Three Prayers and Sermons

The three prayers here were written for Esther Johnson, known as Stella, as she lay dying in 1727. Swift never intended them for publication; they are the private grief of a man watching his closest companion slip away. These are not performances but pleas - raw, urgent, desperate. They reveal a side of Swift that his satire rarely shows: the believer trembling before divine mystery, the friend shattered by loss. The sermons that follow display his characteristic wit turned toward religious and social hypocrisy. He scolds congregations for sleeping through services, for practicing a faith that costs them nothing, for treating the poor as abstractions rather than neighbors. This is Swift at his most incisive: less the monstrous ironic designer of "A Modest Proposal," more the earnest clergyman who cannot stomach the gap between Christian profession and Christian practice. The collection offers both faces of one writer: the penitent begging for grace, and the satirist demanding the world do better.