A Description of a City Shower Summary and Analysis PDF

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A Description of a City Shower Summary and Analysis...

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Overview “A Description of a City Shower” is one of Jonathan Swift’s earlier published works. According to Swift’s correspondence, the poem was one of his favorites. Swift began the poem October 10, 1710, and it was published in Richard Steele’s Tatler seven days later. Though Swift wrote poetry throughout his life, “A Description of a City Shower,” along with “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732) and “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (1739) are his few poetic works that compete with his prose masterpieces like Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729). Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is one of the most influential works of English literature ever written. “A Description of a City Shower” takes the form of an urban pastoral, a type of mock pastoral that takes traditional rural scenes and transplants them to the city. The disconnect between the speaker’s heightened Neoclassical vocabulary and his choice of grotesque, bawdy imagery leaves the poem’s reader at an ironic distance. While the poem can be read as a straightforward description of rain in a contemporary English city, the poem’s particular images and diction work with the dramatic irony to complicate that surface-level interpretation. Poet Biography Jonathan Swift is one of the best-known post-restoration English writers. Swift is particularly notable for his dead-pan satires that blend earnest argumentation with absurd premises. Though he is best remembered for prose satires such as A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, Swift is also well-regarded for his argumentative essays, political pamphlets, religious sermons, and poetry. Swift was born 30 November, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland. He was the second child of Johnathan Swift and Abigail Erick. Swift’s father (and namesake) was originally from Herefordshire but moved to Ireland with his brother, Godwin, to practice law. Seven months after Swift was born, his father died of syphilis. Swift was left to the care of his uncle Godwin at the age of three. From the ages of 6 to 15, Swift attended Kilkenny College. Swift then, financed by Godwin’s son, attended Trinity College, Dublin where he studied logic and philosophy. After graduation,

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Swift worked for Sir William Temple, an English Diplomat and essayist. Upon Temple’s death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin and worked as a chaplain and secretary. For much of the rest of his life, Swift was employed as a churchman. Though Swift did not publish prior to 1704, he started writing poetry as early as 1691. It was not until Swift turned to writing prose satires such as 1704’s The Battle of the Books that he gained success and reputation in literary circles. Other than his sermons, Swift published most of his works under pseudonyms. Despite Swift’s best attempts, the authorship of his early works was identified by their stylistic similarities to Temple, and that of his later works were often leaked by publishers or acquaintances shortly after publication. Swift’s satires still grabbed hold of the public consciousness, and many of his political satires, such as 1729’s A Modest Proposal, influenced policy. Swift’s work grew cynical and embittered as he aged and dealt with anxieties about his mental health. Despite this cynicism, Swift was one of the strongest and most influential allies of the Irish people during this time and fought to defend them against the English oppressors. By 1738, Swift began to show signs of serious mental illness, and in 1741 he was unable to care for himself. He died four years later, in 1745, at the age of 77. Poem Text Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower: While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more. Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink Strike your offended sense with double stink. If you be wise, then go not far to dine; You’ll spend in coach hire more than save in wine. A coming shower your shooting corns presage, Old achès throb, your hollow tooth will rage. Sauntering in coffeehouse is Dulman seen; He damns the climate and complains of spleen. Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings, A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings,

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That swilled more liquor than it could contain, And, like a drunkard, gives it up again. Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope, While the first drizzling shower is born aslope: Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean: You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stop To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop. Not yet the dust had shunned the unequal strife, But, aided by the wind, fought still for life, And wafted with its foe by violent gust, ’Twas doubtful which was rain and which was dust. Ah! where must needy poet seek for aid, When dust and rain at once his coat invade? Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain Erects the nap, and leaves a mingled stain. Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town. To shops in crowds the daggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. The Templar spruce, while every spout’s abroach, Stays till ’tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While seams run down her oiled umbrella’s sides. Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, Commence acquaintance underneath a shed. Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs. Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits, While spouts run clattering o’er the roof by fits, And ever and anon with frightful din The leather sounds; he trembles from within. So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed, Pregnant with Greeks impatient to be freed (Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do,

