Trinity law professor David Kenny spent seven years decoding Swift’s self-written Latin epitaph at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, arguing it is deliberate self-mockery, not heroic boast.
Key Takeaways
Yeats’s famous 1933 translation framed the epitaph as earnest; Kenny argues Swift, a lifelong ironist, would never write a sincere self-eulogy.
Key evidence: Swift’s will places his monument next to Narcissus Marsh, a rival he publicly despised, suggesting the placement itself is satirical commentary.
A 1777 travelogue confirms the two epitaphs were originally adjacent; a Guinness-funded 1860s cathedral restoration likely separated them, obscuring the joke.
Parallel from “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”: Swift’s boastful claims in that poem are widely accepted as ironic, yet the epitaph received no such reading.
Kenny’s method: seven years of biographies, correspondence, secondary literature, and a 35-euro physical copy of Swift’s will that finally surfaced the Marsh connection.
