Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit [Where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more].

This Latin line is the epitaph Jonathan Swift composed for himself and had placed on his monument in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, where he served as Dean. Written late in his life and associated with his declining health and increasing misanthropy, it reflects the self-image Swift cultivated as a satirist driven by moral outrage at political corruption, human folly, and social injustice in Ireland and Britain. The epitaph’s phrasing suggests a desire for final rest from the emotional torment of indignation—an indignation that had fueled much of his public writing and polemical activity.

The line frames Swift’s life as one marked by “savage indignation”—a fierce, almost bodily anger at vice and stupidity—so intense it “lacerates” the heart. Death is imagined not as defeat but as release: only in the grave can that moral pain cease. The epitaph also functions as a key to Swift’s satire: his attacks are not merely playful wit but the product of ethical passion that wounds the satirist as much as his targets. In presenting indignation as both motive and suffering, Swift casts himself as a reluctant scourge whose peace lies beyond the world he criticized.

1) "Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit." 2) "Where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart." 3) "Where fierce indignation can tear his heart no more."