Page 31 - Gullivers

Writing in the eighteenth century, the act of imagination that allowed Swist, in ‘To Charles Ford, Esq’ or ‘The Legion Club’ or elsewhere to make the contemporary city – rather than some timeless rural landscape – the location for pœtry was perhaps as difficult, in its way, as was Joyce’s transformation of Dublin into an epic world two hundred years later.
Swist was not alone among mid-eighteenth century pœts in choosing to write about Ireland’s capital in English verse during the eighteenth century – though he remains by far the best-known writer who did so. Thomas Newburgh penned ‘The Beau Walk in St. Stephen’s Green’. Lawrence Whyte wrote ‘A Pœtical Description of Mr. Neal’s new Musick-Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin’. Henry Jones, the so-called ‘Bricklayer Pœt of Drogheda’, celebrated Bartholomew Mosse’s foundation of the Rotunda Hospital in ‘On the Hospital for Lying-
in Women, erected in Dublin’. William Dunkin – a friend of Swist’s, and the translator into English of Swist’s Latin pœm, ‘Carberiæ Rupes’ (1723) on Carbery Rocks, near Ross Carbery in Co. Cork – wrote ‘On the New Bridge built on the Eastern Side of Dublin [i.e. Essex Bridge]’. Such verse is exceptional, though. Even pœms that might seem to modern readers to be urban pœms - James Ward’s ‘Phœnix Park’ or ‘The Smock Races at Finglas’; Richard Pockrich’s ‘The Temple-Oge Ballad’; John Winstanley’s ‘A Thought, in the Pleasant Grove at Cabragh’, or Henry Jones’s ‘A Farewell to Apollo, and the Muses at Glasnevin’ – actually engage with what were then rural locations quite distinct from the
city itself.
Some less reverent lines – his last - were composed extempore when Swist, admired as the ‘Hibernian Patriot’ but a politically-disillusioned man, was being accompanied on a walk through the Phœnix Park during his final years. Observing the recently-built magazine fort that still exists in the Park, Swist allegedly improvised the following:
I. Swist and Dublin 25