gulliver s travels - PURPLE PATCH: Meditation upon a broomstick —Jonathan Swift

This solo stick, which you now observe ingloriously lying in that mistreated corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest. It was full of sap, full of plants, and full of boughs; but now in vain does the busy art of man pretend to vie with nature, by tying that withered package of twigs to its sapless trunk; it is now at top but the overturn of what it was, a tree turned upside-down, the branches on the earth, and the root in the air; it is now handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and, by a unpredictable kind of fate, destined to make other things hygienic, and be nasty itself; at length, worn to the stumps in the service of the maids, it is either thrown out of doors or condemned to the last use of kindling a flames. When I behold this I sighed, and said within myself, “Surely fatal man is a broomstick!” Nature sent him into the world brawny and robust, in a thriving condition, wearing his own hair on his head, the proper branches of this reasoning vegetable, till the axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs, and left him a withered trunk; he then flies to art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon an perverted bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew on his head; but now should this our broomstick imagine to enter the scene, proud of those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with dust, through the sweepings of the premium lady’s chamber, we should be apt to ridicule and scorn its vanity. Partial judges that we are of our own Excellencies, and other men’s defaults!But a broomstick, perhaps you will say, is an sign of a tree standing on its head; and pray what is a man but a topsy-turvy creature, his animal faculties everlastingly mounted on his rational, his head where his heels should be, groveling on the earth? And yet, with all his faults, he sets up to be a universal reformer and corrector of abuses, a remover of grievances, rakes into every slut’s corner of nature, bringing unseen corruptions to the light, and raises a mighty dust where there was none before, sharing deeply all the while in the very same pollutions he pretends to sweep away. His last days are spent in slavery to women, and generally the least deserving; till, worn to the stumps, like his brother besom, he is either kicked out of doors, or made use of to kindle flames for others to tepid themselves by.