21 pages • 42 minutes read
A Description of a City Shower
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Background
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 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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By Jonathan Swift
