Today’s Poem: My Cat Jeoffry
The mysticism of small things
Jubilate Agno (an extract)
by Christopher Smart
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East
he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round
with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is
the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing
he begins to consider himself. . . .
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness
by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent,
which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed,
neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing
is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats
at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe. . . .
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called
by benevolence perpetually — Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry!
the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body
to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity
what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends
from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth
are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.═══════════════════════
As James Boswell (1740–1795) records, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) once remarked to him, “My poor friend Smart shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street” — later adding, to Charles Burney (1726–1814), that “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”
That line, “I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else,” has stuck with me since I first encountered it. Christopher Smart (1722–1771) was a madman, a genius, and a Christian poet. What is most powerful in him, or, at least has most influenced me, is his mysticism, for it is not a grand thing: the loss of the self in the absorption into the numinous, the flight of the alone to the Alone, the ecstatic transport to a vision of the oneness of reality. Smart is instead the model — even in his madness, or maybe especially in his madness — of what I have called the mysticism of small things.
This is not pantheism, each object in the world a little God-bit. It cannot be, for Smart, since pantheism is irreconcilable with his orthodox Christianity, but even more because pantheism is ultimately a denial of the sharp and vital particularity of things. Christopher Smart sees every living being as entirely itself: distinctive, singular, quirky, special. And in that particularity he sees not God, but God’s grace, God’s plan, and, most of all, God’s creation — a creative power so vast that it can populate the world with real existences that are not God Himself. Smart sees the world as infused with grace, a hunger for redemption, and the constant interaction of creatures and Creator.
This picture of reality appears most clearly in Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), the incomplete poetry manuscript he wrote between 1759 and 1763, during his confinement by his inlaws in an insane asylum in Bethnal Green. Not rediscovered till the 20th century, the poem was finally published in 1939. It consists of four fragments, totaling over 1,200 lines, nearly all of them beginning with the words Let or For.
The whole poem deserves to be read. Sometimes it’s marvelously comic in its mystical associations of reality and the Bible: “Let the Levites of the Lord take the Beavers of the brook alive into the Ark of the Testimony.” And sometimes it’s heartrending: “For I pray the Lord Jesus that cured the lunatick to be merciful to all my brethren and sisters in these houses,” where the keepers “work on me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others.”
But anthologists since 1939 have settled on the “my Cat Jeoffry” lines (from Fragment B.4) as the representative sample: “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. / For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.”
And not without reason. The lines are alive — Beat poetry before there were Beats, and the long lines livelier than much of their work:
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
What Smart conveys — better even, I think, than Blake — is the sheer grace of the particularity of the individual creature: wholly itself and yet simultaneously instantiating God’s providential plan. In Today’s Poem, a 58-line extract from Jubilate Agno, we see a joyous Christian mysticism that looks out at the world and sees creation. “I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else,” said Dr. Johnson.
Me, too.
A favorite!
Absolutely beautiful review. Yes, it does enhance at least my appreciation for the poem. Thank you, Mr. Bottum