Christopher Smart: The Poet as Patriot of the Lord

Abstract

ideas and therefore are in accordance with the chief characteristic of the parabolic style as described by Lowth. Thus the Unicorn, associated by Smart with Joshua, is the swiftness of the Lord, the strength of the Lord, and the spear of the Lord mighty in battle ; Job blesses with the worm, type of humiliation; and Solomon rejoices with the ant, type of wisdom. Although these analogies are traditional, some of their significances are not entirely apparent. For example, Smart has Jemuel rejoice with Charadrius, who is from the HEIGHT & the sight of him is good for the / For I look up to heaven which is my prospect to escape envy by surmounting it (Bi, 26). Here the emblem is applied not to Jemuel but to Smart, in the plight of his confinement, which for him is a kind of physical and spiritual jaundice. Commonly identified by naturalists as the golden plover and found, among other places in the Grampian Hills, the charadrius according to tradition is a bird unto which some ascribe this strange property, viz, that if any who hath the Jaundice look upon him, and the bird on him, the bird then taketh the disease and dieth, but the man is cured, made sound, and liveth. Such are we, by nature sick unto death, but by Christ (who died for our sinnes and rose again for our justification) we are cured, made sound, and live. 11 Another significant, if somewhat grim, emblem is the mineral Capnites, which Smart associates with Richard Glover the mar John Swan, Speculum Mundi (2nd ed., 1643), p. 409.