Jonathan Swift's "The Character of Sir Robert Walpole"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2025
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s poem throws unambiguous shade on one of 18th-century England’s most divisive politicians, and marks out Swift as one of the gutsiest Scriblerians. Happy reading.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. |
| 0:08.2 | I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, March 12th, 2025. |
| 0:13.2 | Today's poem is by perhaps the most enduringly famous member of the group of 18th century satirists, |
| 0:20.1 | known as the Scriarians or scribblers club |
| 0:23.1 | Jonathan Swift. |
| 0:25.8 | And though Swift is best remembered today for prose works like Gulliver's Travels or the satirical |
| 0:32.4 | essay, A Modest Proposal. |
| 0:35.1 | He did a roaring trade in verse during his own lifetime. And today's poem is a very |
| 0:43.2 | gutsy description of the British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who was thought to wield an unusual |
| 0:52.2 | amount of power for a prime minister because the reigning monarch |
| 0:57.3 | George II was somewhat ineffective. Walpole was also thought to be quite corrupt by people |
| 1:05.5 | like Swift and his party and his compatriots. Nevertheless, or rather maybe because of the things I've just said about Walpole, |
| 1:13.7 | it was not safe to be on his bad side and shows how committed Swift and his friends were |
| 1:21.2 | to the political aspect of their literary projects. |
| 1:25.3 | Here is the character of Sir Robert Walpole. |
| 1:31.7 | With favor and fortune fastidiously blessed, |
| 1:35.8 | he's loud in his laugh and he's coarse in his jest, |
| 1:39.5 | of favor and fortune unmerited vein, |
| 1:42.3 | a sharper in trifles, a dupe in the main. Achieving of nothing, |
| 1:46.7 | still promising wonders, by dint of experience improving in blunders, |
| 1:51.6 | oppressing true merit, exalting the base, and selling his country to purchase his piece. |
| 1:58.5 | A jobber of stocks by retailing false news, a praetor at court in the style of the |
... |
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