Discovering poetry: Samuel Johnson’s advice to a posh boy

You can hang or drown at last.

When a young man turned twenty-one, he was of age. If he had been left a large inheritance as a boy, he suddenly had complete access to it. He was ‘free to mortgage or to sell’ his family’s land and could waste his ‘Grandsire’s guineas’ as he saw fit. Youth, wealth, and wisdom seldom go hand in hand. This is Samuel Johnson’s mock-advice to a  youth who in an instant has all the power of money thrust upon him without the responsibility to earn it or the experience to use it well.

The speaker of the poem is a tempter. He whispers in the young man’s ear. Sensibly he begins with flattery. The first stanza is formal and elevated. The syntax is complicated and frequent pauses (marked with commas) evoke a careful dignity. The young man is given both his title and a flattering epithet – ‘Great Sir John’. He is being addressed with the respect, which rich young men feel very entitled to (especially if they’ve done nothing to deserve it).

The tone becomes more conversational in the sixth line with colloquial phrases like ‘light as a feather’ and then a list of unpretentious girls’ names ‘Bettys, Kates, and Jennys’. The tempter is establishing intimacy with young Sir John. This allows him to slip in a whole string of instructions which, if they’re noticed at all, sound more like friendly advice than orders. ‘Bid the slaves of thrift farewel’ he says, ‘Lavish of your Grandsire’s guineas’, ‘See the Jocky, see the Pander, Bid them come, and take their fill.’

These temptations are very commonplace. Women, gambling, and a callow fear of appearing priggish and unsophisticated (‘show the Spirit of an heir’ John is told). These clichés are not a sign of Johnson’s lack of imagination. The fact that they are so predictable is part of the satire. People never learn.

The speaker often phrases his arguments as aphorisms. ‘Wealth, Sir John, was made to wander, Let it wander as it will’, ‘What are acres? what are houses? Only dirt, or wet or dry.’ This makes them sound like simple common sense and therefore difficult to disagree with (especially if you’re not used to making your own decisions). The tempter uses rhetorical questions followed immediately by answers for the same reason. This trick makes the listener feel like they’ve been thinking through an argument without giving them the time to raise (or even think of) any objections. This is helped by the easy rhythms and rhymes of the sixth stanza. Like a drinking song, they sweep the listener along with them.

An arresting change of tone comes in the poem’s very last line. Suddenly the tempter drops his mask. ‘You can hang or drown at last’ he says, acknowledging the ruin (even suicide) which his advice leads to. We are forcefully confronted with the irony of the poem but it doesn’t seem sly (as it did in the fourth stanza, which is like a dramatic aside). Now it is just brutally honest. Its matter-of-factness is unsettling. The suggestion is that the tempter can openly say it, because he has caught Sir John so firmly that pretence is no longer needed. Folly can be both obvious and inescapable.