War! that mad game the world so loves to play.

Swift’s line treats war not as a tragic necessity but as a kind of collective pastime—an irrational “game” pursued with enthusiasm despite its ruinous stakes. Calling it “mad” underscores both moral insanity and social delusion: nations dress violence in the language of honor, glory, and policy, while ordinary people are swept into admiration for conquest. The phrasing also fits Swift’s satiric habit of deflating grand public rhetoric by reducing it to a childish or absurd metaphor. Read this way, the quote is less a comment on a single conflict than a condemnation of the recurring human appetite for organized violence and the cultural mechanisms that make it seem normal or even lovable.