Poem: The Vanity of Human Wishes

Overview
Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) is a formal moral satire in heroic couplets that surveys the varieties of human desire and shows how they end in disappointment, danger, or ruin. It is Johnson's English imitation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire, but he enlarges the scope to a global and Christian perspective, opening with a panoramic summons to observe mankind across the world. He tests common ambitions, wealth, power, military glory, learning, beauty, and long life, and finds each undermined by unforeseen consequences. The poem culminates not in cynicism but in counsel: relinquish the demand to control outcomes, curb restless wishes, and pray instead for wisdom, patience, humility, and a mind resigned to Providence.

Argument and Structure
The poem proceeds as a sequence of moral demonstrations. Johnson begins with the claim that hopes and wishes, which promise happiness, are the very engines of human distress. He then examines one desire at a time, staging each as a case study that moves from aspiration through attainment to reversal. The merchant amasses riches only to court fear, fraud, and shipwreck. The courtier climbs by flattery and intrigue and falls by the same arts. The scholar withdraws to pursue fame in letters and discovers that learning brings envy, weariness, and neglect. The beauty who relies on charm encounters impermanence and predation. The supplicant for longevity receives the penalties of age, illness, isolation, and the loss of friends. Even those who seek public virtue and martial renown are not exempt: fortune turns, and triumph exposes them to sudden catastrophe.

Key Exempla
Johnson anchors these reflections in vivid portraits. For martial ambition, he invokes Charles XII of Sweden, the prodigious warrior-king whose headlong valor ends in defeat, exile, and a violent death, glory revealed as a glittering path to desolation. For the scholar, he catalogs the scholar’s outward poverty and inward consumption: health decays, rivalries multiply, and achievement brings scant reward. For the statesman and court favorite, he traces the swift arc of favor and disgrace, the precariousness of depending on princes, and the way greatness awakens enemies as well as imitators. Each exemplum sharpens the larger lesson: when wishes are granted, they often deliver a punishment wrapped as a prize.

Moral Vision
Johnson's satire differs from Juvenal's in its Christian resolution. After exhausting the catalogue of secular hopes, he turns to the question of prayer. Humans beg for specific gifts, riches, rank, beauty, long life, but lack the foresight to know which gifts will bless or destroy them. The safer petition is for a rightly ordered soul: a sound mind, regulated passions, capacity to bear loss, and charity toward others. He advises entrusting measure and choice to a higher wisdom, accepting that life is mixed, that innocence does not guarantee safety, and that the human condition includes suffering. Resignation here is not passivity; it is an active discipline of judgment, temperance, and faith that frees one from the tyranny of chance and fashion.

Style and Tone
Composed in tightly turned rhyming couplets, the poem compresses argument into aphoristic strokes and balances severity with pity. Its diction is elevated yet concrete, moving from sweeping generalizations to specific histories. The steady cadence of the couplets underscores the poem’s theme of recurrence: generations repeat the same errors, and only a change in what we ask of life can alter the result. The Vanity of Human Wishes ultimately holds up a mirror to desire, showing how often we misread our good, and offers a bracing, humane corrective grounded in moral clarity and religious trust.