The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume 1 | Page 7

heavenly gay,?Sit clad in lawn of purer woven day.?There some high-spirited throne to Sancroft shall be given,
In the metropolis of Heaven;?Chief of the mitred saints, and from archprelate here,
Translated to archangel there.
XII
Since, happy saint, since it has been of late?Either our blindness or our fate,?To lose the providence of thy cares?Pity a miserable church's tears,?That begs the powerful blessing of thy prayers.?Some angel, say, what were the nation's crimes,?That sent these wild reformers to our times:?Say what their senseless malice meant,?To tear religion's lovely face:?Strip her of every ornament and grace;?In striving to wash off th'imaginary paint??Religion now does on her death-bed lie,?Heart-sick of a high fever and consuming atrophy;?How the physicians swarm to show their mortal skill,?And by their college arts methodically kill:?Reformers and physicians differ but in name,?One end in both, and the design the same;?Cordials are in their talk, while all they mean?Is but the patient's death, and gain--?Check in thy satire, angry Muse,?Or a more worthy subject choose:?Let not the outcasts of an outcast age?Provoke the honour of my Muse's rage,?Nor be thy mighty spirit rais'd,?Since Heaven and Cato both are pleas'd--
[The rest of the poem is lost.]
[Footnote 1: Born Jan., 1616-17; died 1693. For his life, see "Dictionary of National Biography."--W. E. B.]
ODE TO THE HON. SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
WRITTEN AT MOOR-PARK IN JUNE 1689
I
Virtue, the greatest of all monarchies!
Till its first emperor, rebellious man,?Deposed from off his seat,?It fell, and broke with its own weight?Into small states and principalities,
By many a petty lord possess'd,?But ne'er since seated in one single breast.
'Tis you who must this land subdue,?The mighty conquest's left for you,?The conquest and discovery too:?Search out this Utopian ground,?Virtue's Terra Incognita,?Where none ever led the way,?Nor ever since but in descriptions found;
Like the philosopher's stone,?With rules to search it, yet obtain'd by none.
II
We have too long been led astray;?Too long have our misguided souls been taught
With rules from musty morals brought,?'Tis you must put us in the way;?Let us (for shame!) no more be fed?With antique relics of the dead,?The gleanings of philosophy;?Philosophy, the lumber of the schools,?The roguery of alchymy;?And we, the bubbled fools,?Spend all our present life, in hopes of golden rules.
III
But what does our proud ignorance Learning call?
We oddly Plato's paradox make good,?Our knowledge is but mere remembrance all;?Remembrance is our treasure and our food;?Nature's fair table-book, our tender souls,?We scrawl all o'er with old and empty rules,
Stale memorandums of the schools:?For learning's mighty treasures look?Into that deep grave, a book;?Think that she there does all her treasures hide,?And that her troubled ghost still haunts there since she died; Confine her walks to colleges and schools;
Her priests, her train, and followers, show?As if they all were spectres too!?They purchase knowledge at th'expense?Of common breeding, common sense,?And grow at once scholars and fools;?Affect ill-manner'd pedantry,?Rudeness, ill-nature, incivility,
And, sick with dregs and knowledge grown,?Which greedily they swallow down,?Still cast it up, and nauseate company.
IV
Curst be the wretch! nay, doubly curst!?(If it may lawful be?To curse our greatest enemy,)?Who learn'd himself that heresy first,?(Which since has seized on all the rest,)?That knowledge forfeits all humanity;?Taught us, like Spaniards, to be proud and poor,?And fling our scraps before our door!?Thrice happy you have 'scaped this general pest;?Those mighty epithets, learned, good, and great,?Which we ne'er join'd before, but in romances meet,?We find in you at last united grown.
You cannot be compared to one:?I must, like him that painted Venus' face,?Borrow from every one a grace;?Virgil and Epicurus will not do,
Their courting a retreat like you,?Unless I put in Caesar's learning too:
Your happy frame at once controls?This great triumvirate of souls.
V
Let not old Rome boast Fabius' fate;
He sav'd his country by delays,?But you by peace.[1]?You bought it at a cheaper rate;?Nor has it left the usual bloody scar,
To show it cost its price in war;?War, that mad game the world so loves to play,
And for it does so dearly pay;?For, though with loss, or victory, a while
Fortune the gamesters does beguile,?Yet at the last the box sweeps all away.
VI
Only the laurel got by peace?No thunder e'er can blast:?Th'artillery of the skies?Shoots to the earth and dies:?And ever green and flourishing 'twill last,?Nor dipt in blood, nor widows' tears, nor orphans' cries.
About the head crown'd with these bays,?Like lambent fire, the lightning plays;?Nor, its triumphal cavalcade to grace,
Makes up its solemn train with death;?It melts the sword of war, yet keeps it in the sheath.
VII
The wily shafts of state, those jugglers' tricks,?Which we call deep designs and politics,?(As in a theatre the ignorant fry,
Because the cords escape their eye,?Wonder to see the motions fly,)?Methinks, when you expose the scene,?Down the ill-organ'd engines fall;?Off fly the vizards, and discover all:
How plain I see through the deceit!?How shallow, and how gross, the cheat!?Look where the pulley's tied above!?Great God! (said I) what have I seen!
On what poor engines move?The