Swift and Pope: Satirizing Death in Enlightenment Poetry
This essay examines Jonathan Swift's "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" and Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Arbuthnot" as companion works in the Enlightenment satirical tradition. Both poems use humor, candor, and self-reflection to confront mortality, assess literary legacies, and honor close friendship. The essay explores the poets' shared motivations — including the desire to control how they are remembered — and traces the ways each poet weaves references to the other throughout their verse. It argues that satire functions as an essential tool for managing grief, egotism, and existential anxiety, and that both poems represent the climax of their authors' careers.
- Introduction: Mocking Death as a Literary Act: Swift and Pope use satire to confront mortality
- Mortality and the Reassessment of Legacy: Death prompts both poets to reassess their legacies
- Personal Motivations and Poetic Self-Reflection: Poets expose insecurities and personal motivations honestly
- Friendship, Rivalry, and Mutual Admiration: Each poet weaves tributes to the other
- Satire as a Vehicle for Eulogy: Humor prevents sentimentality and elevates the tribute
- Enlightenment Values and the Rejection of Religious Death: Gentle teasing and self-effacement shape each poem
- Conclusion: Transcending Death Through Literature: Both poems achieve timeless literary and humanizing legacy
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper draws a precise structural parallel between the two poems, showing how each functions simultaneously as a self-portrait and a tribute to a friend — a comparison that yields genuine analytical insight.
- Direct quotations from both poems are integrated naturally and used as evidence for specific claims, rather than dropped in without context.
- The essay maintains a confident, appropriately literary tone throughout, mirroring the wit of the poets it discusses without losing analytical focus.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative close reading: it places two texts in dialogue, identifying shared themes (mortality, legacy, friendship, egotism) while respecting what makes each poem distinct. By quoting specific lines and glossing them in context, the writer shows how textual evidence supports broader thematic claims rather than simply asserting them.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by introducing both poems and their shared satirical project, then moves through thematic sections covering legacy, personal motivation, friendship, and the role of humor. It closes by situating the poems within Enlightenment thought and arguing for their lasting humanizing effect on both poets as historical figures. The argument builds progressively, returning to the central thesis — that satire enables a fearless confrontation with death — in each section.
Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope mastered satire as a primary means of poetic communication. Swift's "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" is essentially his self-written obituary. With candid self-insight, Swift admits his flaws, his jealousies, his insecurities, and his egotism. His characteristic tongue-in-cheek style belies the weight of the subject matter; he knew his death was imminent and, at the most basic level, wanted to pen something that displayed how he hoped to be remembered.
Swift's friend Alexander Pope did not copy him. However, Pope's "Epistle to Arbuthnot" is the obituary of his dear friend John Arbuthnot, who also happened to be a friend of Swift's. The "Epistle to Arbuthnot" is similar in tone and style to "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift." Both poems are brash, humorous, sarcastic, and brutally honest. Although morbid in theme, the poems serve distinct literary functions. Pope and Swift mock death while they are still alive, and they do so fearlessly and with the same lack of compunction the authors reveal throughout the rest of their literary canon.
Mocking death is the final frontier for both Swift and Pope. After taking jabs at social and political issues throughout their careers, Swift and Pope tackle a more existential issue: mortality. Both poets confront their own deaths with aplomb. As Pope writes about the death of his friend, he does so with the understanding that it is his own mortality he contemplates. For instance, lines 302 and 303 of "Epistle to Arbuthnot" provide an example of how Pope writes himself into his friend's eulogy: "Make satire a lampoon, and fiction, lie / A lash like mine no honest man shall dread." His roast of his friend is as much a reflection of his own temperament as Swift's self-eulogy.
The motivations for writing an autobiographical obituary and an obituary of a friend include the willingness, desire, and need to satirize one of the heaviest matters in human experience: death. For artists and creative figures like Swift and Pope, death entails the need to reassess one's legacy. In doing so, Swift and Pope reach the climax of their work. Their reassessment becomes something that is far from self-indulgent, even as they write about themselves.
There are also deeply personal reasons for penning their respective morbid poems. Swift controls how he is remembered; his death is not the end of his life but the beginning of a timeless legacy. Writing his obituary gives him a sense of control over his destiny. The self-reflection is remarkably personal, yet paradoxically detached.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.