Jonathan Swift’s Last Joke

The writer composed his own epitaph. Did it have a secret satirical intent?May 2, 2026Illustration by Jan Robert DünnwellerIn the dying light of a December afternoon in 2018, within the vaulted Gothic interior of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Rosie Hennigan saw that her husband, David Kenny, was hypnotized by an epitaph. Kenny and Hennigan are a witty, attractive Irish couple. He is a professor of law at Trinity College and she is a novelist. Their conversations often take the form of friendly jousts.Hennigan had suggested the visit because she wanted to learn more about a Tudor artifact in the cathedral, known as the Door of Reconciliation, for a book she was researching. But it was a more recent monument that detained Kenny. Near the south door, he gazed up at a marble plaque bearing the epitaph for Jonathan Swift, the redoubtable novelist, poet, satirist, and former Dean of St. Patrick’s who died in 1745, and who was buried beneath the cathedral floor.The text of the monument was in Latin and stipulated by Swift himself, in his will. Translations vary, but the most enduring was published in 1933, by William Butler Yeats, who considered Swift’s “the greatest epitaph in history”:SWIFT has sailed into his rest;Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty.Kenny reads Latin, and knew that Yeats had taken some liberties himself. Leo Damrosch, who published “Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World,” in 2013, had rendered a less flamboyant translation:Here is deposited the body of Jonathan Swift S.T.D. [Sacrae Theologiae Doctor] of this Cathedral church the Dean where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveler, and imitate, if you can, a valiant champion of manly freedom.Kenny had adored Swift since he was introduced, as a schoolboy, to “A Modest Proposal,” the Dean’s mordant, devastating satire on class relations in Ireland. (

Swift’s suggestion for reducing the number of poor children in the country is for the rich to eat them; kids are delicious, he notes, “whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”) Kenny had read Swift’s epitaph before, but on that gloomy afternoon the lines caught him anew. “I had the strongest sense that there was something going on here that I couldn’t quite understand, and that wasn’t captured by Yeats,” Kenny told me recently. “The interpretive materials in the cathedral didn’t suggest the possibility of any other reading. The rousing, earnest interpretation taken up by Yeats was clearly the accepted understanding. But, to my ear, it was discordant. . . . Swift had never struck me as boastful. Something felt wrong.”Hennigan and Kenny returned home. She went to bed; he stayed up until the early hours reading Swift. This wasn’t that anomalous an occurrence. Kenny, who later became head of the law school at Trinity, is a constitutional specialist who has worked in Ukraine and has advised the Japanese parliament on referendums. But he also teaches a class called Literature and the Law, and many of his friends are writers. (He’s mentioned in the acknowledgments of Sally Rooney’s novel “Intermezzo” because he helped her better understand the world of one of her protagonists, a Dublin barrister.) That night of Swiftian immersion was the start of Kenny’s effort to grasp the deeper meaning of the epitaph—an academic side quest that, he freely admitted, has become an obsession. Seven years later, the journey may be reaching its conclusion.In September, Kenny and I walked a mile from the elegant front quad of Trinity College to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. About to turn forty, he was wearing a sports coat, chinos, and oxfords, and his brown hair was swept tidily across his head. We stopped every so often so that Kenny could point out some piece of Swiftiana: the Dean’s modest birthplace, near Dublin Castle; the library outside St. Patrick’s, which holds the oldest copy of Swift’s will; the row of houses near the cathedral, which are adorned with reliefs depicting scenes from Swift’s dark and riotous novel “Gulliver’s Travels,” the work with which he will forever be associated. As we entered the cathedral, we passed a cast of Swift’s skull.

