Smart's Bawdy Politic: Masculinity and the Second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno

Abstract

Christopher Smart professes in to be the divinely in spired Reviver of ADORATION amongst ENGLISH-MEN (B 332).1 And his Jubilate, like so much of the prophetic tradition of radical Protestant enthusiasm with which it is in dialogue, attempts to imag ine a reawakened and reconstructed body politic.2 Indeed, it is well understood that Agno, written between 1759 and 1763 while the author was confined for madness, can be fruitfully approached as a millennial text.3 A millennial theme, moreover, given Smart's excruciating sensitivity to verbal correspondences, can be said to enter his poem with the Jubilate Agno inscribed at the top of the first page of the holograph manuscript. For, early in Christian tradition, etymological vicissitudes conflated the Latin roots of jubi lation and the Hebraic roots of jubilee. Ushered in by a blast of a ram's horn (Hebrew yobel, whence the word), the jubilee, dating back to the thirteenth century C. E., was supposed to be a sort of le gally mandated super-sabbath in which slaves were to be emanci pated and all monopolized land was to revert to its former owners.4 Arriving every fiftieth year—seven times seven plus one—the jubilee is an obvious figure for millennial renewal. The Bible's Jubilee program (Lev. 25:8-17, 29-31) was, as Arthur Waskow says, rooted in the conception of sacred time that inspires the Sabbath tradition of rest, contemplation, and sharing on the sev enth day of every week.5 The sharing seems to be a periodic level ling device designed to prevent domination by material accumula tion and hoarding. Scattered references to the land-sharing topos can be found in such seventeenth-century Puritans as John Bun yan, who equates it in The Advocateship of Jesus Christ (1688) with Christian redemption through grace.6 The concept, however, seems to have become much more popular in the following century. Peter Line baugh thus points out that the Biblical jubilee was used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a justification for counter

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