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JONATHAN SWIFT'S "Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple" should be dated not to 1692 or 1693, as it generally is by modern scholars, but to 1690, which would make it his earliest known piece of writing. To support this argument, I draw on a range of biographical and textual evidence, much of it not fully considered by modern editors and readers of the poem: the whereabouts of Swift and Temple, Swift's duties on behalf of his patron, and parallels and verbal echoes between Swift's ode and Temple's essays. In addition to correcting this date, I discuss another early Swift poem that has received little critical attention, "Occasioned by Sir W - T's Late Illness and Recovery" (1693), and in light of the revised dating, clarify the connections between these two poems and their significance for Swift's early career.
During the years 1689-99, Swift spent three periods in residence with Sir William Temple, the essayist and diplomat, then living in retirement. The first stay was the shortest: he entered Temple's service sometime in 1689 and left around May 1690, having turned twenty- two. Swift performed various secretarial duties for Temple, as described in Temple's letter of 29 May 1690 to Sir Robert Southwell, principal secretary to Ireland: Swift "has lived in my house, read to mee, writt for mee, and kept all accounts as farr as my small occasions requird. Hee has latine and greeke & some French, writes a very good and current hand, is very honest and diligent."1
At this time, Swift perhaps wrote little. Although his "Ode to Dr. William Sancroft" was given the date May 1689 in its first publication a century later in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse, this date is too early, as Edward W. Rosenheim Jr. has shown: Swift wrote this poem to praise Sancroft, the archbishop of Canterbury who was deprived in February 1690 for refusing to recognize William III as king, but he did not depart Lambeth palace until June of the following year. Swift therefore could not have begun the poem - or at least those parts that refer to Sancroft's "retreat" - until summer 1691.2 Swift's letter of 3 May 1692 to his cousin Thomas confirms Rosenheim's argument; he refers to an ode...