The Comedy of Swift's Scatological Poems

Abstract

Five of Jonathan Swift’s scatological poems of the early 1730’s—A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, The Lady’s Dressing Room, Strephon and Chloe, Cassinus and Peter, and A Panegyrick on the D–n—are comic masterpieces. In the case of A Beautiful Young Nymph, appreciation of the comedy involves recognition of its grimness, lightened only by the precarious successes of Corinna’s daily struggles for survival, indeed, for resurrection. With the other poems, this appreciation depends on a perception of the basic incongruities between fantasy and fact, sublimation and reality, the standards of pastoral romance or polite society and the need to evacuate waste. Although Swift satirizes those who would ignore or deny this need, his own willingness to face its results and his mock-heroic allusiveness in the scatological poems suggest the tolerance and playfulness characteristic of and conducive to a comic outlook.