Jonathan Swift's "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2024

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s poem, while everyone else is dressing up to become something terrible, the acerbic Jonathan Swift gives us a domestic horror story in reverse. Happy reading.

Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, essayist, and political pamphleteer Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He spent much of his early adult life in England before returning to Dublin to serve as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin for the last 30 years of his life. It was this later stage when he would write most of his greatest works. Best known as the author of A Modest Proposal (1729), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Tale Of A Tub (1704), Swift is widely acknowledged as the greatest prose satirist in the history of English literature.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is
0:06.1	Thursday, October 31st, 2024, and I have endeavored to conjure up the scariest poem I can think of.
0:14.6	It's called A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed by Jonathan Swift. It is on the longer side,
0:20.8	and though horrific, I think it speaks for itself, so I'll read it
0:24.7	just once.
0:26.1	Jonathan Swift was known for his misanthropy, especially in his later years, and so it seemed
0:33.7	appropriate to read a poem like this on a day like this when so many men
0:38.8	intentionally disfigure themselves, but perhaps Swift would say they reveal their true
0:45.5	nature. Here is a beautiful young nymph going to bed. It carries an epigram written for
0:53.1	the honor of the fair sex in 1731.
0:58.5	Corina, pride of Drury Lane, for whom no shepherd sighs in vain,
1:03.7	never did Covent Garden boast so bright a battered strolling toast,
1:07.9	no drunken rake to pick her up, no cellar wear on tictus up. Returning at the midnight
1:13.2	hour, four stories climbing to her bower, then seated on a three-legged chair, takes off her
1:19.7	artificial hair. Now, picking out a crystal eye, she wipes it clean, and lays it by. Her eyebrows
1:26.9	from a mouse's hide stuck on with art on either side,
1:30.8	pulls off with care, and first displays them, then in a playbook smoothly lays them. Now dexterously,
1:37.7	her plumpers draws that serve to fill her hollow jaws, untwists a wire, and from her gums, a set of teeth completely comes,
1:47.0	pulls out the rags contrived to prop her flabby dugs and down they drop,
1:52.0	proceeding on the lovely goddess unlaces next her steel-ribbed bodice,
1:56.2	which, by the operator's skill, press down the lumps, the hollows fill.
2:01.0	Up goes her hand, and off she slips the bolsters that supply her hips.
	...

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