Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Restoration Verse. 1910.

Stella’s Birthday, March 13, 1727

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

THIS day, whate’er the Fates decree,

Shall still be kept with joy by me.

This day, then, let us not be told

That you are sick, and I grown old;

Nor think on our approaching ills,

And talk of spectacles and pills.

To-morrow will be time enough

To hear such mortifying stuff.

Yet, since from reason may be brought

A better and more pleasing thought,

Which can in spite of all decays

Support a few remaining days,

From not the gravest of divines

Accept for once some serious lines.

Although we now can form no more

Long schemes of life, as heretofore,

Yet you, while time is running fast,

Can look with joy on what is past.

Were future happiness and pain

A mere contrivance of the brain;

As atheists argue, to entice

And fit their proselytes for vice

(The only comfort they propose,

To have companions in their woes)—

Grant this the case, yet sure ’tis hard

That virtue, styled its own reward,

And by all sages understood

To be the chief of human good,

Should acting die, nor leave behind

Some lasting pleasure in the mind,

Which, by remembrance, will assuage

Grief, sickness, poverty, and age;

And strongly shoot a radiant dart

To shine through life’s declining part.

Say, Stella, feel you no content,

Reflecting on a life well spent?

Your skilful hand employed to save

Despairing wretches from the grave,

And then supporting with your store

Those whom you dragged from death before:

So Providence on mortals waits,

Preserving what it first creates.

Your gen’rous boldness to defend

An innocent and absent friend;

That courage which can make you just

To merit humbled in the dust;

The detestation you express

For vice in all its glittering dress;

That patience under tort’ring pain,

Where stubborn Stoics would complain;

Must these like empty shadows pass,

Or forms reflected from a glass,

Or mere chimæras in the mind,

That fly, and leave no marks behind?

Does not the body thrive and grow

By food of twenty years ago?

And, had it not been still supplied,

It must a thousand times have died;

Then who with reason can maintain

That no effects of food remain?

And is not virtue in mankind

The nutriment that feeds the mind,

Upheld by each good action past,

And still continued by the last?

Then who with reason can pretend

That all effects of virtue end?

Believe me, Stella, when you show

That true contempt for things below,

Nor prize your life for other ends

Than merely to oblige your friends,

Your former actions claim their part,

And join to fortify your heart:

For Virtue, in her daily race,

Like Janus, bears a double face;

Looks back with joy where she has gone,

And therefore goes with courage on.

She at your sickly couch will wait,

And guide you to a better state.

O then, whatever Heaven intends,

Take pity on your pitying friends!

Nor let your ills affect your mind

To fancy they can be unkind.

Me, surely me, you ought to spare,

Who gladly would your suff’ring share,

Or give my scrap of life to you,

And think it far beneath your due;

You, to whose care so oft I owe

That I’m alive to tell you so.