Famous First Lines: Christopher Smart's "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry"

I find it difficult to read much of Jubilate Agno, because it mentions names from the Bible that are unfamiliar to me and it rejoices in concepts I find difficult to understand unless I compare the whole of the manuscript (it was not published during his lifetime and subsequent editors have "managed" the text) to the underlying concept of many modern scientists' religious views: that every particle or atom in the universe is imbued with a very literal vibration of life that can either be considered random or a joyous creation.

Although I may be guilty here of a howlingly awful misinterpretation.  I take his conviction that all life sings praises to a Supreme Being to be roughly analogous to all atoms actually vibrating, an act that, in quantum physics, produces a tiny, teeny, minutely perceptible Ringing of the Spheres (now I'm really delving into misalignment, taking a medieval notion of astral significance at the other end of the physical scale, and equating the motion of heavenly bodies with the quantum dance of quarks.  Ouch).

That said, the circumstances of Christopher Smart's life are heartbreakingly familiar and relevant.  He was institutionalized.  He had a nervous breakdown.  He owed large sums of money he could not repay.  He was exuberantly extravagant.  He was also quietly philosophical.  His writing could indulge in frat house humor.  His writing could wring beauty and joy out of stones, toads, and the magic of language itself.

And he saw a powerfully persuasive proof of his conception of a Supreme Being in everything around him.

Unlike William Blake, whose canon swerves from keen social satire into mythological proportions of astoundingly prolific and particularly obscure perception of reality, Christopher Smart was meticulous in a different way.  As an Anglican of (allegedly) maniacal zeal, he calmly listed the evidence he found in his world to enumerate the guises of a Supreme Being in concrete evidence, which in the long Jubliate Agno (partly based on Benedictine responses and partly on the Hebrew tradition) involves evidence from the Bible first, and then from every single thing he can see around him.

Saying that the man was clearly insane is to belittle the magnitude of his capacity for wonder at the obvious beauty of life.  Even when institutionalized in an insane asylum, he found evidence of a Supreme Being in the everyday routine of his only companion, his cat Jeoffry.  Clearly he was guilty of oversimplification.  Clearly, I am too.  I have found his verses to be achingly moving and that makes me wonder why.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.

For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

Now, I defy anyone with a pet cat not to laugh out loud at this.  Who hasn't seen the cat wreath herself around before sitting down?  To say that she (or he, as in Jeoffry's case) is worshiping the new day, that her actions are a physical aubade to the glory of the morning, is delightfully silly.  

The poem goes on (and on) from there, until we realize that every detail of every action of every living creature that Smart sees is performing lay rituals of divine worship to Smart's conception of his god -- so that, when wrongly shut up in an insane asylum by his father-in-law, he didn't waste any time bemoaning the injustice.  

Instead, he listed the wonder of existence, and the moving force of the lines becomes hypnotic.