In December, 2018, while visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, David Kenny became hypnotized by an epitaph. 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:
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 had read Swift’s epitaph before, but on that day 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 Ed Caesar. “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.”
After seven years of research, Kenny thinks he’s cracked Swift’s true meaning: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essa...
