Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) is one of those authors — Ovid and Benjamin Franklin are others — who wrote with so many layers of irony that readers can never be sure they’ve reached the bottom of it. One is usually better off noting that Swift — or Ovid or Franklin — said something, than claiming that any of them believed the something that they had said. It’s probably impossible, for example, to peel back all the ironies and ironic references that populate the pages of Swift’s convoluted work in “A Tale of a Tub” (1699).

One of the ironic devices he adopted was disparaging himself, mocking those who tried to attack him by doing it better and more wittily. In 1713, as a (disappointing) reward for his work for the government at London, Swift was installed as dean of St. Patrick’s, the Anglican cathedral at Dublin. And it was there he wrote, probably in the early 1730s, “The Dean’s Manner of Living.” For the lighter verse featured on Wednesdays, The New York Sun offers as Poem of the Day these five tetrameter couplets in which Swift mocked his own life in Ireland.