Page 11 - Gullivers

The church to which Swist refers in these lines has long since disappeared but was once a notable Dublin landmark: St. Andrew’s church, usually known as
the ‘Round Church’. The popular name was not quite accurate in fact, since the church, built in the 1660s following the Restoration of Charles II and eventually destroyed by fire in the 1860s, had been built on an elliptical plan. Swist’s mention of the church, however, is intended primarily not to fix the position
of the parliament house – already an imposing building well known to Dubliners, if not those beyond the Irish capital – but to facilitate a joke. The location of the parliament house next to the church is seen as ‘Making good my grandam’s jest,/ Near the church – you know the rest’: an allusion to the popular proverb: ‘Near the church and far from God’.
Throughout his pœm, in fact, the physical fabric of Dublin figures as
a symbolic location for Swist’s satirical attack on Irish politicians. For a while, Swist toys with the notion of wanting to destroy the parliament, as a means of destroying those whom it contains:
Could I from the building’s top
Hear the rattling thunder drop,
While the devil upon the roof,
If the devil be thunder-proof,
Should with poker fiery red
Crack the stones, and melt the lead; Drive them down on every skull,
While the den of thieves is full. (ll. 21-28)
I. Swist and Dublin 5