Jonathan Swift’s Last Joke
Key takeaways
- Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In the dying light of a December afternoon in 2018, within the vaulted Gothic interior of St.
- 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.
- The text of the monument was in Latin and stipulated by Swift himself, in his will.
Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In 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”: