Juvenal delinquent.(Samuel Johnson's poem The Vanity of Human Wishes)(Critical essay)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I HAVE just recently finished writing a book about pessimism. Spare me the jokes, please. "A book about pessimism? Oh, that'll never sell ..." etc. By way of background research into some of the leading lights (darks?) of pessimism, I read Dr. Johnson's magnificent long 1749 poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes" all the way through with attention. That led me on a journey back through time, from which I have only just returned. Here is my trip report.

Johnson's poem is in Mona Wilson's 1951 Harvard University Press selection of his writings. Ms. Wilson annotates nothing, though, so I had to resort to the Internet to find out, for example, whom Johnson meant by "the bold Bavarian" who "in a luckless Hour, / Tries the dread Summits of Cesarean Pow'r." (It was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII.)

The poet's aim is to disillusion us. Wealth? Political power? Military or intellectual glory? Long life? Beauty? Empty, all of them! After 344 lines of this, having reduced the reader to trembling nihilism, Johnson perks up with an appeal to faith, though of a stoical, almost fatalistic kind:

 
   Still raise for Good the supplicating 
   Voice, 
 
   But leave to Heav'n the Measure and 
   the Choice. 
 
   ... 
 
   Pour forth thy Fervours for a healthful 
   Mind, 
 
   Obedient Passions, and a Will 
   resign'd.... 

Insha'Allah. To be fair to the great moralist, Johnson was a natural depressive, plagued by fears of madness, suicide, and--depending on his precise mood--either hell or blank annihilation. At the time he wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes" he was struggling with his monumental Dictionary of the English Language while trying to support a high-maintenance wife who had gone sexually cold on him and who was sinking into hypochondria and alcoholism.

The subtitle of Johnson's poem is "The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, Imitated." I knew of course that Juvenal was one of the Roman authors, and had very dim memories of construing bits and pieces of him in high-school Latin back in the Pleistocene Epoch. How close was Johnson's imitation? I wondered.