Episode 50
‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’ by Christopher Smart 

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses the passage ‘For I will consider my cat Jeoffry’ from Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart.

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Poet

Christopher Smart

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness



























‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’

From Jubilate Agno 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 is this 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 this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered 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 is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
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 sit 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 Icneumon 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, though 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.

Podcast transcript

This is one of the most charming and delightful passages of poetry in English, and yet there is a sad story behind it.

Written by Christopher Smart in the 18th century, it is actually part of a much longer poem called Jubilate Agno, which is Latin for ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’; the lamb being, of course, Jesus Christ. But this passage is often printed separately and it is much better known than the rest of Jubilate Agno, or indeed anything else Smart wrote. It is so popular and frequently anthologised that Jeoffry, Christopher Smart’s cat, has been described by the poet Neil Curry as ‘the most famous cat in the whole history of English literature’.

So if you are a cat lover like me then it’s hard to resist this poem. Every time I read it I marvel again at Smart’s powers of observation, to capture the many and charming aspects of his cat. And I can’t help thinking of my own cat, who is sadly no longer with us. And if you have ever had a cat in your life then I’m sure this poem will bring a smile to your face too.

Now if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you will know I’m always a bit wary of biographical readings of poems. I generally like to focus on the poem itself rather than extrapolating links to what may or may not have been happening in the poet’s life at the time of writing. So I could quite happily just talk about the poem and Smart’s depiction of Jeoffry, and all the marvellous details that he uses to capture the life of his cat. And rest assured we’re going to get to that very shortly.

But I do think it’s worth giving you a bit of background to the poem, partly because it adds a layer of poignancy and pathos, but also because I think it partly explains how he was able to observe the cat so closely, and to immortalise him for posterity.

So. By the 1750s Smart was living in London and publishing poetry and satires and parodies in magazines, and had racked up considerable debt, and it seems considerable ill-will in his publisher and father-in-law John Newbery. In 1757 Newbery had Smart confined to a mental asylum, St Luke’s, on the grounds of ‘religious mania’, and Smart spent the next seven years in one asylum or another.

Ever since then, people have been debating whether or not Smart was really ‘mad’ in the contemporary parlance, or in 21st-century terms whether he was mentally ill, how severely, and what diagnostic category he might be put in by a modern psychiatrist. And various ulterior motives have been suggested for Newbery having Smart confined, including debt, drunkenness, and disputes between the two over the publication of Smart’s work.

Samuel Johnson was a friend of Smart’s, visiting him in his confinement and defending him in public, by saying:

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. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.

On the other hand, Smart’s habit of insisting that people pray with him clearly became an obsession, and there was one incident where he prayed out loud in public in the park in such a way that everyone around him was alarmed and ran away, an incident he refers to in Jubilate Agno:

For I blessed God in St James’s Park till I routed all the company.

For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the watchman smites me with his staff.

My own sense of Smart is that whether or not he was mentally ill, he was also a genuinely religious poet who may well have had a direct experience of the divine and tried to express it or recapture it in some of his poetry. Have a listen to this, which is from Jubilate Agno, a few pages before the bit about Jeoffry:

For the approaches of Death are by illumination.

For a man cannot have Publick Spirit, who is void of private benevolence.

For the order of Alamoth is first three, second six, third eighteen, fourth fifty four, and then the whole band.

For the order of Sheminith is first ten, second twenty, third thirty and then the whole band.

For the first entrance into Heaven is by complement.

For Flowers can see, and Pope’s Carnations knew him.

It’s quite far out isn’t it? And the bits about about Alamoth and Sheminith are pretty impenetrable. But then we get this amazing line: ‘For Flowers can see, and Pope’s Carnations knew him.’

So Pope here is the poet Alexander Pope, who referred to carnations in his poem The Dunciad. Smart clearly assumes Pope had some actual carnations in his house or garden, and that these flowers were conscious and could see him. And the implication is that all flowers are conscious and can see us. It’s a really unsettling thought isn’t it? It feels like a moment of genuine mystical perception. Or delusion, depending on which side of the philosophical fence you are sitting.

And I actually Googled that line to see if anyone else had picked up on it, and it turns out that Allen Ginsberg, the great 20th century American poet, really admired that line too. He said it was ‘better than Blake’. So I’m pleased to discover that Ginsberg shares my good taste.

And to me it’s entirely appropriate to link Christopher Smart to William Blake, because Blake was another 18th century poet who was accused of being mad because of his religious visions and who also, by coincidence, wrote a famous poem about a member of ‘the tribe of Tiger’. And the resemblance doesn’t stop with cat poems, because if you read some of the other parts of Jubilate Agno, they are reminiscent of Blake’s Prophetic Books – and that’s not a compliment by the way, because both poets had a predilection for interminably long passages full of the names of exotic deities. But both of them also include moments of genuine mystical insight or at least startling originality.

