A Prisoner Rescued

POEMS BY CHRISTOPHER SMART (326 pp.] --Edited, with an Introduction & Notes, by Robert Brittain--Princeton University ($4).

When Poet Robert Browning stumbled across a devotional poem entitled A Song to David, by one Christopher Smart (1722-1771), he was both awed and delighted. Poet Smart's Song was a haunting combination of the lyrical and the intellectual, clothed in words that threw fresh lights and colors upon many a common thing:

Where rain in clasping boughs inclos'd,

And -vines with oranges dispos'd,

Embow'r the social laugh . . .

The nectarine his strong tint imbibes,

And apples of ten thousand tribes,

And quick peculiar quince.

But when Browning began eagerly to search for further masterpieces by Christopher Smart, he could find nothing but a dull collection of odes and occasional pieces. Browning did discover, however, that poor Poet Smart had been confined in an asylum just before A Song to David was first published -- which prompted Browning to the romantic conclusion that Smart had been no better than a hack while, he had his wits; that when he lost them his dormant genius had burst into bloom.

Editor Robert Brittain, a longtime Smart addict, does his best to destroy this theory by presenting a selection of Smart's poems, most of which Browning never read. His volume shows that A Song to David was not Smart's only masterpiece; but it also shows that the sufferings Smart experienced because of his fits of madness gave his best work a peculiar profundity.

"Pray Without Ceasing." Smart was driven to distraction by overwork and financial worries as early as his Cambridge days, and tried to earn money from his writing. In one play, noted a contemporary, "He acts five Parts himself, & is only sorry, he can't do all the rest, he has also advertised a Collection of Odes; & [as] for his Vanity & Faculty of Lyeing, they are come to their full Maturity, all this . . . must come to a Jayl, or Bedlam."

That cruel prophecy soon came true. Smart found a job with a bookseller who waxed rich on the profits he made from concoctions such as "Dr. Hooper's Female Pills." Smart became his hack, churning out for him a flow of trite but salable verse and prose. Then Smart's high-strung system collapsed. He took to interpreting literally Christ's "injunction to pray without ceasing"--and pray Smart did, whenever he was moved to do so, whether in public places or in the small hours of the morning, summoning those near him to do likewise.

The next few years Smart spent in confinement, where he wrote Rejoice in the Lamb, praising the Lord in a loose-strung jumble of beauty and innocent absurdity:

For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ . . .

For the harp rhimes are sing ring, string & the like.

For the cymbal rhimes are bell well toll sold & the like . . .

For beat heat, weep peep &c are of the pipe.

For every word has its marrow in the

English tongue for order and for delight.

Madness & Marrow. Poet Smart's contemporaries found more madness than marrow in his passionate and personal use of the English tongue. Dropped by many of his friends, ignored by the reading public, Smart died on parole from a debtors' prison.

It is Editor Brittain's hope that today's, readers will give poor Smart "his rightful place in the front rank of English devotional lyricists." At any rate, Brittain's efforts may rescue Smart from his long imprisonment in a literary footnote. He was put there by his onetime friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, who once declared: "I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it."

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