21 pages • 42-minute read
A Description of a City Shower
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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 human life are the vehicle for this comic exaggeration. To this end, the poem elevates human waste (bodily and otherwise) to something essential to the human experience—and if waste is viewed as an essential part of human life, the city’s pretensions of culture and refinement are immediately called into question. This is obvious in Line 42, in which the two political figures unite only “to save their wigs” (Line 42), a symbol of their outward appearance and superficiality. The speaker’s scientific, materialistic emphasis on the city’s filth and waste also results in an image of shallow frivolity and wasteful consumerism; “To shops in crowds the daggled females fly, / Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy” (Lines 33-34).
Instead of being the site of civilization, then, the city of “City Shower” is full of artificiality and waste. The attention the poem draws to this false and wasteful lifestyle can also be extrapolated into a larger commentary about the city’s inhabitants and their morality.
The City and the Country
Swift also draws attention to the disconnect between the city and the country. Though the tension between the two locales is not explicitly stated in the poem, a contemporary reader’s understanding of the pastoral form would make the poem’s association with rural life implicit. As in antiquity, many of the readers enjoying pastorals in Swift’s time lived in cities. Though rural landowners were generally literate and educated during both Classical and Restoration periods, they were rarely the individuals either producing or consuming the poetry. Horace, one of the most significant Roman pastoral poets, was a member of Augustus’s inner-circle and not the rural farmer who the poems present.
Often, then, rural life is presented as an idealistic escape from city living—a place where cultured city folk can slow down and enjoy nature. These idealistic escapes were, in a sense, the contemporary equivalent of a nature hike. Swift’s “City Shower” satirizes this simple binary view by taking it to logical extremes: If urbanities prize country life for being relaxed, in tune with nature, and pure, then city life must therefore be chaotic, discordant with nature, and contaminated. Moreover, Swift presents the city’s residents as working to “cheapen goods” (Line 34) and to “save their wigs” (Line 42), further reinforcing the city’s superficial, materialist mode of life.
Among the poem’s greatest ironies is that the people who live in and sustain this filthy, chaotic city are the same people who consume pastoral poetry as a means of escaping that city. The tension suggests that people’s moral weakness prevents them from living their ideal lives or from actualizing the rural ideals in their own homes. This moral weakness is one of the poem’s satirical targets.
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