Selected Poems (1685-1700) — Background and Themes

Irregular Meter and Direct Address

Tutchin's prosody is deliberately uneven, mixing iambic lines of varying length with occasional anapests. In stanza IV, he shifts from a pentameter question—'Tell me, ye Learned Sots! who spend your time / In reading Books'—to a trimeter exclamation: 'The rankest Hellebore cannot prevent.' This metrical instability mirrors the poem's thematic volatility. The repeated use of direct address ('Tell me, I say, ye Learn'd Sots!') creates an adversarial intimacy, as if the speaker is haranguing a room of pedants. Tutchin also employs rhetorical questions that undercut themselves: 'Did e'r the old or new Philosophy, / Make a Man splendid live, or wealthy die?' The answer is implied by the poem's relentless irony.

Caricature and the Grotesque Body

The poem's satire operates through physical grotesquerie. The 'Fool' is described as an 'Image' with 'sunk in' eyes and a 'carotty' beard—a carrot-colored detail that reduces the figure to a vegetable. The lady's husband is 'a nauseous ugliness' and 'scarce had Wit enough to be a Fool.' Tutchin extends this bodily metaphor to the 'God of Dullness,' who sits 'Beneath a Canopy / Of fix'd stupidity' and 'handles one and feels his Skull' to determine thickness. The bear-licking simile in stanza VIII—'Thus do's the gloomy God of Folly do, / With the insipid Race'—transforms intellectual deficiency into a bestial process of shaping. These images ground abstract folly in concrete, often repulsive, physicality.

The Rhetoric of Inversion

Tutchin systematically inverts conventional values. The poem's opening lines establish that the sun's blessings fall equally on 'Hemlock as to nobler Plants,' implying a natural leveling that human society perverts. Wealth and honour go to 'triumphant Fools,' while 'abject Sence do's barefoot go.' The speaker's encounter with the wealthy lady and her foolish husband culminates in the exclamation: 'if Fools such fortune get, / Then who (the Devil) wou'd be plagu'd with wit.' The final stanza declares that to rise, one 'Must be much a Fool, or much a Knave.' This inversion is not merely thematic but structural: the poem itself, by celebrating folly's rewards, performs a kind of ironic praise that undercuts its own moral stance.

Allusion and the Learned Satirist

Despite his attack on learning, Tutchin's poem is densely allusive. He references Aristotle, 'Philology,' and 'Philosophy' in the same breath as 'the dirty Road' and 'Thorns.' The 'God of Dullness' recalls Pope's later Dunciad, but Tutchin's version is more explicitly political: his 'Blockheads' become 'Lords' through the god's favor. The biblical allusion to 'Issachar' (a tribe associated with servitude) in stanza VIII adds a scriptural layer to the satire. Tutchin positions himself as a learned insider mocking the unlearned, a paradox he acknowledges by calling the wise 'monstrous, ill shap'd Man.' The poem thus enacts the very tension it describes: it requires erudition to appreciate its ridicule of erudition.

Readers approaching Tutchin's poems should attend to the tension between his professed contempt for learning and his own scholarly apparatus. The verse rewards attention to its metrical irregularities and bodily imagery, which carry much of the satirical force. The editor's introduction provides essential context for Tutchin's self-mythologizing as a Whig martyr, but the poems themselves offer a more ambiguous portrait of a writer who both scorns and depends on the intellectual traditions he mocks.

Sometimes I think of John Tutchin’s ragged, furious verses, and how they ache for a world that wouldn’t listen. That same lonely fire burns across the ocean in The Poems of Philip Freneau, Poet of the American Revolution. Volume 2 (of 3) — Inside the Classic. Both men wrote with their backs to the wall, their meters stumbling from the strain of telling truth too loudly. I’ve aged alongside them, and still, their stubbornness feels like company.