A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

By Jonathan Swift

His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that Mighty Warrior fall?
And so inglorious, after all!
Well, since he’s gone, no matter how,
The last loud trump must wake him now:
And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He’d wish to sleep a little longer.
And could he be indeed so old
As by the newspapers we’re told?
Threescore, I think, is pretty high;
’Twas time in conscience he should die
This world he cumbered long enough;
He burnt his candle to the snuff;
And that’s the reason, some folks think,
He left behind so great a stink.
Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widow’s sighs, nor orphan’s tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.
But what of that, his friends may say,
He had those honours in his day.
True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he died.

Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.

Podcast Transcript

If you thought poetry was all sweetness and light, daffodils and rainbows, sublime visions and declarations of undying love, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. It can be all those things – but it can also be bitterness and spite, insult and injury, backbiting and kicking people when they are down – or in this case, even when they are dead.

And to illustrate this harsh truth, I give you Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish writer who by the time he wrote this poem, in 1722, was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin – a man of the cloth, no less. I mean, when someone dies, we generally expect the vicar to be the person who says something kindly and consoling and full of as much praise as he or she can honestly muster. But Swift obviously didn’t feel bound by such social niceties.

So who was the ‘late famous general’ and why did Swift hate him so much? He was John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, a British statesman in the late 17th and early 18th century, and a general in the British army who was famous for never losing a battle. Blenheim Palace, the famous country house in Oxfordshire, was named after his victory at the Battle of Blenheim, and built for Marlborough by the Crown as a reward for winning the battle. So he was quite a big deal and regarded by many as a national hero.

But Swift hated him. Because he saw him as the embodiment of a corrupt system. And with some justification: Marlborough’s rise at court involved a fair amount of nepotism – his sister was the mistress of King James II, and later on, his wife’s friendship with Queen Anne was central to his power. Then, when Sarah fell out with the Queen, Marlborough’s career collapsed.

Swift’s enmity was also political – as a Tory, he believed that the wars in which Marlborough distinguished himself were a racket run by the Whigs, the other major political force at the time. He believed England was being bled dry to serve foreign interests and enrich Marlborough and his circle. So far from being a hero, Swift saw Marlborough as a corrupt and greedy fellow who amassed a fortune by sacrificing other people’s lives and money in unnecessary wars.

So Swift didn’t like the guy. And instead of writing the conventional respectful elegy, he wrote a ‘satirical elegy’, to ridicule him and attack his reputation. Now, this kind of thing wasn’t unheard of at the time – the Augustan age, as it was known, was an age of satire. We caught a glimpse of this tendency a couple of episodes ago, in An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope, who was a friend of Swift.

The Augustans looked at the world and saw folly, corruption and vice everywhere, and produced works that were satirical, often of specific individuals but also of humanity in general. A great example of this is Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels. You may have come across an edited and illustrated version of this book when you were a child. But if you read the whole thing, it is a very dark book, with a very grim view of human beings, and definitely not suitable for children.

So satire and criticism were part of the air Swift breathed. But there is a violence, a vitriol in Swift that we don’t find in Pope, or indeed any other Augustan writer. And not many other writers I can think of. Swift wrote an epitaph for himself – maybe because he was worried someone might write him an elegy like this! And in the epitaph he describes himself in terms of ‘saeva indignatio’, savage indignation. And I think savage indignation is exactly the tone we pick up in this poem, and in much of his other writing.

It was as if he had a grudge against life, which started at birth. He described himself as ‘an Englishman born in Ireland’ and clearly wished he hadn’t been. ‘I happened to be dropped here’, was how he described it. I once tried to read a biography of Swift and I gave up, not because it wasn’t well-written, but because he was such insufferable company. He had an endless list of complaints about being overlooked for professional positions, or people acting against him behind his back – and the biographer patiently explained that in many cases, the perceived injury or injustice was entirely in Swift’s mind. He was taking offence where none had been given.

Anyway, I’m here to analyse Swift’s poem, not his personality. So let’s get started on the poem.

The poem advertises its stance in the title: ‘A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General’. Why didn’t he name Marlborough in the title? Well, he was writing for an audience who would have known exactly who he was referring to. He didn’t publish the poem, probably because it would have been too scandalous. So it would have been circulated among friends in manuscript copies.

In the episode about Pope, I said the typical stance of an Augustan writer was of ‘a reasonable man writing for a group of like-minded people’. And that pretty well applies to Swift here, apart from maybe the ‘reasonable’ part. When he refers to ‘a Late Famous General’, there’s a gossipy, knowing tone – we all know who he’s referring to, and if you don’t know, then maybe you’re just not one of us.

And the gossipy voice continues into the opening lines:

His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!

It’s like the opening of a play, isn’t it? Where we learn the news of the death through the reaction of a character on stage. Then it segues into the mock-heroic mode that was so popular in the Augustan age, where the heroic pretensions of the so-called great and good are brought down to earth by mundane reality:

And could that Mighty Warrior fall?
And so inglorious, after all!

