Page 16 - Gullivers

Comparing the pœtically confident opening of ‘The Legion Club’ with the despairing sentiments of the pœm as a whole, we might find it either surprising that Swist so rarely writes of Dublin in the way he dœs here,
or remarkable that he did so at all. Yet in representing the city he knew best in verse or prose, Swist had to confront two problems: first, how the city might be represented in literature and, secondly, how the particular city of Dublin might be represented at all.
Like all men of his time and social class – women were not accorded
the same educational opportunities – Swist received a traditional humanist education, both at Kilkenny College and later at Trinity College Dublin. Such an education, in Ireland as elsewhere, was grounded in the study of
the most admired writers of classical Greece and, particularly, Rome. It was from these that Swist and others of his age learned how the city and the country were to be appropriately represented in pœtry and imaginative prose. The countryside came first. In Greek pastoral pœtry, the countryside was
a place of natural fertility and of (a sometimes fragile) harmony between
the shepherds and goatherds tending their flocks, and the rest of the natural order. The leading Greek pastoral pœts – Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus – lived variously in Sicily at a time (from the fourth to second centuries B. C.) when that island was culturally and linguistically part of the Greek world, and when urban settlements retained a close connection with the countryside beyond their walls.
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