John Gay | Poetry Foundatn

Contents:

• JOHN GAY AND TRIVIA
• WALKG THE STREETS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON: JOHN GAY'S TRIVIA (1716)
• JOHN GAY
• JOHN GAY
• TRIVIA (GAY)

JOHN GAY AND TRIVIA

SynonymsDefnIn his poem Trivia, John Gay (1685–1732) sts himself as a “bold Traveller” (Gay 1974: 171; III.

WALKG THE STREETS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON: JOHN GAY'S TRIVIA (1716)

”IntroductnJohn Gay was born Barnstaple but by the age of 10 he was orphaned (Nok 2009), and he slipped his Devon anchor when his late teens he ma his way to London. Gay me to a cy still unrgog renstctn after the Great Fire of 1666, where wh the pullg down went a prodig puttg up. The associatn wh Pope and Swift was part of what empowered Gay to wre Trivia, which was posed 1714 and 1715 for publitn January 1716 and then aga (wh an expand send Book) 1720.

It was wh the stagg of The Beggar’s Opera 1728, however, that Gay the satirist would e most forcefully forward. As if he were emulatg the wonr-workg svenger of Trivia who “bids Kennels gli/Wh their bounds” (Gay 1974: 135; I.

JOHN GAY

15–16), Gay giv both the poem and the play the salubr flotsam of London life smoothly ntaed and stylishly prented. “Of Ways There Are Three Sorts”: Trivia as a TleTrivia is the godss to whom the Walker – the poet’s alter ego for the purpos of the work – ow allegiance, and whom he asks to “aid [his] song” (Gay 1974: 135; I. It was on that basis that Gay appoted Trivia “the Godss of Streets and High-Ways, ” as his Inx terms her (Gay 1974: 179) – which by extensn, sce down those streets a man mt go, would also make her the patrons of pestrians – and then scribed triparte divisn as a repeated pattern upon the poem that he dited to her.

JOHN GAY

Wh Book I voted to the preparatn that the Walker mt make, and Books II and III alg, rpectively, wh the experience of walkg the streets of London by day and by night, Gay approach his subject om three different angl; and that g together of three “ways” is punngly ntaed the poem’s tle. Jt as one of the Books of Gay’s poem may be twice the length of the prev one, so some of London’s lan and thoroughfar are broar than others – or better mataed, or ls “nvenient … to Walkers” (Gay 1974: 150). Trivia’s Poetic PrecursorsWh the first ten l of Trivia’s openg Book, Gay has not only troduced a Walker who is open to diversns, “Where wdg Alleys lead the doubtful Way” (135; I.

TRIVIA (GAY)

As poetry tak an urban turn, so Gay impli that he is enterg h lerary terrory. It had taken a particular batn of circumstanc, however, to ensure that the lan existed for Gay to tread them. Already by the begng of the eighteenth century, therefore, the ndns were right for the posn of a work like Gay’s ’s prefixed Advertisement acknowledg one specific stimul for the poem: “I owe several Hts of to Dr.

Swift” (Gay 1974: 134).

Gay learns om Swift the satirist’s knack of nnectg the ntemporary to the classil, so that a morn “Dcriptn” n reach back through alln to Roman antecents and by dog so n reveal eighteenth-century London as a travty of the. In Trivia, the field of alln is very wi, sce through all the poem’s layers n Gay’s “refully bungled or splendidly mangled imatns of the English Augtan non of Lat poets, ” prisg Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal (Am 1978: 200); but the most important reference pot is Virgil.

” (Gay 1974: 143–44; II. 11–12) – so that picture of the cy to which Gay mak them all add up is built over s Virgilian oppose: the rehearsal the Eclogu of the charms of the untrysi. Instead of stctg farmers how to work the land, Gay’s “stctive Song” (149; II.

A walkg tour of London, rather than a stroll around some untry farm wh well-stocked veyards, is what the poet patrollg his patch has e to entail if Gay tend the poem to be a journey through the reer of Virgil as much as a journey through the streets of London, he gtur Trivia not only towards the Eclogu and the Geics but towards the Aeneid. Te to s thor’s fondns for generic promiscuy – Gay had jt wrten an afterpiece entled The What D’Ye Call It – “Trivia begs wh the pastoral …, mols self on the geic, and aspir fally to epic heights” (McWhir 1983: 414).