Page 9 - Gullivers

A decade aster he had published Travels through Several Remote Nations
of the World, Jonathan Swist began his last great pœm much closer to home. ‘The Legion Club’ (1736) opens with the lines:
As I stroll the city, oſt I
Spy a building large and loſty,
Not a bow-shot from the College,
Half a globe from sense and knowledge. (ll. 1-4)
In many respects, this is a remarkably confident opening to any eighteenth- century pœm and even more so for a writer who, at almost seventy years of age, and increasingly infirm from a degenerative illness that had dogged him for much of his life, was close to the end of his writing career. What is especially notable about these lines, however, is less immediately apparent today, to readers familiar with, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Raglan Road’ (1946), or Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy (1987-1991). Today, Dublin is not only the setting of much modern writing, it has become – above all through Joyce’s use of the city – one of the mythic locations of western literature, as the Bloomsday celebrations held on 16 June remind us annually.
It was not always so. One of the first things Swist’s contemporaries would have noticed about the opening of ‘The Legion Club’ and one of the first things modern readers of the pœm must still understand is that the city through which Swist strolls is Dublin. This simple fact is remarkable since the pœm was not first published in the Irish capital but rather – and like Gulliver’s Travels – in London.
I. Swist and Dublin 3