r could require
From slaves employed for daily hire,
What Stella, by her friendship warmed,
With vigour and delight performed;
My sinking spirits now supplies
With cordials in her hands and eyes,
Now with a soft and silent tread
Unheard she moves about my bed.
I see her taste each nauseous draught
And so obligingly am caught,
I bless the hand from whence they came,
Nor dare distort my face for shame.'

The poem in which Swift imagines what will take place upon his death, is
full of satiric humour, combined with that vein of bitterness that is
never long absent from his writings. His humour is always allied to
sadness; his mirth often sounds like a cry of misery. In this poem he
pictures his gradual decay, and how his special friends, anticipating
the end, will show their tenderness by adding largely to his years:

'He's older than he would be reckoned,
And well remembers Charles the Second.
He hardly drinks a pint of wine,
And that I doubt is no good sign.
His stomach too begins to fail,
Last year we thought him strong and hale,
But now he's quite another thing,
I wish he may hold out till Spring.'

No enemy can match a friend, Swift adds, in portending a great
misfortune:

'He'd rather choose that I should die
Than his prediction prove a lie,
No one foretells I shall recover,
But all agree to give me over.'

So he dies, and the first question asked is, 'What has he left and who's
his heir?' and when these questions are answered, the Dean is blamed for
his bequests. The news spreads to London and is told at Court:

'Kind Lady Suffolk, in the spleen,
Runs laughing up to tell the Queen.
The Queen so gracious, mild, and good,
Cries, "Is he gone? 'tis time he should."'

But the loss of the Dean will cause a brief regret to his most intimate
friends:

'Poor Pope will grieve a month; and Gay
A week; and Arbuthnot a day.
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug, and cry,
"I'm sorry--but we all must die."'

Why grieve, indeed, at the death of friends, since no loss is more easy
to supply, and in a year the Dean will be forgotten, and his wit be out
of date.

'Some country squire to Lintot goes,
Inquires for "Swift in Verse and Prose."
Says Lintot, "I have heard the name;
He died a year ago." "The same.