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Updated: June 13, 2025
His ironical remarks on The Abolishing of Christianity were also misunderstood. His poems, such as A Description of a City Shower, and Cadenus and Vanessa, show the same general characteristics as his prose, but are inferior to it. We shall search Swift's work in vain for examples of pathos or sublimity.
As his friend was an hospitable, open-hearted man, well beloved and largely acquainted, it happened one day that some gentlemen dropped in to dinner, who were strangers to Stella's situation; and as the poem of 'Cadenus and Vanessa' was then the general topic of conversation, one of them said, 'Surely that Vanessa must be an extraordinary woman that could inspire the Dean to write so finely upon her. Mrs.
This increased her regard for Swift till it grew to affection, and she made him an offer of marriage, which he refused, and upon this occasion he wrote his little poem of "Cadenus and Vanessa."
And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket, Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering just outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pellmell, misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact: John Wilkes's the ugliest man's in England saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus old and savage leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning tongue had he," as much as to say, it isn't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over, just as of old, when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his stuff, and so did the mischief.
The piece as we have hitherto had it comes as near poetry as anything Swift ever wrote except "Cadenus and Vanessa," though neither of them aspires above the region of cleverness and fancy. Indeed, it is misleading to talk of the poetry of one whose fatal gift was an eye that disidealized. But we are not concerned here with the discussion of Swift's claim to the title of poet.
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