The rhyming couplets are also part of the signature style of the age. As we saw a couple of months ago, Pope was the master of the heroic couplet, two rhyming iambic pentameters, ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM. Swift is using iambic tetrameters, so there are only four beats in the line: ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM which makes the verse a little more clipped and terse, but very much in the same clever and witty and pithy mode.

In the next four lines, the speaker seems to adopt a more reflective and pious tone, before undercutting this with a really sharp dig:

Well, since he’s gone, no matter how,
The last loud trump must wake him now:
And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He’d wish to sleep a little longer.

So ‘The last loud trump’ is a reference to the Day of Judgment, heralded by a trumpet blast, when Christians believe Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead. So why would someone want to sleep a little longer on Judgment Day? Presumably because he is not expecting a favourable judgment! So, far from avoiding speaking ill of the dead, Swift is condemning him to Hell. And there’s more:

And could he be indeed so old
As by the newspapers we’re told?
Threescore, I think, is pretty high;
’Twas time in conscience he should die
This world he cumbered long enough;
He burnt his candle to the snuff;
And that’s the reason, some folks think,
He left behind so great a stink.

I mean, really, Dean Swift? Is this necessary? Is it Christian? It’s undeniably clever and sharp. But it’s almost unspeakably nasty. The guy’s dead. Did you really hate him so much that you can’t help rubbing it in? And do you have to be so crude?

I mean, the primary meaning of ‘so great a stink’ is clearly that Swift thinks the Duke left behind a lot of bad feeling. But given that we’re talking about someone who has recently died, the body just buried, it’s hard to escape the connotations of the ‘stink’ of a decomposing corpse. And if you think I’m reading too much into that phrase, then you should check out some of Swift’s other writings, where there are plenty of descriptions of the body and its various disgusting forms and functions.

But the good Dean hasn’t finished with the ‘late famous general’:

Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widow’s sighs, nor orphan’s tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.

So Swift claims that there were no widow’s sighs or orphan’s tears at the Duke’s funeral, which implies that he wasn’t even mourned by his own surviving family. And if that’s not insult enough, he really twists the knife in the following lines:

But what of that, his friends may say,
He had those honours in his day.
True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he died.

Ouch! So obviously the Duke’s friends would never have said anything like this. It’s typically savage irony from Swift, saying the opposite of what he means or what is likely, to make his point brutally clear. And notice how cleverly – I almost said Swiftly! – he elides from the specific to the general. When he first refers to ‘widow’s sighs’ and ‘orphan’s’, it’s slightly ambiguous – perhaps he’s just talking about Marlborough’s family. But he then goes on to suggest that the Duke provoked plenty of widows’ sighs and orphans’ tears during his lifetime – presumably because of all the men who were killed in the wars that made his fortune.

True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he died.

Then we get the gloriously horrible ending, with a mock-merry tone that belies the vicious sentiment:

Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.

So even though, as we’ve seen, the Duke benefited from a lot of nepotism, he was a man of substantial achievement, at least in military terms – a man who won many battles and sieges and was described as a strategic genius even by people who disliked him. So it’s a little extreme to describe him as a ‘bubble raised by breath of kings’, as if he were the kind of talentless fop who simply hung around the court in search of preferment. But if we take these lines purely on their own terms, they are a wonderfully biting criticism posing as a jolly invitation:

Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.

And what is that fate? Well, Swift closes his poem by quite literally dishing the dirt on his subject:

Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.

So once again, Swift exploits a tension between opposites when he says ‘how very mean a thing’s a Duke’, because in Ireland and England, a duke was and is the very highest ranking hereditary peerage. It’s basically one rank down from a king. So it was absolutely not the case that a duke was a ‘mean’ thing, i.e. a low or common thing, in the social sense. So Swift is saying that a very mean person can occupy a high place in society, and we shouldn’t be deceived by appearances.

From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.

That brutal last line of the poem manages to be both savage and spiritual: by saying that Marlborough has turned to dirt, it’s a literal and nasty reference to the fact his corpse is decomposing and returning to dirt. It also looks like a swipe at his origins, saying that he ‘sprung’ from dirt, which again might seem odd in terms of social status, given that his father, Sir Winston Churchill, was a knight of the realm. But Churchill was ‘new money’ compared to the ancient aristocracy, so it looks like Swift wants to remind us of that.

And of course it is also a Biblical reference, from Genesis Chapter 3 Verse 19, when God says to Adam, when he expels him and Eve from the Garden of Eden, ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’. And this mixture of savagery and sanctimony is absolutely typical of Swift, and is as memorable as it is repulsive.

So why am I reading you such a nasty poem? Well, firstly, because I admire it as a poetic performance, even as I recoil from its spirit. It is a brilliantly written poem, however unpleasant it may be. And poetry is a broad church, there are no human experiences or feeling that it cannot encompass or express.

But also reading it because I detect an irony in this poem that I believe even Swift was unaware of, and I’d like to share that with you – even though I think he would have vigorously resisted what I’m about to say. OK, let’s be honest. I’m going to say it partly because I know he would have hated it!

