Cats and Crazy People -Hanna A.

The piece from “Jubilate Agno” called “My Cat Jeoffry,” by Christopher Smart, outlines how everything in creation, including Swift’s cat, worships God. However, the way that everything is overstated in terms of the cat having worshipful rituals, seems to imply that Swift is jokingly making these allusions to his cat in worship. Though many have taken his pieces quite seriously, this particular piece seems to be joking about the rituals of church life. Though Smart himself was apparently quite devout and was put in the madhouse for praying in inconveniently public places, even those actions seem to be more as a social statement or an extended prank than anything else. If Smart were serious about his faith, would he not pay attention to verses that proclaim the necessity of closeted prayerful action, rather than displaying his devotion in public places? Particularly if he knew he would be thrown in the madhouse for his actions?

It seems that Christopher Smart was rather someone who enjoyed seeing the reactions of the people around him. Rather a sort of experimental sociologist or anthropologist as well as a poet. He enjoyed toying with social conventions and seeing what happened. As a result he got put in the mad house, but he also got to experiment with the conventions of worship and the ideas of social class while he was there. Though this would not be the best way perhaps to find out reactions of people, it does seem that Smart was not just expressing his devotion through is cat, but was also attempting to experiment with social norms.

Cats, for example, are seldom personified as pictures of devotion. In fact they are quite often portrayed as the opposite. They are often shown as representations of bad luck or are painted as vessels or advocates of the devil. They often accompany witches or other forces of darkness, and so Smart seems to be taking something that is viewed a certain way in society, and is instead turning it the other way. He writes, “For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he / worships in his way” (3-4). So, rather than the cat being a symbol of fear or chaos, he is representing it as a symbol of joy and worship in the morning. The image of morning is also important because cats are most often portrayed in night-time situations, as vessels of darkness. So, again, Smart is using an every-day conventional image, and turning into something unconventional and strange.

In this way, Smart is an unusual writer who is brave enough to experiment, even at the cost of his own freedom, and defy the conventions of his time. Just as he is thrown in a madhouse for praying in the wrong places, he chooses to take ordinary things and turn them into something extraordinary, just to see what happens.