ABSTRACT
The very title of Jonathan Swift's tract, A Short View of the State of Ireland, suggests his mode of observation, the word 'short' not only literally characterizing a brief polemic only a few pages in length but also denoting a close-up, eye-level view. The body of the tract deals directly with the differences between accurate and distorted ways of seeing. The tract makes clear Swift's abiding sense of Ireland's total vulnerability, to perceptual distortion as well as to economic abuse and political oppression. Swift is in effect telling Dean Brandreth to remove his 'philosophical Spectacles' so that he can view his surroundings accurately, without comforting illusion. The perceptual distortion that appears throughout Swift's early odes, with their imagistic emphasis upon optical illusions, blindness, and visual as well as moral and physical errancy, tends to become translated into more specifically political terms in his later writings.
