It has always been a conviction of mine that the best people are born in November. Jimmy Hendrix, Billy Connolly, Scarlet Johansson, Voltaire, Bjork, Joe Biden [poor old Joe, 82 last Tuesday], Claude Monet, Whoopi Goldberg, Marie Antoinette – who lost her head while all about were losing theirs – and ... well ... me! Okay, I’m biased.
Not listed there is Jonathan Swift, the most famous dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral to date. Possibly, “infamous” might be more accurate.
We’ve had quite a few well-known deans there recently, including the late great Victor Griffin, Robert McCarthy, and current Dean William Morton who, while plague raged throughout the world, put a new roof on the 800-year-old building during 2020 and 2021. Deans of St Patrick’s, clearly, tend to be made of “the right stuff”.
Jonathan Swift would have been 357 years old next Saturday had he not, inconveniently, died in 1745. Those of us who admire the contrary old weed were the original Swifties. We were Swifties before singer Taylor Swift herself was born in 1989. Yes, before it was so popular and so, so profitable.
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There was all that “savage indignation”, you see. What’s not to love about a man who recommended that the Irish people could escape poverty by selling their children as a delicacy for the tables of the English rich?
In his A Modest Proposal, he wrote how he had been “assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food ...”
It was satire, of course, as were his more famous Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of a Tub, etc.
Yeats wrote those lines: “Swift has sailed into his rest;/Savage indignation there/Cannot lacerate his breast./Imitate him if you dare,/World-besotted traveller; he/Served human liberty.”
You can see the original epitaph in finest Latin on the walls of St Patrick’s itself should you go there on Wednesday, November 27th where the excellent Culwick Choral Society will perform music from Swift’s period along with more seasonal and contemporary pieces. St Patrick’s Cathedral Girls’ Choir will also perform.
All that music, such as will soothe the savage breast, soften rocks, or bend the knotted oak.
Swiftie, a fan of Jonathan Swift and the original of the species, preceding any pop star.
