SOURCE: "The Structure of Smart's Song to David," in The Review of English Studies, Vol. 14, No. 54, April, 1938, pp. 178-82.

In this essay, Havens identifies patterns of language, imagery, and numerology as ordering elements in A Song to David.

Certain structural features of Christopher Smart's Song to David, such as the repetition of "adoration" and "glorious," are so obvious as to attract immediate attention, but no one seems to have remarked, at least in print, that the poem is constructed throughout on one or another formal pattern. This attention to form extends even to the general divisions, which are made up almost entirely of stanzas grouped in threes, or sevens or their multiples—the mystic numbers. The Song begins with three stanzas of invocation, which are followed by fourteen (twice seven) describing David, by nine (thrice three) which give the subjects of which he sings, and by three recounting...