barr'd.
Can anything be more unkind?
Must I not see, 'cause you are blind?
Methinks a friend at night should cheer you,--
A friend that loves to see and hear you.
Why am I robb'd of that delight,
When you can be no loser by't
Nay, when 'tis plain (for what is plainer?)
That if you heard you'd be no gainer?
For sure you are not yet to learn,
That hearing is not your concern.
Then be your doors no longer barr'd:
Your business, sir, is to be heard.

THE ANSWER The wise pretend to make it clear,
'Tis no great loss to lose an ear.
Why are we then so fond of two,
When by experience one would do?
   'Tis true, say they, cut off the head,
And there's an end; the man is dead;
Because, among all human race,
None e'er was known to have a brace:
But confidently they maintain,
That where we find the members twain,
The loss of one is no such trouble,
Since t'other will in strength be double.
The limb surviving, you may swear,
Becomes his brother's lawful heir:
Thus, for a trial, let me beg of
Your reverence but to cut one leg off,
And you shall find, by this device,
The other will be stronger twice;
For every day you shall be gaining
New vigour to the leg remaining.
So, when an eye has lost its brother,
You see the better with the other,
Cut off your hand, and you may do
With t'other hand the work of two:
Because the soul her power contracts,
And on the brother limb reacts.
   But yet the point is not so clear in
Another case, the sense of hearing:
For, though the place of either ear
Be distant, as one head can bear,
Yet Galen most acutely shows you,
(Consult his book _de partium usu_)
That from each ear, as he observes,
There creep two auditory nerves,
Not to be seen without a glass,
Which near the _os petrosum_ pass;
Thence to the neck; and moving thorough there,
One goes to this, and one to t'other ear;
Which made my grandam always stuff her ears
Both right and left, as fellow-sufferers.
You see my learning; but, to shorten it,
When my left ear was deaf a fortnight,
To t'other ear I felt it coming on:
And thus I solve this hard phenomenon.

'Tis true, a glass will bring supplies
To weak, or old, or clouded eyes:
Your arms, though both your eyes were lost,
Would guard your nose against a post:
Without your legs, two legs of wood
Are stronger, and almost as good:
And as for hands, there have been those
Who, wanting both, have used their toes.
But no contrivance yet appears
To furnish artificial ears.

DR. SWIFT TO MR. POPE, WHILE HE WAS WRITING THE "DUNCIAD"

Pope has the talent well to speak,
   But not to reach the ear;
His loudest voice is low and weak,
   The Dean too deaf to hear.

Awhile they on each other look,
   Then different studies choose;
The Dean sits plodding on a book;
   Pope walks, and courts the Muse.

Now backs of letters, though design'd
   For those who more will need 'em,
Are fill'd with hints, and interlined,
   Himself can hardly read 'em.

Each atom by some other struck,
   All turns and motions tries;
Till in a lump together stuck,
Behold a poem rise:

Yet to the Dean his share allot;
   He claims it by a canon;
That without which a thing is not,
   Is _causa sine quâ non_.

Thus, Pope, in vain you boast your wit;
   For, had our deaf divine
Been for your conversation fit,
   You had not writ a line.

Of Sherlock, thus, for preaching framed
   The sexton reason'd well;
And justly half the merit claim'd,
   Because he rang the bell.

 

John Lee Clark edited the anthologies Deaf American Poetry and Deaf Lit Extravaganza. A collection of his essays is coming out in the fall from Handtype Press.