The Work
Jubilate Agno ('Rejoice in the Lamb') was written by Christopher Smart between approximately 1759 and 1763, while he was confined in St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in London and subsequently in Mr. Potter's madhouse in Bethnal Green. It was not published in Smart's lifetime; he died in a debtor's prison in 1771. The poem was first published in a partial edition by William Force Stead in 1939; the full text, with detailed scholarly apparatus, was published by W.H. Bond in 1954. The poem consists of approximately 1,748 surviving lines, though the original manuscript appears to have been more extensive.
The poem is structured in two alternating movements, labeled 'Let' and 'For,' modeled on the responsive verse of the Hebrew Psalter - the antiphonal 'call and response' structure of Psalms like Psalm 136 ('O give thanks unto the LORD; for his mercy endureth forever'). Each 'Let' line describes a biblical figure or creature praising God; each 'For' line (written on a separate leaf that was apparently meant to be spoken antiphonally) provides a corresponding reason for praise.
Benjamin Britten set a substantial portion of the poem - the 'Hallelujah' section and the Jeoffry passage - as a cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb (1943), for the fiftieth anniversary of St. Matthew's Church, Northampton. Britten's setting brought the poem to wide public attention and is now a standard of the choral repertoire.
Biblical Engagement
Psalm 150:6 - 'Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD' - is the Psalmic command that Smart's poem enacts and extends. Where Psalm 150 catalogs instruments and creatures that praise God, Smart catalogs the entire natural world - plants, animals, birds, insects, minerals - with each creature assigned its specific mode and occasion of divine praise. The poem is the longest and most exhaustive attempt in English literature to execute Psalm 150's universal summons.
Revelation 5:13 - 'And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever' - is the apocalyptic vision that Smart's poem makes present. Where Revelation's vision is future - the universal praise of the Lamb at the end of time - Smart's poem attempts to realize it in the present through the act of naming and thus honoring each creature.
Psalm 148:1-5 ('Praise ye the LORD from the heavens: praise him in the heights... Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light... Let them praise the name of the LORD: for he commanded, and they were created') provides the Psalmic model for cosmic praise. Smart's poem extends this Psalm's catalog of creation to include every specific creature he can name - from the whale to the earwig, from the lion to the cat.
The antiphonal structure (Let/For) is modeled on the responsive structure of Psalm 136 and the pattern of Mosaic blessing and response in Deuteronomy 27-28. Smart envisioned Jubilate Agno as a liturgical text to be spoken in community, with one voice leading and another responding - making the madhouse cell a place of cosmic worship.
The Jeoffry Passage
The most famous section of the poem is the extended passage on Smart's cat Jeoffry (Fragment B1, lines 695-770). It begins: 'For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. / For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. / For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.' The passage continues for seventy-four lines, describing with precise observation the way Jeoffry washes himself, leaps, stretches, and purrs - and interpreting each action as a form of divine praise. It concludes: 'For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. / For he knows that God is his Saviour. / For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. / For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.'
This passage is the most celebrated animal-praise writing in English poetry, and one of the most cited examples of the theological claim that every creature's natural behavior is a form of worship. It enacts the Pauline claim that all creation groans and praises - that the praising community is not only human but cosmic.
Author and Context
Christopher Smart (1722-1771) was born in Shipbourne, Kent, and educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he won the Seatonian Prize for religious poetry five times. He was a brilliant scholar and poet, but his career was disrupted by debt, irregular religious behavior, and what his contemporaries regarded as madness. Samuel Johnson, who knew him, famously said: 'I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.' Johnson's comment suggests that Smart's 'madness' included compulsive public prayer rather than any more dangerous disorder.
Smart's confinement gave him both the isolation and the time to write a poem of extraordinary length and ambition. His 'madness' - whatever its clinical character - was clearly also a form of religious intensity: the poem reflects a mind simultaneously cataloging the cosmos, arguing with its enemies, celebrating its cat, and maintaining the conviction that all things praise God.
His other major work, A Song to David (1763), a celebration of the Psalmist, was published on his release and was admired by Robert Browning as 'a fine, fierce thing.'
Literary Analysis
The poem's formal structure - the antiphonal Let/For - is not always consistently maintained in the surviving manuscript, suggesting that Smart was composing in conditions of real difficulty. The poem's range of reference is astonishing: it encompasses the entire Hebrew Bible (working through biblical names in a systematic quasi-liturgical pattern), natural history, personal grievance (Smart works through his enemies and persecutors), astronomy, botany, and personal devotion.
The poem anticipates the Romantic and metaphysical poets who followed. Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'charged' creation - 'The world is charged with the grandeur of God' - is the Victorian counterpart to Smart's cosmic liturgy. William Blake's vision of every creature as a vehicle of divine expression shares Smart's conviction that the universe is a liturgical text waiting to be read and celebrated.
Britten's Setting
Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb (Op. 30, 1943) sets approximately thirty of the poem's lines for chorus and organ, including the Jeoffry passage and the 'Hallelujah' section. The setting is quietly ecstatic - Britten captures the combination of spiritual intensity and worldly specificity that characterizes Smart's poem. The 'Hallelujah' section, in particular, achieves the universal praise the poem aims for: 'Hallelujah from the heart of God, / And from the hand of the artist inimitable / And from the echo of the heavenly harp / In sweetness magnifical and mighty.' The work has been performed at thousands of choral concerts worldwide and has made the poem accessible to audiences unfamiliar with the Augustan period.
Theological Significance
The poem's theological contribution is its realization of the Psalmic vision of universal praise in a post-Newtonian, naturalistic universe. Smart was writing at a moment when the mechanical philosophy - the view of the universe as a self-sufficient mechanism requiring no divine superintendence - had become the dominant educated worldview. His response was not to argue against it philosophically but to counter-assert, through patient and precise naming of the natural world, that every creature is a form of praise. This is not pantheism but an insistence that the praise of the Psalter is literally true: every thing that has breath praises the Lord, whether it knows it or not.
Legacy
The poem's rediscovery in 1939 and Britten's 1943 setting positioned it as a significant text of twentieth-century poetry and music. It has been included in major anthologies of English poetry since the 1950s. Its influence on subsequent religious poetry - including R.S. Thomas, David Jones, and Anne Carson - is substantial. The Jeoffry passage has become one of the most quoted passages of English poetry about animals and has influenced a tradition of theological reflection on the natural world.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Psalm 148 (creation's universal praise), Psalm 150 (let everything that breathes praise the Lord), Revelation 5:9-14 (the cosmic praise of the Lamb), Psalm 104 (the creation psalm), and Romans 8:19-22 (all creation groaning in eager expectation).
Further Reading
- Karina Williamson, ed., The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, vol. 1 (1980) - the standard scholarly edition, with full textual apparatus. - Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony, eds., Christopher Smart: An Annotated Bibliography 1743-1983 (1984) - comprehensive secondary literature guide. - John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (2013) - while focused on Herbert, provides essential context for the metaphysical devotional tradition in which Smart's work participates.