The glory that is Swift

 Round about 1959-60, starting Irish Leaving Cert, my brain-cells absorbed the dictum about:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I see I blogged about it, nearly a decade ago. And rather well, too, if I'm allowed to say so:

... the slim-line version was courtesy of Augustus de Morgan, the twice-coined professor of mathematics at the newly-minted London University: a great man who was ineligible for Oxbridge tenure because of his atheism — though he went the same way as Willie Yeats, seduced into spiritualism by the love for a good woman. Correction there: since the Yeatsian seduction was via that Surrey minx, Edith Maud Gonne, and de Morgan married Sophia Frend, that should read “the love for a better woman”.

Nothing like getting one's vicious retaliation in first; but around then — and continuing to this day — I've always felt the Gonne MacBride (from father to wife to son to son-in-law) set up was to be treated with very long tongs. Dammit: the fascist tendencies were never far from the surface.

But, just now, I had to remind myself of Swift's original. He was getting at his Critics. Here's the whole thing:

Hobbes clearly proves that every creature 
Lives in a state of war by nature. 
The greater for the smallest watch, 
But meddle seldom with their match. 
A whale of moderate size will draw 
A shoal of herrings down his maw. 
A fox with geese his belly crams; 
A wolf destroys a thousand lambs. 
But search among the rhyming race, 
The brave are worried by the base. 
If on Parnassus' top you sit, 
You rarely bite, are always bit: 
Each poet of inferior size 
On you shall rail and criticize; 
And strive to tear you limb from limb, 
While others do as much for him. 
The vermin only tease and pinch 
Their foes superior by an inch. 
So, nat'ralists observe, a flea 
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey, 
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, 
And so proceed ad infinitum: 
Thus every poet in his kind 
Is bit by him that comes behind; 
Who, though too little to be seen, 
Can tease, and gall, and give the spleen; 
Call dunces, fools and sons of whores, 
Lay Grubstreet at each others' doors: 
Extol the Greek and Roman masters, 
And curse our modern poetasters. 
Complain, as many an ancient bard did, 
How genius is no more rewarded; 
How wrong a taste prevails among us; 
How much our ancestors out-sung us: 
Can personate an awkward scorn 
For those who are not poets born: 
And all their brother dunces lash, 
Who crowd the press with hourly trash.

I'm fairly sure I've seen that printed as quatrains, and the punctuation suggests the same.

Why is it coming to mind just now?

Well, here's a tweet by the egregious @OwenJones84:

Labour needs to stop waging war on its own party and fight the Tories instead.

On @lbc shortly arguing just that...

Boosterism personified. Ah well, a young feller has to make it where he can, even if that means felling every fruitful tree in sight.

But who is 'waging war' on whom? Where I'm sitting, the far left are making life as hard as they can for anyone not of their little persuasion (meretricious* Steve Walker's Sqwawkbox, anyone?) and crowd the press with hourly trash.

* Now there's a good word.

It's the Anglicising (by Francis Bacon, no less) of the Latin meretricius, the adjective formed from meretrix. And meretrix is a prostitute. Related, then, to Swift's sons of whores. 

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