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Instead of paying chairmen, run them through), Laocoön struck the outside with his spear, And each imprisoned hero quaked for fear. Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go: Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. They, as each torrent drives with rapid force, From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course, And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge. Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood. Swift, Jonathan. “A Description of a City Shower.” 1710. Poetry Foundation. Summary “A Description of a City Shower,” as the poem’s title suggests, describes the event of a rain shower in a contemporary English city. The speaker starts by making a hypothetical claim that “Careful observers” (Line 1) know “when to dread a shower” (Line 2), then goes on to describe how “the pensive cat” (Line 3) stops playing and how “corns” (Line 9) and “Old achès throb” (Line 10) when rain is imminent. Once the rain has come, the “double stink” (Line 6) of the sewers, or “sink” (Line 5), hangs in the air, and one individual in a coffee shop “damns the climate” (Line 12) and blames his melancholy on the weather. The second stanza drops the first stanza’s hypothesis and, with the word “[m]eanwhile” (Line 13), actualizes the shower. The rain is no longer predicted, but “A sable cloud athwart the [sky] flings” (Line 14). Lines 15-16 establish a metaphorical relationship between rain and vomit or urine that is sustained throughout the poem. The speaker then goes on to present “Brisk Susan” (Line 17) taking her clothes from the clothesline before clarifying the previous extended metaphor by juxtaposing “not so clean” (Line 20) rainwater with water from “some careless quean[’s]” (Line 19) mop. The shower also brings a “violent gust” (Line 25) that lifts dust into the air. The second stanza concludes with the speaker observing that the dust and

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rain together have stained his coat. The rainfall is promoted to a “flood” (Line 31) in the third stanza. The speaker describes women running into shops and “templar[s]” (Line 35), or law students, trying to wait out the storm. Even politicians of opposing parties unite in order “to save their wigs” (Line 42). The stanza ends with a comparison between an impatient lover hiding in a hired sedan-chair and “Those bully Greeks” (Line 49) who invaded Troy by hiding in the Trojan horse. The final stanza returns to the grotesque imagery of the sewer’s “double stink” (Line 6). Now, after the rain has come, “all parts of the swelling [sewers] flow, / And bear their trophies,” or waste (Lines 53-54). The rainfall has flooded the city’s sewer system, and so “Filths of all hues and odours” (Line 55) run through the streets. Lines 57-60 describe the particular route that the filth takes through the city and where it collects. The last three lines of the work itemize the things that can be found among the washed-up filth.

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Poem Analysis Analysis: “A Description of a City Shower” Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” is a mock pastoral. This means that the poem borrows a sensibility and style of imagery from the traditional Roman form of the pastoral— popularized by Classical poets like Virgil and Horace—and combines them with a contemporary ironic sensibility. Traditionally, pastorals depict calm scenes from rural life and were enjoyed by upper-class Roman citizens who wished for an escape from the city. The main ironic force of Swift’s “City Shower” lies in how it uses the pastoral's idealistic language to depict the city’s filth and corruption rather than the country’s purity and tranquility. The primary way that Swift accomplishes this is through his choice of diction—in particular, his combination of high and low diction (from “sable cloud[s]” [Line 14] to “[d]ead cats” [Line 63]). “City Shower” relies on stock pastoral imagery of weather events and local scenery to propel the poem, but the way that the poem’s speaker arrives at these images is unusual for a traditional pastoral. The first two lines immediately reveal the poem as a product of a different kind of high diction than that of Roman pastorals. Instead of the elevated language that poets like Virgil and Horace use to idealize their scenes, Swift incorporates the elevated language of scientific jargon with words like “prognostics” (Line 2) and “Careful observers” (Line 1). Though the speaker later incorporates more traditional heightened language when describing the “sable cloud athwart the welkin” (Line 14) (“welkin” is a word exclusively used in pastorals to describe the sky), the scientific language that opens the poem immediately establishes a different worldview than that of “sable cloud[s]” and “welkins.” Even the elevated language of the “sable cloud” is immediately undermined by its association with the low-brow verb “fling” (Line 14). The scientific jargon introduces the poem as a disillusioned, materialist description. Rather than raising the material to the level of the divine, as many pastorals attempted, Swift’s poem aims to reduce the pastoral to the level of material. The imagery presented during the shower is one of the elements in service to this materialist reduction. The showers in the city are not the refreshing and scenic showers in the country. Rather, they are something that one should “dread” (Line 2). Instead of emphasizing the purifying and restorative abilities of water, the speaker associates the water with “shooting corns” (Line 9), “Old achès” (Line 10), and filth more generally. Compared to the water of the maid’s mop, the rainwater is “not so clean” (Line 20), and the sheer amount of rain causes a “double stink” (Line 6) as the “kennels” (Line 53), or sewer systems in the middle of the road,