Anyway. Opinion is still divided about Smart’s precise state of mind. I’m reminded of the possibly apocryphal story about the visitor to an 18th century asylum, who asked one of the inmates how he came to be there, and the inmate replied: ‘I said the world was mad, and the world said I was mad; and they outvoted me.’

But regardless of the rights or wrongs of his diagnosis, Smart is thought to have been confined in mental asylums for about seven years, and during that time he was accompanied by his cat Jeoffry, who was evidently a great comfort to him. And to me this suggests an explanation for two questions – firstly why did he devote so much space in his poem to a description of his cat? And also how did he manage to observe Jeoffry so closely that he was able to write about him in such extraordinary detail?

Because if you’re confined to a room on your own for years on end, but your cat is in there with you, then you are going to spend a lot of time looking at that cat and getting to know it in all its moods and actions and aspects. And in this respect, Smart’s pain was literature’s gain, because he really does seem to capture all aspects of Jeoffry, including several imaginary ones. Wallace Stevens wrote a famous poem called ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, and as Smart’s description of Jeoffry has 74 lines, we could easily call it ‘74 Ways of Looking at a Cat’.

So we see Jeoffry in all kinds of poses, including looking upon his forepaws to see if they are clean, washing himself, sharpening his claws on a post, kicking out behind, playing with a cork, arching his back, toying with a mouse, and leaping into his master’s bosom.

There are moments in this poem that seem to me to be spine-tinglingly realistic, almost as if we’ve been presented with an Instagram photo of an 18th-century cat. When Smart says that Jeoffry ‘camels his back’, he’s using the word camel as a verb – and isn’t that exactly what cats do when they arch their back? They look like camels! And this is an almost Shakespearean fluidity of language.

So these observational details make the poem feel remarkably modern. You know, these days we take it for granted that you can write a poem about an everyday object like a glass of brandy or a vase or a filling station, or an everyday creature like a cat or a dog. But this was not common practice in 18th century poetry. And if you ask me this is one reason why the 18th century was not a golden age of poetry, there was an awful lot of high flown language, with artificial poetic diction, the kind of stuff that the Romantics rebelled against at the end of the century, as we saw in Episodes 32 and 34 about Wordsworth and Coleridge.

And part of the tragedy of Smart’s life is the fact that this poem was not published until 1939. You know, he was anticipating the Romantic movement and even some trends in 20th-century poetry, and maybe this poem could have influenced those trends – but of course it didn’t because it wasn’t published until two centuries later, when the world had caught up with Smart.

Another way that Smart’s writing about Jeoffry is startlingly modern is in the verse form. So last month you heard me enthusing about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Windhover’, and his innovative use of what he called ‘sprung rhythm’, a metrical system based on the expressive rhythms of the human voice, rather than the regular patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables that dominated English poetry for hundreds of years. And I was marvelling at Hopkins use of this kind of metre, all the way back in 1877. Well if I thought that was amazing, it’s even more amazing that Smart was writing in an even freer and more modern-sounding verse form all the way back in the 1760s, a hundred years before ‘The Windhover’.

Because when we listen to this poem there is no regular drumbeat, there is no tiTUM tiTUm tiTUM. It’s just Smart talking about his cat. And he’s doing it in a very enthusiastic and energised way, but also in an incredibly free and natural way.

And even Hopkins claimed to have a regular number of stresses in every line, but not Smart. Every line in his description of Jeoffry is just as long as it needs to be to express one particular thought. It’s not marching in step with all the other lines, the way the lines do in the work of just about every other poet of the time. So for instance we can have a really long line like this:

For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.

Followed by a short line like this:

For he rolls upon prank to work it in.

And of course the description of Jeoffry ends with this outrageously and hilariously short and expressive line:

For he can creep.

Okay, so far so modern. When we look at Smart’s poem from this angle he seems to be way ahead of his time. And yet, just like Hopkins, we can also see Smart as drawing on a very old poetic tradition. So last month I drew a line from Hopkins’ poem ‘The Windhover’, all the way back through medieval poetry to Anglo-Saxon verse. And believe it or not, the roots of Smart’s poem go back even further than that – all the way back to the language of The Bible.

And specifically, Jubilate Agno evokes the language of the Psalms, which are thought to have been composed in the first millenium BC, an astonishing collection of mostly poems or hymns of praise, of supplication, and of lamentation. Now I can’t claim any expertise in ancient Hebrew versification, but as I understand it, one of the governing principles of the poetry of the Psalms is the repetition of key words and phrases. This repetition has an incantatory and spellbinding effect. It certainly elevates the language in a way that is entirely appropriate to its religious and royal subject matter.

