Friends and Enemies in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift

Abstract

“I have been severall months writing near five hundred lines on a pleasant subject, onely to tell what my friends and enemyes will say on me after I am dead.” 1 From Swift’s descriptions of Verses on the Death of Dr, Swift in these or very similar words, over and over in his letters, it is evident that (however later critics may have described the poem) when he himself thought of it as a whole, he thought of it as a poem about friendship and enmity, and as a poem about what people would say of him after he died,2 Despite abundant commentary on the poem’s textual history, its structure, genre, irony, vanity, politics, religious lessons, and multiplication of identities, we still have not paid enough attention to the basic question of what it is about. Some discussions, moreover, have insisted too much upon finding Swift an exemplary poet and moralist. But Ronald Paulson, Marshall Wain­ grow, and David M. Vieth have spoken of friendship as a topic of the Verses; and I propose, without purporting to rescue the poem from the fascinated uneasiness with which we read it, or to explain away its rhetorical flaws, that a fuller recognition of Swift’s strong emphasis on friendship and enmity would correspondingly benefit our understand­ ing of the poem’s intended meaning.3 To that end, I seek to show how the poem emphasizes friendship of a particular kind; then, to illuml·