Page 18 - Gullivers

Rocque Map 1756
I oſten wish’d that I had clear
For life, six hundred pounds a year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend,
A river at my garden’s end,
A terrace walk, and half a rood,
Of land, set out to plant a wood. (ll. 1-6)
The entire pœm, in fact, depends on the implicitly understood contrast between an ideal (and idealised) rural existence and the uncertainties and fatigues of city life. Written in 1713, shortly aster Swist had been made Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, but while he was in England, frequenting the court and enjoying the friendship and company of leading politicians and writers, the pœm concludes with Swist’s professed desire to return to the simple country life of his parish in County Meath:
Thus in a sea of folly tossed,
My choicest hours of life are lost;
Yet always wishing to retreat;
Oh, could I see my country seat!
There leaning near a gentle brook,
Sleep or peruse some ancient book;
And there in sweet oblivion drown
Those cares that haunt a court and town. (Satire 2.6 ll. 105-12)
The rustic idyll these lines evoke was, however, very far from being the world Jonathan Swist really wished to inhabit in 1713. As ambitious as any contemporary writer, clergyman, or politician – and he was all three – Swist had little real wish to spend his time in rural obscurity, least of all in Ireland.
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