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overflow. The rainwater also combines with the “dust” (Line 26) that would often collect in cities of the era to stain people’s coats. The poem, in other words, carefully itemizes the rain’s physical detriment to the city. Like a true “Careful observer” (Line 1), the poem’s speaker does not limit his observation to the negative effects of the rain. In the first and third stanzas, there are a number of relatively neutral observations, including “The tucked-up seamstress who walks with hasty strides / While streams run down her oiled umbrella’s sides” (Lines 37-38) or the two political opponents who “Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs” (Line 42). While these observations do not nullify the negative observations in the other stanzas, they further reinforce the poem as a scientific description rather than a romantic one. The speaker even delves into the realm of psychology with his claim that the shower affects people’s “spleen” (Line 12), making them depressed (the ancient medical theory of humorism associates black bile, secreted by the spleen, with melancholy). As a rhetorical device, the inclusion of these scenes increases the apparent trustworthiness and objectivity of the speaker’s account; superfluous, neutral details suggest an unbiased, scientific report. In Swift's case, however, it is dangerous to pin this speaker down; just as the speaker tries to play himself off as unbiased, he employs loaded language like “invade” (Line 28) and “trophies” (Line 54) betraying his ironic intentions. To further distance the poem from a traditional pastoral, “City Shower” blurs the boundaries between the human and the meteorological. Just as it is unclear as to which particulate “was rain, and which was dust” (Line 26), the speaker sometimes makes it difficult for the reader to distinguish between rain and other liquids. The most prominent example of this ambiguity occurs in the confusion between rainwater and the water from the “careless quean” (Line 19), or working-class woman who is mopping, and the speaker’s impulse to “invoke the gods” (Line 21). In a pastoral poem, the gods would only be invoked for celebratory or religious purposes, and never in vain as the poem’s speaker suggests. Furthermore, the gods would never be blamed for human action or consequence—the gods’ domain was, particularly in Classical pastorals, relegated to natural phenomena. This confusion between the meteorological and human also extends to the vomit metaphor, in which the speaker compares a rain cloud to “a drunkard” (Line 16) who “swilled more liquor than it could contain” (Line 15). This metaphor not only provides a vulgar explanation for rainwater, but it reinforces the poem's secular bent and its focus on material explanations. All of these elements together demonstrate how different “City Shower” is from a Classical pastoral and how an 18th-century English city is different from Classical Roman farm life.

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Contextual Analysis Historical Context Swift’s “City Shower” was written in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, in which thinkers and writers began to take a critical, materialist look at the world around them. Informed by the rise of the scientific method of inquiry, Swift’s poem is critical (and sometimes outright dismissive) of divine attribution. Though Swift himself was religious and worked much of his life as a priest, his worldview privileges rational argument and empiricism. Science developed quickly during the early 18th century, but there were limitations. Miasma theory was still favored over the germ theory of disease, the former an antiquated medical theory holding that illness spread through miasma, or bad air; it was common for people in cities to discard their excrement and other waste products by throwing it from their window. This act of disposal most often occurred during heavy rains, as the water would help wash the waste away, as the final stanza describes. More importantly, the mixture of liquids and waste products that fell from city skies during rainfall explains the poem’s conflation of rain and human waste (as in the urine metaphor, for example) as well as its emphasis on people retreating from the rain for fear of their clothes being ruined. During city showers, more than rain fell from the sky.

