Hell has no fury like a poet scorned

THE contemporary stand-up poet John Moynes recently tweeted, “Someone just bought me a pint because of a poem I wrote. Pretty sure this puts me in the top 1% of poets in terms of earnings.”

That probably wasn’t always the case. The poet William Congreve, born exactly 350 years ago, had relatively humble beginnings. Yet he seems to have made more than a reasonable living at the old versifying.

Congreve was born in Yorkshire, but brought up in Ireland. His father, a soldier, was stationed in Youghal, and may have also served in Carrickfergus Castle. At any rate the young William thrived in Co. Cork, picked up something of an Irish accent, and was subsequently educated in Kilkenny. He proved to be a gifted student from an early age, eventually winning a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin. There he became a lifelong friend of Jonathan Swift.

Congreve’s literary career encompassed poetry and drama. But two of his best known lines are often misquoted or misattributed “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” from The Mourning Bride is regularly rendered ‘hath’ instead of ‘has’.

This immediately makes it sound Shakespearean, to whom the lines are regularly attributed. (Mind you, if you read it in a Cork accent it sounds considerably less Shakespearean.)

Another of Congreve’s great lines similarly suffers regular misquoting. “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast . . . . ” is often given as ‘the savage beast’, with ‘has’ written as ‘hath’ once again.

Being a philosophical type, Congreve probably would have just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Thupid thouls.”

One thing we can be certain of is that the poet regarded living and being educated in Ireland as a step up in his life. One of his biographers even went as far as to say that “he meanly disowned his own country, England”.