Bettesworth's Exultation

Jonathan Swift, better known as the author of Gulliver's Travels and the foremost prose satirist in English, also wrote verse of devastating wit, and this poem is proof. Bettesworth's Exultation is a vicious little portrait of a man who has just learned his name will live forever in Swift's works, and he couldn't be happier about it. The satire cuts deep: Bettesworth doesn't realize (or perhaps does, and doesn't care) that being immortalized in Swift's satires means being remembered as a fool, a target, a laughingstock for posterity. Swift captures something uncomfortably true about human vanity, the desperate desire to be remembered at any cost, even if that remembrance is ridicule. It's a brief poem, barely a page, but it lands with the precision of a scalpel. For readers who know Swift only from his prose, this offers a window into his verse: same razor wit, same contempt for human pomposity, condensed into couplets that still sting three centuries later.