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, 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.