Thomas Parnell's "The Book-Worm"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

The life of this week’s final Scriblerian, Thomas Parnell, rounds out the picture of the entire Scriblerus club as a fraternity of wildly brilliant men all carrying some great pain or wound. Some of them clearly write out of that wound, while others seem to write in spite of it. Parnell straddles the line, and today’s poem is a fine example of his blending of bright energy with a sharp edge. Happy reading.

Thomas Parnell (11 September 1679 – 24 October 1718) was an Anglo-Irish poet and clergyman who was a friend of both Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.

He was born in Dublin, the eldest son of Thomas Parnell (died 1685) of Maryborough, Queen's County (now Portlaoise, County Laois), a prosperous landowner who had been a loyal supporter of Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War and moved from Congleton, Cheshire to Ireland after the Restoration of Charles II. His mother was Anne Grice of Kilosty, County Tipperary: she also owned property in County Armagh, which she left to Thomas at her death in 1709. His parents married in Dublin in 1674. Thomas was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and collated as Archdeacon of Clogher in 1705. In the last years of the reign of Queen Anne of England he was a popular preacher, but her death put an end to his hope of career advancement. He married Anne (Nancy) Minchin, daughter of Thomas Minchin, who died in 1712, and had three children, two of whom died young. The third child, a girl, is said to have reached a great age. The marriage was a very happy one, and it has been said that Thomas never recovered from Nancy's early death.

He spent much of his time in London, where he participated with Pope, Swift and others in the Scriblerus Club, contributing to The Spectator and aiding Pope in his translation of The Iliad. He was also one of the so-called "Graveyard poets": his 'A Night-Piece on Death,' widely considered the first "Graveyard School" poem, was published posthumously in Poems on Several Occasions, collected and edited by Alexander Pope and is thought by some scholars to have been published in December 1721. It is said of his poetry, "it was in keeping with his character, easy and pleasing, enunciating the common places with felicity and grace."

-bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.0	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, March 14th, 2025.
0:13.0	Today's poem comes from Thomas Parnell, the last of our Scriblarians for the week,
0:17.8	and it's called The Bookworm.
0:20.1	There's a little bit of cultural background to this poem
0:22.5	that comes in tangentially. Many English scholars and men of letters at the time were embroiled in a
0:30.4	debate that actually began in France, but was called The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns,
0:36.0	or later by Jonathan Swift, the Battle of the Books.
0:39.4	And this debate was about whether modern learning had attained to a greater degree of excellence
0:48.0	than that of the ancients, those of antiquity. Some thought yes, while others contended no and argued that if it seemed to be so,
0:58.1	it was merely because the moderns were dwarfed men standing upon the shoulders of giants.
1:05.9	And it was from this vantage point, all because of the work that had been done by the ancients that they could
1:12.0	see so far and had attained to the apparent heights, which they enjoyed.
1:19.0	Swift and Pope and their circle, including Parnell, were drawn into this debate as it raged
1:24.5	in the English-speaking world, and you will see some clear allusions to it
1:30.0	in this poem, in which a certain kind of reader is clearly personified. Here is the bookworm.
1:40.7	Come hither, boy, will hunt today the bookworm, ravenous beast of prey, produced by parent earth at odds as fame reports it with the gods.
1:50.8	Him frantic hunger wildly drives against a thousand authors' lives, through all the fields of wit he flies, dreadful his head with clustering eyes, with horns without, and tusks within,
2:03.2	and scales to serve him for a skin, observe him nearly lest he climb, to wound the bards of ancient time,
2:10.8	or down the veil of fancy go to tear some modern wretch below, on every corner fix thine eye,
2:19.2	or ten to one he slips thee by.
2:25.6	See where his teeth a passage eat, will arouse him from the deep retreat, but who the shelters forced to give, tis sacred Virgil as I live? From leaf to leaf, from song to song, he draws the
	...

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