A Voyage to Lilliput

To celebrate our third anniversary of Word & Song (on the Fourth of July), we are offering a special Poetry Aloud series this summer. Next Friday and following, I’ll be reading to you not a work of poetry, but “The Voyage to Lilliput,” Book One of the most brilliant of all English satires, Gulliver’s Travels. For this week’s podcast, I’ve recorded an original introduction to the work, and I’ll read the “publisher’s note” that was printed as an ironical testimony to the veracity of everything in the book, as if Lemuel Gulliver really existed, and as if you could look up his family’s forebears in the local cemetery! To fully enjoy the story, we need to suspend our disbelief and attend to the accurate account of his travels, told by Gulliver himself.

Now then — surely modern life doesn’t show us anything like Swift’s fanciful accounts of voyages to the South Seas, where you meet little human beings six inches high, but just as arrogant as us six-footers everywhere else! (Or does it?) Listen in, and I’ll see if I can show you otherwise. For we do have those voyages, as we navigate the ocean of life. Whether they’re as brilliant and as revealing about human nature as Swift’s was, you’ll have to decide for yourselves. For this summer, then, pack up the hardtack and the biscuit and the lemons, because we’re going to be setting sail.

“Gulliver and the Liliputians,” Jehan Georges Vibert. Public Domain.

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