W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > Jonathan Swift: The Major Works (Oxford Authors > Status Update

Swift's final birthday poem to Stella (Mar 13, 1727) is heartbreaking.

Me, surely me, you ought to spare,
Who gladly would your suff'rings 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.

note p380:
... only twelve sermons ascribed to [Swift] are known... [including] a sermon on sermons, now known as Sleeping in Church.

Generally speaking, the times which afford most plentiful matter for story are those wherein a man would least choose to live...

Hmm. Bit of a non sequitur:

... he goes down in a rage, shoots his wife through the head, then falls on his sword; and, to make the matter sure, at the same time discharges a pistol through his own head, and died on the spot, his wife surviving him about two hours, but in what circumstances of mind and body is terrible to imagine. I have finished my poem on the Shower, all but the beginning, and...

From The Bickerstaff Papersa (or perhaps the) recipe for satire:

... he will succeed... as long as he can preserve a thorough contempt for his own time, and other people's understandings, and is resolved not to laugh cheaper than at the expense of a million people.

Swift's (sometimes, not always appealing) jaundice in a nutshell:

That those abuses and corruptions which in time destroy a government, are sown along with the very seeds of it, and both grow up together; and that as rust eats away iron, and worms devour wood, and both are a sort of plagues born and bred along with the substance they destroy; so with every form and scheme of government that...

'Tis agreed, that in all government there is an absolute unlimited power, which naturally and originally seems to be placed in the whole body, wherever the executive part of it lies.

In the rump [party], then.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to be alive and talking to me. (Apothegms and Maxims 148)

(Not a speed-reader by any means: feel entitled, tho, to be skipping ahead past what I already read last year in another edition—The Battel of the Books and Tale of a Tub, etc.)