Literary Context 18th-century Europe, though progressive in science and philosophy, spent much of its time looking to antiquity for artistic inspiration. In particular, the recently recovered works of ancient Greek and Roman poets, artists, and philosophers fueled much artistic creation during this period. Many authors, poets included, saw these Classical forms—such as special metrical, rhyme, and stanza patterns—as powerful modes of expression, and ones that could be perfected using modern scientific techniques. This sparked a movement in poetry, art, and architecture called Neoclassicism. Unlike the Renaissance, during which time artists sought to recreate works in the style of the ancient masters, Neoclassical artists sought to improve and modernize these ancient forms. Part of this project to modernize Classical works required artists to create modern language equivalents of these old forms. Since poetry, in particular, places an emphasis on the sonic qualities of a language, English poets had to discard the old Latin and Greek forms. English

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poets chose rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter to replace the dactylic hexameter of Classical verse (see: Literary Devices). This meter, called heroic verse, soon became the dominant English poetic mode of the late 17th and early 18th century. Swift’s “City Shower” follows this verse form almost exactly, with one notable exception: The last three lines, in which the speaker itemizes the objects that flow through the sewers, form a rhyming triplet. Swift likely included this triple rhyme to satirize poets who conclude their works with triplets. Swift was an outspoken critic of concluding a poem in this way and claimed that his mockery of the form brought about its eventual demise.

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Themes Materialism: Sense Experience and Bodily Reality As noted in the poem’s analysis, “A Description of a City Shower” operates under a materialist, rather than spiritual, worldview. In Swift’s poem, one’s experience of the rain does not rely on one’s spiritual or emotional framework, as it would in a sentimental Classical pastoral, but on the “careful observ[ation]” (Line 1) of events. The signs of the coming rain are presented as mechanical: The cat stops her “frolics” (Line 4), the nose is “offended […] with double stink” (Line 6), and “Old achès throb” (Line 10). Whether it be through sight, smell, or touch, all of these signs are empirically registered. Even “Dulman” (Line 11) at the “coffee-house” (Line 11) “damns the climate” (Line 12) and sees it as having a material influence over his “spleen” (Line 2). This foregrounding of materiality is perhaps most obvious in the last three lines, which present the “Filths of all hues and odours” (Line 55) as they run through the streets. This catalog, including “dung […] Dead cats and turnip-tops” (Lines 61, 63), suggests that the flow of rainwater has real, material interactions with the waste and refuse of society. Far from inspiring lofty thoughts, imagined tranquil landscapes, and moments of reflection, the rainfall in Swift’s city results in surfacing filth, polluted streets, and people so bombarded with sensory experience that they seek shelter. Swift’s materialism, in other words, brings the high-minded down to the raw facts of human life. If poets and readers of antiquity were able to celebrate rural pastorals, Swift seems to say, it was only by ignoring the disconnect between those cerebral images and the material actualities of life.

The City as a Site of Waste Swift often relies on grotesque depictions of humanity to hone his satiric edge. One of Swift’s most common ironic tools is hyperbole, or exaggeration. Swift stretches this ironic use of hyperbole to its limits, which often results in him taking metaphors and literalizing them; the poem’s imagery of filth, exaggerated as it is, is as literal as it is metaphorical. In “City Shower,” Swift employs this ironic hyperbole to make a claim about the moral and physical condition of his contemporary urbanites, and waste products associated with

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human life are the vehicle for this comic exaggeration. To this end, the poem elevates human w...