Nearby, on a wall, was the epitaph.Kenny showed me around. He told me that, soon after his December, 2018, visit to St. Patrick’s, an observation from a 1953 essay by the critic Maurice Johnson had struck him: “There is no joke in Swift’s epitaph. It is obtrusively serious.” Kenny couldn’t bring himself to believe this. Nothing Swift wrote was “obtrusively serious.” There was cleverness and doubleness in every line. Moreover, something was off in the heroic style of the epitaph. Swift rarely wrote in such a register, except to mock it. As he put it in the comic poem “An Epistle to a Lady,” “For your Sake, as well as mine / I the lofty Stile decline.”Swift’s epitaph, in St Patrick's Cathedral.Photograph by jimfeng / GettyThere was one text that Kenny thought was particularly relevant to his search for the truth about the epitaph. In 1732, Swift completed a poem titled “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.” in anticipation of his demise. The poem describes how Swift will be forgotten by his friends, and by the reading public. Its final verses contain some egregious claims, not least that Swift’s brutal satires have never been cruel: “Yet malice never was his aim; / He lash’d the vice, but spar’d the name; / No individual could resent, / Where thousands equally were meant.”“Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” was widely misunderstood in Swift’s lifetime, and for centuries afterward. Alexander Pope, a friend of Swift’s, dismissed its final stanzas as “too vain” and “not true.” But, as several scholars have since noted, Pope got Swift wrong. Swift was being ironic in these passages: mocking himself, and mocking vanity of all kinds. (The claim that he had “lash’d the vice, but spar’d the name” was undermined by the long list of enemies he ravaged, by name, earlier in the same poem.) In other words, the boasts were Swift’s joke—on himself, and on the remembrance business in general. Kenny wondered if the same misunderstanding had afflicted “the greatest epitaph in history.

”Kenny’s quest to understand where Swift’s last joke was hidden began with studying epitaphs in general. (One night, as Kenny and Hennigan read together on their living-room couch, she asked what was so absorbing him; it was the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland.) Then, after reëncountering Swift’s epitaph, he attempted to understand Swift himself as thoroughly as possible, by reading every major biography and as many secondary works as he could handle, including large volumes of Swift’s correspondence. Finally, he “started looking at matters related to the epitaph,” Kenny said, adding, “I was first interested in making sure of my case that Swift was up to something, rather than necessarily to figure out what he was up to.”This went on for years, as Kenny disappeared into several “wonderful diversions” that allowed him a more acute understanding of Swift. For instance, the Dean had written another epitaph in the cathedral, for the Duke of Schomberg, who died, at the Battle of the Boyne, in 1690. Kenny told me that it was “one of the maddest epitaphs” he’d ever seen. On our walking tour, we stopped to read its Latin text. In it, Swift settles scores with Schomberg’s relatives, who failed to respond to Swift’s entreaties to erect a monument to the Duke’s memory. “His reputation for virtue among strangers was stronger than the ties of blood,” it reads. Swift also paid for the text to be published in London newspapers, so that Schomberg’s skinflint relatives would see it. “Apparently the King and Queen were furious,” Kenny told me. “They thought it might lead to a breach with Prussia.”The Schomberg epitaph taught Kenny something: Swift was unafraid to use marble to make a point. But it was only in March, 2025, that it became obvious to Kenny what the point may have been. He bought a secondhand copy of a rare printing of Swift’s long and elaborate will from a bookseller, for thirty-five euros. He had read the will online several times, but something about having the paper copy led him to read it differently.One night, Kenny brought the will into the bedroom to show Hennigan something that had tickled him.

Swift had mischievously bequeathed his first-, second-, and third-best “beaver hats” to his friends, allowing them to squabble after his death about how he might have ranked the garments. Another detail also jumped out:I desire that my Body may be buried in the Great Isle of [St. Patrick’s] Cathedral, on the South Side, under the Pillar next to the Monument of Primate Narcissus Marsh, three Days after my Decease, as privately as possible, and at Twelve O’Clock at Night: and, that a Black Marble of [illegible] Feet square, and seven Feet from the Ground, fixed to the Wall, may be erected, with the following Inscription in large Letters, deeply cut, and strongly gilded . . .Narcissus Marsh! It was a thunderbolt. As Kenny knew, Swift loathed Marsh.Marsh was the provost of Trinity College during Swift’s time, and had risen to be the Primate, or chief clergyman, in Ireland. Swift believed him to be a man of little wit and few talents who had failed upward. In a description of Primate Marsh written around 1710, Swift comments on his enemy’s unpleasant body odor and lack of friends, and notes that he is “the first of human race, that with great advantages of learning, piety, and station, ever escaped being a great man.” Swift concludes his attack: “No man will be either glad or sorry at his death, except his successor.”Why, then, would Swift have asked for his epitaph to be placed next to such an unimpressive man? On our tour of the cathedral, Kenny showed me Marsh’s monument. It was a huge slab of white marble on which there were some sixty lines of text, in Latin, listing Marsh’s many achievements and virtues—he was brilliant, pious, munificent, and a seven-time Lord Justice of Ireland. Kenny laughed at the Ozymandian pathos of the scene: the monument was partially obscured by several towers of stacked plastic chairs.Kenny explained to me that the monument had originally been outside the cathedral, near the public library that Marsh had founded and that bears his name. The stone was moved inside in 1728, to save it from the weather.