Afterword

Abstract

In many ways, these lines encapsulate the types of creative energy released when Swift draws upon the new natural philosophy in his writing. Here, Vanessa’s love for Cadenus is figured as a prism which refracts the incident light of the things she studies. However, while Newton had shown that the colours produced by the prism are not ‘Qualifications’ but ‘Original and connate properties’ of the natural white light, Vanessa’s lens of ‘Passion’ is ‘bend[ing]’ the world, producing a distorted vision of a particular ‘Tincture’, not revealing its true nature.¹ Through Swift’s poetic dexterity, the limitations of this analogy then diffuse into a simile that seeks to satirically expose the shortcomings of any ‘System’ of natural knowledge (although it is not made explicit whether this makes a poke at Newtonian optics specifically). However, the elisions reveal Swift’s own (poetic) surrender to the exigencies of octosyllabic metre, somewhat undercutting the severity of this repudiatory glance at reductive structures.

Her Knowledge, with such Pains acquir’d,

By this new Passion grew inspir’d.

Thro’ this she made all Objects pass,

Which gave a Tincture o’er the Mass:

As Rivers, tho’ they bend and twine,

Still to the Sea their Course incline;

Or, as Philosophers, who find

Some fav’rite System to their Mind,

In ev’ry Point to make it fit,

Will force all Nature to submit. (Cadenus and Vanessa, ll. 716–25, in Poems, II, 709)