And fortunately for us, this is an effect that can survive and come across pretty well in translation. So for example, here are the opening lines of Psalm 29, in the King James Version, which was published in 1611 and which would have been extremely familiar to Smart and his contemporaries:

Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto the Lord glory and strength.

Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters.

The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.

The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.

He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn.

The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire.

The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh.

The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests: and in his temple doth every one speak of his glory.

The Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth King for ever.

The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace.

This is magnificent, isn’t it? And we can hear, can we not, the magisterial effect of the repetition of phrases such as ‘Give unto the Lord’, and ‘The voice of the Lord’. It’s such a simple technique and yet it is so powerful and effective here.

So technically this is a rhetorical device called anaphora, which is ancient Greek for ‘carrying back’. And it’s used all over the place, often by public speakers. For example, Winston Churchill’s famous speech in 1940, where he repeats the phrase ‘we shall fight’:

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

And Smart uses anaphora in Jubilate Agno in a beautifully simple and effective way. About half of the poem has lines beginning with the word for, meaning ‘because’. Which seems a bit strange in isolation – why would you start a poem with the word ‘because’? But when you look at the whole poem you can see that the sections beginning ‘for’, are preceded by passages where every line begins with the word ‘let’. For example:

Let Sosthenes rejoice with the Winkle – all shells like the parts of the body are good kept for those parts.

Let Chloe rejoice with the Limpin – There is a way to the terrestrial Paradise upon the knees.

Let Carpus rejoice with the Frog-Fish – A man cannot die upon his knees.

Let Stephanas rejoice with Mormyra who is a fish of divers colours.

Let Fortunatus rejoice with the Burret – it is good to be born when things are crossed.

So we can hear the repetition of that word ‘let’, and I think we can also start to understand why the rest of Jubilate Agno is not as famous as the bit about Jeoffry. But within the passage about Jeoffry, isn’t it amazing how much work that little word ‘for’ is doing? It has that incantatory quality that elevates the language effortlessly to the plane of the Psalms:

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 is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

And because the word ‘for’, means ‘because’, every line in the description can be read as referring back to the first one and justifying that first line. Smart is saying ‘these are the reasons why I am going to consider my cat Jeoffry; these are the reasons why my cat Jeoffry is worthy of consideration’.

And if we look again at Psalm 29, then we can see another thing that this text has in common with Smart’s poem, and that is the catalogue, the enumeration, of the attributes of its subject. The Psalmist tells us about the voice of the Lord: that it is upon the waters, that it thunders, that it is powerful and full of majesty, that it breaketh the cedars of Lebanon, that it divideth the flames of fire and maketh the hinds to calve, and so on. It’s a wonderfully rich and varied list of attributes, that makes for a magnificent and awe-inspiring description.

The poetic catalogue was later picked up and done to death in Petrarchan love poetry, in the form of the blazon, which was the enumeration of the attributes of a beautiful woman: her eyes were like stars, her hair was like a field of corn, her lips were like rubies, and so on. And the blazon was famously parodied by Shakespeare in his Sonnet 130:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

And it isn’t it delightful that Smart has taken this tradition of the catalogue, that was used first in religious poetry and then love poetry, and applied it to his beloved cat? You could almost say he’s turned it into a cat-alogue! And he’s brought the catalogue full circle because this is not just a poem about how lovely his cat is, but it is also a religious poem in the tradition of the Psalms.

And I think there’s something really delightful going on in the tone of Smart’s writing, because on the one hand the language is elevated and holy, but it’s also about a very humble subject, so you could stop there and argue that the tone is supposed to be comic. And it is funny, but at the same time I think Smart is serious. Not deadly serious but joyfully serious. He is saying: ‘Yea, verily, even this little cat is a divine creature and we can ‘consider’ him, meditate upon him, and see God in him.’

 

‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’

From Jubilate Agno 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 is this 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 this he performs in ten degrees.

For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.

For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.

For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.

For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.

For fifthly he washes himself.

For sixthly he rolls upon wash.

For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.

For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.

For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.

For tenthly he goes in quest of food.

For having considered 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 is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.

For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.

For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.

For he is tenacious of his point.

For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.

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 sit 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 Icneumon 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, though 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.

Christopher Smart

Christopher Smart was an English poet and satirist who was born in 1722 and died in 1771. He spent his early career at Pembroke College Cambridge, before moving to London where he published poems, satires and parodies in various magazines, and via the printing press of John Newbery, whose stepdaughter Anna Maria Carnan Smart married in 1752. After falling out with Newbery, Smart was confined to mental asylums for several years. After his release, his problems with debt increased, and in 1770 he was arrested for debt and then imprisoned in The King’s Bench Prison, where he died a few months later. His poetry was neglected after his death until the publication in 1939 of Jubilate Agno, containing the description of his cat Jeoffrey, which became one of the most frequently anthologised poems in the English language.

 

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