Hozier’s Eat Your Young as a Modern-Day Response to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal

Almost three hundred years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, the song “Eat Your Young” by the Irish singer and song-writer Hozier reveals the attitudes of the wealthy ruling class analogous to those prevailing in the political climate of eighteenth century Ireland. Whereas Swift’s essay has been subject to various literary and political criticisms throughout the years, the research on “Eat Your Young”, and Hozier’s discography as a whole, is miniscule in comparison. Although Hozier’s song offers apt critique of the contemporary exploitation of people under the capitalist system, neither its satirical commentary nor its connection to Swift’s essay has been explored academically. This paper analyses the song as a modern social critique inspired by Swift’s essay. The song’s profound criticism is understood in this paper as a reiteration, with a difference, of Swift’s critique of the aftermath of the British colonial exploitation of Ireland. The song is here considered as a parodic satire alluding to “A Modest Proposal” in order to illustrate and amplify its message: its censure of the unceasing abuse faced by the most vulnerable members of society at the hands of the powerful and the wealthy. The ensuing discussion concerns the theme the essays and the song share—the motif of cannibalism used to represent a figurative “consumption” of people and their resources, rendered in both as the literal devouring of children– as well as the ideological similarities in the critiques delivered by the two texts, which are three hundred years apart, yet similar in their sensibilities.