The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume 1 | Page 3

prose
satires, "The Tale of a Tub," and "Gulliver's Travels," though planned,
were reserved to a later time.--In other forms of poetry he soon
afterwards greatly excelled, and the title of poet cannot be refused to
the author of "Baucis and Philemon"; the verses on "The Death of Dr.
Swift"; the "Rhapsody on Poetry"; "Cadenus and Vanessa"; "The
Legion Club"; and most of the poems addressed to Stella, all of which
pieces exhibit harmony, invention, and imagination.
Swift has been unduly censured for the coarseness of his language upon
Certain topics; but very little of this appears in his earlier poems, and
what there is, was in accordance with the taste of the period, which
never hesitated to call a spade a spade, due in part to the reaction from
the Puritanism of the preceding age, and in part to the outspeaking
frankness which disdained hypocrisy. It is shown in Dryden, Pope,
Prior, of the last of whom Johnson said that no lady objected to have
his poems in her library; still more in the dramatists of that time, whom
Charles Lamb has so humorously defended, and in the plays of Mrs.

Aphra Behn, who, as Pope says, "fairly puts all characters to bed." But
whatever coarseness there may be in some of Swift's poems, such as
"The Lady's Dressing Room," and a few other pieces, there is nothing
licentious, nothing which excites to lewdness; on the contrary, such
pieces create simply a feeling of repulsion. No one, after reading the
"Beautiful young Nymph going to bed," or "Strephon and Chloe,"
would desire any personal acquaintance with the ladies, but there is a
moral in these pieces, and the latter poem concludes with excellent
matrimonial advice. The coarseness of some of his later writings must
be ascribed to his misanthropical hatred of the "animal called man," as
expressed in his famous letter to Pope of September 1725, aggravated
as it was by his exile from the friends he loved to a land he hated, and
by the reception he met with there, about which he speaks very freely
in his notes to the "Verses on his own Death."
On the morning of Swift's installation as Dean, the following scurrilous
lines by Smedley, Dean of Clogher, were affixed to the doors of St.
Patrick's Cathedral:
To-day this Temple gets a Dean
Of parts and fame uncommon,
Us'd
both to pray and to prophane,
To serve both God and mammon.

When Wharton reign'd a Whig he was;
When Pembroke--that's
dispute, Sir;
In Oxford's time, what Oxford pleased,
Non-con, or
Jack, or Neuter.
This place he got by wit and rhime,
And many
ways most odd,
And might a Bishop be in time,
Did he believe in
God.
Look down, St. Patrick, look, we pray,
On thine own church
and steeple;
Convert thy Dean on this great day,
Or else God help
the people.
And now, whene'er his Deanship dies,
Upon his stone
be graven,
A man of God here buried lies,
Who never thought of
heaven.
It was by these lines that Smedley earned for himself a niche in "The
Dunciad." For Swift's retaliation, see the poems relating to Smedley at
the end of the first volume, and in volume ii, at p. 124, note.
This bitterness of spirit reached its height in "Gulliver's Travels," surely

the severest of all satires upon humanity, and writ, as he tells us, not to
divert, but to vex the world; and ultimately, in the fierce attack upon
the Irish Parliament in the poem entitled "The Legion Club," dictated
by his hatred of tyranny and oppression, and his consequent passion for
exhibiting human nature in its most degraded aspect.
But, notwithstanding his misanthropical feelings towards mankind in
general, and his "scorn of fools by fools mistook for pride," there never
existed a warmer or sincerer friend to those whom he loved--witness
the regard in which he was held by Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay,
Arbuthnot, and Congreve, and his readiness to assist those who needed
his help, without thought of party or politics. Although, in some of his
poems, Swift rather severely exposed the follies and frailties of the fair
sex, as in "The Furniture of a Woman's Mind," and "The Journal of a
Modern Lady," he loved the companionship of beautiful and
accomplished women, amongst whom he could count some of his
dearest and truest friends; but He loved to be bitter at
A lady illiterate;

and therefore delighted in giving them literary instruction, most
notably in the cases of Stella and Vanessa, whose relations with him
arose entirely from the tuition in letters which they received from him.
Again, when on a visit at Sir Arthur Acheson's, he insisted upon
making Lady Acheson read such books as he thought fit to advise, and
in the doggerel verses entitled "My Lady's Lamentation," she is
supposed to resent his "very imperious" manner of instruction:
No book for delight
Must come in