The great Jonathan Swift wrote a poem when he thought he was close to dying, called “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.”. It’s very long and funny and also not funny. It would be classified as “cringe” nowadays maybe, but I don’t care about that. I am more embarrassed that I know what cringe means than I am about my defense of Swift’s poem.

Here is a part that spoke to me in particular:

  "Had he but spar'd his tongue and pen
He might have rose like other men:
But pow'r was never in his thought,
And wealth he valu'd not a groat:
Ingratitude he often found,
And pity'd those who meant the wound:

What does it mean? It’s pretty obvious to me, but ok I will put it in words clearer for you. He’s saying he didn’t give a fuck. Not about money or what people thought… Ironically the reasons he didn’t give a fuck was because he DID give a fuck. He gave too many fucks, until he’d run out of fucks to give.

Here is a potted essay on Jonathan Swift and why, like him, I am cursed with the idgaf of giving too many fucks.

The “Gulliver” Problem

First, a little SEO primer for the uninitiated, because apparently, the algorithm demands it. You probably know Swift as the guy who wrote Gulliver’s Travels (1726). You might remember a Ted Danson movie or a cartoon where a giant is tied down by little people. You may even recall Jack Black urinating on a palace to put out a fire, simultaneously saving and pwon-pissing on them (that’s actually in the book). The uninitiated think it’s a whimsical adventure story. It isn’t.

It’s a brutal, misanthropic takedown of political pettiness, scientific hubris, and the general idiocy of the human species. The “Yahoos” represent US (not the US, I mean us humans, the Ant Monkeys and The Human Disgrace etc). We are the savage, shit-flinging beasts. Swift’s cute little bedtime story, in its unabridged form, was nothing less than a hate mail to humanity.

He also wrote A Modest Proposal (1729), a pamphlet suggesting the Irish poor should sell their children as food to the rich to solve the famine. People at the time thought he was serious. That is the level of “sick burn” we are dealing with here. He was the original troll, but with a PhD in moral outrage. (Note that’s factually inaccurate, PhD didn’t exist in those days, but he obtained a Doctor in Divinity degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1702)

The Original Edgelord: The Bickerstaff Prank

Before we get to his own death poem, you have to understand that Swift treated mortality like a punchline long before he was on his deathbed. In 1708, writing under the pseudonym “Isaac Bickerstaff,” he predicted the death of a famous astrologer named John Partridge. Partridge was a bit of a hack who sold almanacs, and Swift decided to end him.

Swift predicted Partridge would die on March 29th at 11 pm. When the day came, Swift published a letter confirming that Partridge had indeed died, right on schedule. The thing is, Partridge was very much alive. But Swift kept the bit going. It got practical, too. Legend (and a convenient pamphlet likely forged by Swift’s friends) has it that on April 1st, a sexton knocked on Partridge’s door to ask about the funeral sermon, followed by an undertaker looking to measure the walls for mourning drapes.

When Partridge tried to publish a new almanac to prove he wasn’t a corpse, Swift accused him of being an imposter who had taken over the dead man’s business. He effectively gaslit London into believing this guy was dead, ruining his career. It was the 18th-century equivalent of hacking some right-wing influencer to spam their timeline with woke goodness. Like all the best satire, what he wrote weaponised reality by hijacking truth and replacing it with a more painful, honest lie.

Why Was He So Angry? (The “Gulliver” Specifics)

So why did he do it? Why was he so irascible? Because Swift looked at the “Enlightenment”—the age of reason and science—and saw a bunch of self-important monkeys in wigs.

In Gulliver’s Travels, when Lemuel Gulliver visits Laputa, the flying island of scientists, he finds men trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and turn human excrement back into food. That was a direct shot at the Royal Society and the useless, masturbatory science of his day that ignored actual human suffering.

When the Lilliputians go to war over which end of a boiled egg to crack (the Big-Endians vs. the Little-Endians), Swift was mocking the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that had killed thousands. He was screaming, “You agree that eggs exist and are good for eating. You are killing each other over which way around you do it, you absolute cretins.” Let’s not forget that Catholics and Protestants are both Christians. Whether you love or hate the Pope, you have to remember that there is no mention of a Pope in the Bible, but Exodus 20:13 clearly fucking says: “Thou shalt not kill.”

He gave a fuck because he believed humans were capable of reason (“animal rationis capax”), but we chose to be irrational animals instead. He hated us because we wasted our potential on petty tribalism and pseudo-intellectual wankery. Just look at Twitter/X for five minutes and tell me he was wrong.

David Nokes titled his biography Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (1985) to highlight a central contradiction in Swift’s character: his tendency to conceal his virtues rather than his vices. The title is derived from a description of Swift by his close friend Lord Bolingbroke (Henry St John).

There are other, deeper and more personal reasons for Swift’s irascible nature too, which I will elucidate in another post, but it basically involves his crushed ambition, self-doxing and having a mind that was literally spinning and sick half the time. He saw the human race as a sickness because he himself had lived it…

The Pre-Mortem Roast

Which brings us to Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift. Written in 1731, years before he actually died, it’s essentially a “pre-mortem.” He imagines the news of his own death hitting the streets. He pictures his friends shrugging it off over a game of cards (“The Dean is dead? / (and what is Trumps?)”). He imagines his enemies celebrating.

It is arguably the greatest act of vanity in literary history, but it serves a purpose. It’s his final manifesto.

The lines I quoted above—about sparing his tongue and pen—are the key. Swift is saying he could have been a bishop. He could have been rich. He could have had “power.” All he had to do was shut up. All he had to do was play the game, flatter the right politicians, and ignore the corruption rotting the floorboards of society.

But he couldn’t.

The Curse of Giving a Damn

This is where the “idgaf” paradox kicks in.

Swift didn’t “spare his tongue.” He lashed out. He wrote dangerous, career-ending satire because he was incapable of not seeing the absurdity of the world.

To the outsider, Swift looked like he didn’t care about his reputation. He looked like a bitter, bridge-burning maniac. But the apathy was a shield. You don’t write thousands of words skewering the government unless you care deeply about how badly they are failing.

He ran out of fucks to give about consequence, because he had spent all his fucks on conscience.

That is the vibe we are cultivating here. When you see someone “raging against the machine,” usually they aren’t angry because they hate the world. They are angry because they know it could be better, and it’s driving them mad that everyone else is just playing cards.

What’s Next?

We are going to be diving deeper into this. Much deeper.

Over at Sarcgasm, I’m preparing a “Serious Satire” series where we strip-mine the history of the genre to find out why everything sucks and how to laugh at it properly.

And keep an eye on Hungry Wolf Press. We are dusting off some of Swift’s public domain works—including the Verses and some lesser-known venom—so you can read the original receipts he kept on 18th-century society.

Until then, spare not your tongue.