Humour and mirth had place in all he writ;
He reconciled divinity and wit.

But that was what his enemies could not do.

Whatever the excellences and defects of the poems, Swift has erected, not only by his works, but by his benevolence and his charities, a monumentum aere perennius, and his writings in prose and verse will continue to afford instruction and delight when the malevolence of Jeffrey, the misrepresentations of Macaulay, and the sneers and false statements of Thackeray shall have been forgotten.

#Poems of Jonathan swift#

Ode to doctor William Sancroft[1]
late lord bishop of Canterbury

Written in may, 1689,
at the desire of the late lord bishop of Ely

I

Truth is eternal, and the Son of Heaven,
    Bright effluence of th’immortal ray,
Chief cherub, and chief lamp, of that high sacred Seven,
Which guard the throne by night, and are its light by day;
    First of God’s darling attributes,
    Thou daily seest him face to face,
Nor does thy essence fix’d depend on giddy circumstance
    Of time or place,
Two foolish guides in every sublunary dance;
  How shall we find Thee then in dark disputes? 
  How shall we search Thee in a battle gain’d,
  Or a weak argument by force maintain’d? 
In dagger contests, and th’artillery of words,
(For swords are madmen’s tongues, and tongues are madmen’s swords,)
    Contrived to tire all patience out,
    And not to satisfy the doubt?

II

  But where is even thy Image on our earth? 
    For of the person much I fear,
Since Heaven will claim its residence, as well as birth,
And God himself has said, He shall not find it here. 
For this inferior world is but Heaven’s dusky shade,
By dark reverted rays from its reflection made;
  Whence the weak shapes wild and imperfect pass,
  Like sunbeams shot at too far distance from a glass;
       Which all the mimic forms express,
Though in strange uncouth postures, and uncomely dress;
    So when Cartesian artists try
  To solve appearances of sight
    In its reception to the eye,
And catch the living landscape through a scanty light,
    The figures all inverted show,
    And colours of a faded hue;
  Here a pale shape with upward footstep treads,
    And men seem walking on their heads;
    There whole herds suspended lie,
  Ready to tumble down into the sky;
  Such are the ways ill-guided mortals go
  To judge of things above by things below. 
Disjointing shapes as in the fairy land of dreams,
  Or images that sink in streams;
  No wonder, then, we talk amiss
  Of truth, and what, or where it is;
  Say, Muse, for thou, if any, know’st,
Since the bright essence fled, where haunts the reverend ghost?