The complete name of this famous satirical poem is A Character, Panegyric, and Description of The Legion Club. The poem is a biting portrayal of the Irish Parliament, which Swift dubbed "the legion club" in reference to the well-known story in The Gospel According to S. Mark, Chapter 5, in which Jesus asks the "unclean spirit" possessing the man who is "dwelling among the tombs" to identify itself, and the spirit responds, "My name is Legion: for we are many."

Jesus frees the man from his possessing spirit, and "the devils" enter the bodies of a herd of nearby swine. By implication, then, the Irish Parliament is a legion of hellish spirits and swine, holding forth in their building, which is a kind of asylum for the damned and the mad.

This is the longest poem to appear in these pages. I considered presenting only excerpts from it, but then decided to go with the entire poem and shorten my accompanying remarks. The footnotes are verbatim from the text presented by Prometheus Books' Literary Classic A Modest Proposal and Other Satires. I know that you, gentle reader, will enjoy this poem because you are on this e-mail list as a result of being interested in politics, and this is one of the most political of all poems.