Today’s Poem: On Stella’s Birth-day

We won't dispute a year or more

Godfrey Kneller, Lady Henrietta Crofts, Duchess of Bolton, c. 1715 (Wikimedia Commons)

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On Stella’s Birth-day

by Jonathan Swift

Stella this Day is thirty four, 
(We won’t dispute a Year or more) 
However Stella, be not troubled, 
Although thy Size and Years are doubled, 
Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen 
The brightest Virgin of the Green, 
So little is thy Form declin’d 
Made up so largely in thy Mind. 
Oh, would it please the Gods to split 
Thy Beauty, Size, and Years, and Wit, 
No Age could furnish out a Pair 
Of Nymphs so gracefull, Wise and fair 
With half the Lustre of Your Eyes, 
With half thy Wit, thy Years and Size: 
And then before it grew too late, 
How should I beg of gentle Fate, 
(That either Nymph might have her Swain,) 
To split my Worship too in twain. 
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It occurred to Joseph Bottum and me not long ago that in more than two years of writing Poems Ancient and Modern, we had somehow — somehow! — neglected to feature a single poem by the Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, and Anglican cathedral dean Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Many of us will, of course, first have encountered Jonathan Smith via his “Modest Proposal” of 1729, to make the children of the Irish poor “beneficial to the publick” by providing that “publick” with a ready source of protein. Or we might have met him first in the satirical and frequently bawdy Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726 but propagated in expurgated children’s editions, the first of which had the distinction of being bowdlerized, in 1807, by the Thomas Bowdler, who forever afterward lent his name to what we might call “moral editing.” Or our first meeting with him might have occurred by way of such poems as his “Advice to the Grub Street Verse-writers,” which counsels struggling poets that their only real hope of success is to find some ingenious way of plagiarizing Alexander Pope.

Speaking of first encounters, germane to Today’s Poem is the 1688 meeting between Swift and Esther Johnson (1681–1728), in the house of the diplomat Sir William Temple, whom Swift served as secretary, and whose natural daughter Esther might or might not have been. She was a child of 7 when Swift, aged 21 and in the midst of postgraduate studies, fled political upheaval in Ireland for the relative post-Glorious-Revolution stability of England and Temple’s household, where the influence of his mother had secured him a post.

The young man’s friendly interest in the child, which extended to overseeing her education, would in later years become something far more ambiguous and complicated. On his 1796 return to Temple’s employ, after a stint as a vicar in the Church of Ireland, Swift again encountered Esther Johnson and began the relationship with her — triangulated for many years with a second woman, Esther Vanhomrigh (1688–1723) — that was to last until Johnson’s death in 1728. Both women settled in Ireland, Johnson in 1702, Vanhomrigh in 1714, to be near Swift. Esther Vanhomrigh, dying of tuberculosis, disinherited Swift, whom she had named as sole beneficiary in her will, over his refusal to renounce Esther Johnson. Swift wrote poems addressing both women by pet pseudonyms: Esther Vanhomrigh was “Vanessa,” while Esther Johnson was “Stella.”

Charles Jervas, Jonathan Swift, 1710 (Wikimedia Commons)

Whether or not Swift and Johnson were secretly married, as rumor has been whispering since 1715, Swift wrote frequently and affectionately to and about his “Stella,” including a series of poems to commemorate her birthday. Today’s Poem in tetrameter couplets, written in 1719, allows its recipient a fourth repeat of her thirty-fourth birthday: “We won’t dispute a year or more.” Were “the Gods” to duplicate the organism that is Stella by some process of cell division, twice as many nymphs would still each be only half as beautiful or witty.

In 1719, Swift might well have felt that the gods had bestowed upon him twice as many Esthers — both in Ireland, neither pleased by the presence of the other — as a man might strictly require for his happiness, even if he found it impossible to choose only one. Faced with twice the nymphs, his “Worship” might well have suffered from being “split in twain.” This possibility, certainly, might have occurred to the nymphs in question, especially as they entered their fourth decade and began to recycle birthdays. And so, in a chivalric gesture, the poet marks Stella’s growth in “Size and Years” by assuring her that had she been actually split in two, and therefore only half as old (or large), he would worship her only half as much.

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