Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widow’s sighs, nor orphan’s tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.
And what of that? his friends may say,
He had those honors in his day.
True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he died.

These lines are from Jonathan Swift’s satirical poem “A Description of the Morning” (written in the early 1700s and first printed in 1710). The poem offers a brisk, urban panorama of London at daybreak, cataloguing tradespeople, street life, and the city’s harsher realities with Swift’s characteristic irony. In the midst of this “morning” scene, Swift briefly turns to a funeral procession, using it not for solemn reflection but as another social vignette. The passage mocks a deceased man whose life was marked by self-interest and exploitation, so that even in death he attracts no genuine grief.

Swift uses the absence of mourners—no widow’s sighs or orphans’ tears—to measure a life’s moral worth. The rhetorical shrug, “And what of that?”, mimics the excuses of acquaintances who defend the dead man’s reputation by pointing to the “honors” he enjoyed while alive. Swift’s sting comes in the reversal: the man did receive tears in his lifetime, but only because he caused them—through greed (“profit”) and vanity (“pride”). The couplet compresses a social critique: public status and ceremonial respectability can mask private cruelty, and a legacy is ultimately revealed by who truly mourns.