A Description of a City Shower

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1710

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Natural Functions

“A Description of a City Shower” uses the natural functions of the earth and of its inhabitants to great symbolic effect. As discussed in the earlier section on the poem’s themes, the poem’s emphasis on bodily waste draws attention to the pretensions of city living. The poem, like the city-folk’s habit of waste disposal, is incited by a naturally occurring bout of rain.

The naturally occurring rainfall not only incites these events, however, but actively brings the city’s waste to the surface and “drives with rapid force” (Line 57) the debris through the streets. The natural, inevitable functions of life, whether they be the consumption and digestion of food or the cycles of the weather, remove from life such artificial trappings as social strata; Swift uses these natural functions to symbolize humanity’s common denominators. The poem’s emphasis on the lowest parts of human life only act to raise them up until, in a sense, they symbolize human equality. This equality, of course, is not in the kind that people strive for. Instead of raising the peasant to the level of king, the poem’s idea of equality lowers the king to the level of peasant.

The Greeks

Greek and Trojan heroes from antiquity make a brief but notable appearance in “City Shower.” In a scene that occurs between Lines 43-52, the speaker draws a juxtaposition between an impatient lover awaiting their beloved in a cart and the Greek warriors who invaded Troy through the use of the Trojan horse. This comparison depicts the Greeks as weak-willed and “impatient” (Line 48). Most significant in this comparison, however, is that the Greeks are depicted “as the moderns” (Line 49) in their aggression and their distaste for “paying chairmen” (Line 50).

The speaker’s sympathies lie with the Trojans, who are compared to the chairman, or the person drawing the lover’s cart. According to Virgil, the author of much pastoral poetry, the Trojan Aeneas led the surviving Trojans to Italy, where they eventually became the Roman population. The Greeks and Romans, in “City Shower,” come respectively to represent the negative and positive qualities of the Classical world.

The Flood

The fall of Troy is not the only Classical allusion in “City Shower.” True to the poem’s use of elevated, hyperbolic language to describe otherwise disgusting and mundane events, Swift also uses the symbol of a flood to call upon the flood narrative from the Old Testament.

The lines “Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, / Threat’ning with deluge this devoted town” (Lines 31-32) draw the connection between Swift’s city and the world of the Old Testament with the use of the word “devoted.” The word, in Swift’s contemporary English, is used ironically to poke fun at the lack of religious morality in the city. “Devoted,” however, has also been used historically as a formal way of saying “doomed.” These two meanings together explicitly connect Swift’s city and the world of the Old Testament, which, by divine wrath, was flooded to cleanse it of its iniquities. The flood’s symbolism therefore suggests that Swift’s city—perhaps London—is doomed to destruction due to its own iniquities Storms and floods are also common in Classical literature as signs of civil unrest and divine anger.