Today’s Poem: The Vanity of Human Wishes

Cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth

Pieter Boel, Fighting Animals as Allegory of the Combat between Virtue and Vice, 1658 (Städel Museum)

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The Vanity of Human Wishes (an excerpt)

by Samuel Johnson

Let observation with extensive view, 
Survey mankind, from China to Peru; 
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, 
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; 
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, 
O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate, 
Where wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride 
To tread the dreary paths without a guide, 
As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude, 
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good. 
How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, 
Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice, 
How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress’d, 
When vengeance listens to the fool’s request. 
Fate wings with ev’ry wish th’ afflictive dart, 
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art, 
With fatal heat impetuous courage glows, 
With fatal sweetness elocution flows, 
Impeachment stops the speaker’s pow’rful breath, 
And restless fire precipitates on death. . . .

Once more, Democritus, arise on earth, 
With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth, 
See motley life in modern trappings dress’d, 
And feed with varied fools th’ eternal jest: 
Thou who couldst laugh where want enchain’d caprice, 
Toil crush’d conceit, and man was of a piece; 
Where wealth unlov’d without a mourner died; 
And scarce a sycophant was fed by pride; 
Where ne’er was known the form of mock debate, 
Or seen a new-made mayor’s unwieldy state; 
Where change of fav’rites made no change of laws, 
And senates heard before they judg’d a cause; 
How wouldst thou shake at Britain’s modish tribe, 
Dart the quick taunt, and edge the piercing gibe? 
Attentive truth and nature to decry, 
And pierce each scene with philosophic eye. 
To thee were solemn toys or empty show, 
The robes of pleasure and the veils of woe: 
All aid the farce, and all thy mirth maintain, 
Whose joys are causeless, or whose griefs are vain.
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I love the poetry of madness and the verses that rail in fury. I melt at the music of the highly strung and feel, at wails of grief, the pull down into a primal sorrow. It’s just . . .

It’s just that sometimes I think, you know, like maybe we could use a little balance. Sometimes I ache for a little sanity, a little wisdom, a little awareness that the human condition has always been as it is. Sometimes I just need to dwell a while with Samuel Johnson’s writings. Or maybe Dorothy Osborne’s letters. Sidney Smith’s quips. In entirely different forms, Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology and Jane Austen’s prose.

Even to list a few of the works that somehow convey sanity is to realize how widely they range: poetry to public essays, sermons to private letters, fiction to table talk. And yet they share something — something hard to pin down but real nonetheless. There’s a capaciousness about them, a firm vision of righteousness and a wry sense of the human failure to fulfill it. They have a universality, a recognition that there is no new thing under the sun — and yet also an awareness that the crimes and foibles of the present are always felt as though they were unique and pressing. They show us a grown-up irony.

“Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob,” Virginia Woolf once wrote of Jane Austen,

because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature.

Samuel Johnson is another such figure. He’s not always right. Of his critical judgments about poetry, C.S. Lewis notes in a 1930 letter, “he is always sensible and nearly always wrong. He has no ear for metre and little imagination.” But, Lewis adds, “I find Johnson very bracing when I am in my slack, self-pitying mood. The amazing thing is his power of stating platitudes — or what in anyone else w[ould] be platitudes — so that we really believe them at last and realise their importance.” Johnson’s Rambler essays from the 1750s “are so quieting in their brave, sensible dignity.”

Samuel Johnson doing penance in the rain in Lichfield (Wikimedia Commons)

And his poetry, too: “Let observation with extensive view, / Survey mankind, from China to Peru,” as Today’s Poem opens. We’ve neglected Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) here at Poems Ancient and Modern, in part because Johnson tends to write long. “London” (1738), his first major publication, runs 263 lines as it works up a topical English poem out of the Latin moods and techniques that Juvenal (c. 100 A.D.) had used in his third satire.

Meanwhile, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), Johnson’s best-known poem, is 368 lines, its heroic couplets playing with some of the ironies of Juvenal’s tenth satire. Johnson borrows from Juvenal, for example, the figure of Democritus — the ancient Greek known as the laughing philosopher, Democritus ridens, whom Juvenal had posed as a wry observer of the human condition (as opposed to Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, for whom the same sights brought tears).

Both “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” achieve their effects in part thanks to the modern English that emerged in the generation before Johnson, with what came to be seen as the Neoclassical voice among the 18th-century writers known as Augustans. With its affected dispassion and pose of disinterest, at its worst, Neoclassicism could be supercilious and annoying.

But it helped form a subsequent narrating voice of authority that, at its best — in, say, Samuel Johnson and, a generation later, Jane Austen — achieves what seems a recurring feature of any literature of sanity: It has the voice of adulthood.

This is how grown-ups sound when they are intelligent, quick, and aware of both the human comedy and the human tragedy that measure our distance from the eternal truths: “Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, / And watch the busy scenes of crowded life,” as Johnson writes, and observe “How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, / Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice.”

Jean-Louis Hamon, The Human Comedy, c. 1852 (Wikimedia Commons)

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