So as I said earlier, Swift had very mixed feelings about having been born and bred in Ireland. He was Anglo-Irish, meaning descendants of English Protestants who had emigrated to Ireland and who in Swift’s lifetime were the ruling class on the island, who defined themselves in opposition to the native Irish, who were mostly Catholic and spoke Gaelic instead of English.

So he saw himself as English first and foremost, and looked down on Gaelic speakers. For instance, he made a proposal ‘for teaching the meaner and poorer sort of children to speak and to read the English tongue’ – because this would ‘in time, abolish that part of barbarity and ignorance, for which our natives are so despised by all foreigners’ and ‘bring them to think and act according to the rules of reason’.

Now it’s not a black and white picture, because in spite of this low opinion of the people he called ‘our natives’, he did speak up and stand up for them on quite a few occasions. By the standards of his time and class, advocating universal schooling for the Catholic poor was a progressive position. And when he died, he left most of his money to found Ireland’s first hospital for the mentally ill. So you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to trace the tension between opposites in Swift’s writing, as expressed in irony, paradox and satire, to his own complex and conflicted personality.

But regardless, for Swift, ‘Gaelic culture’ was a contradiction in terms – he saw the native Irish as uncivilised, backward, and lacking in the literary sophistication of writers such as him and his friends in London.

And yet… when I read a poem like this, that takes such evident delight in shredding the reputation of a would-be warrior hero, and which uses such extreme and violent language, I can’t help thinking of the Gaelic poets of old Ireland.

So from ancient times, right up until the 17th century, the poet, the filè, had a well-established role in Irish society. Poetry was a high status profession, on the same level as a warrior or a judge or a doctor. Those were the days, eh? Can you imagine the parents boasting to their friends? ‘Our son’s a poet. We’re so proud of him.’ Oh well.

And one reason why poets were feared as well as admired, was that it was their role to recite the history of the clan, its kings and warriors, and to immortalise them in poetry – either praising them as heroes or shaming them as cowards. Their words were even regarded as having supernatural power. An áer was a kind of poem that is sometimes translated as a satire and sometimes as a curse, because it had elements of both: it was a witty public shaming that was also a magical weapon.

According to legend, the first áer that was composed in Ireland was back in the time of the Tuatha Dé Danann, now known as the Sidhe or faeries. And it was composed by the poet Coirpre mac Étaín. He came to the hall of a king named Bres seeking hospitality. But he was shown into a narrow little house with no fire or furniture. And all he was given to eat was three small cakes, and they were dry.

So these days Bres would be looking at a one-star review on Google, but being a poet, Coirpre composed an áer that tore into Bres and cursed him. Whereupon, red blotches appeared on Bres’s face, and in those days, disfigurement meant a king had to abdicate. So his kingship was over, destroyed by a poem.

So that was the first áer, the first satire, ever composed in Ireland. And from ancient times until shortly before Swift was born, poets had a powerful formal role in Irish society. It was their job to build reputations – and to demolish them.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Don’t you think Swift’s satirical elegy is a perfect fit for this kind of thing? It’s a vicious satire designed to shame a warrior and destroy his reputation. You know, the Augustan writers liked to compare themselves to the great Roman poets of the age of Augustus Caesar. But Horace or Juvenal would probably have raised an eyebrow at the sheer savagery of Swift’s ‘Satirical Elegy’. Yet an Irish filè would have nodded in professional recognition.

So if you ask me, Swift can proudly take his place in the great tradition of Irish satirical poets. But of course he wouldn’t want to, would he? Having railed against Irish barbarism he would hardly relish finding himself in squarely in the tradition of the so-called barbarians. And I do mean this as a genuine compliment to Swift, even though I’m sure he’d see it as a very backhanded one.

I would hope that he might grudgingly appreciate the Swiftian irony of this most anti-Irish of poets being claimed for a great Irish tradition. But I wouldn’t bet on it. And I can probably count myself lucky he’s not around to hear this podcast, and compose a response to me that would be as brilliantly savage as the poem we’re about to hear again.

A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

By Jonathan Swift

His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that Mighty Warrior fall?
And so inglorious, after all!
Well, since he’s gone, no matter how,
The last loud trump must wake him now:
And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He’d wish to sleep a little longer.
And could he be indeed so old
As by the newspapers we’re told?
Threescore, I think, is pretty high;
’Twas time in conscience he should die
This world he cumbered long enough;
He burnt his candle to the snuff;
And that’s the reason, some folks think,
He left behind so great a stink.
Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widow’s sighs, nor orphan’s tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.
But what of that, his friends may say,
He had those honours in his day.
True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he died.

Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, poet and Anglican clergyman, who was born in 1667 and died in 1745. He is best known for Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal, works characterised by savage irony and a bleak view of human nature. Appointed Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713, he became an unlikely champion of Irish causes through the Drapier’s Letters and other pamphlets, while simultaneously regarding his Irish birth as an unhappy accident and dismissing Gaelic culture as barbarous. He left most of his fortune to found Ireland’s first psychiatric hospital.

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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