Initially, when reading A Description of a City Shower, I thought the poem was basically a double entendre based on the second half of the poem. Lines like “While the first drizzling shower is borne aslope / Such is that sprinkling which some carless quean / Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean (Swift 18-20)” and “And wafted with its foe by violent gust, / Twas doubtful which was rain and which was dust (Swift 25-26)”. I believed this poem was going to just be another conceit on a person’s beauty before comparing it with a storm…
…then I realized I’ve only read the poem once and then I immediately drew conclusions from that. In all seriousness, while his humor is still stirring, his message is a lot less dramatic – it’s the poor weather in a poor town. Each of the caesura lines makes it even easier to understand what’s going on in a second read (“But, aided by the wind, fought still for life…”(Swift 24)). Swift wants to bring up how storms rain on everybody’s parade in this dingy town. Everybody is scurrying to get inside, but the winds and rain make the environment so grimy and dusty it’s a challenge to not complain about it. I think the author is basing his poem based on how the sanitation standards of his time were incredibly low, and is that the people are merely referencing and not directly stating what’s going is what makes it so funny.
That is a very interesting interpretation, especially considering that we, as analyzers, always look for the most complex rationale. It is good to take a step back in time, though, and realize that sometimes an apple is merely just an apple, just as in A Description of a City Showe, it may just be plainly that.
I also think that the filth of the sewers is supposed to be a metaphor for political filth. Swift was famous for his satire, and I believe that his message is far more about the social situation in London than the actual sewers (though I’m sure he didn’t like the sewers either!).
Chris, I like how you’ve identified that Swift is really just talking about something as simple as a rainstorm hitting a town. For me, I felt like he was using this simple idea to equate lots of different people in the town. He writes that “Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs \ Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs” (41-42). A rainstorm hits everyone, but the observations Swift makes about the different people’s preparation and reaction to the storm vary. In this way, I suppose this poem is satire, as he’s considering differences between social classes, but also equating them all as being affected in some way by the rain, albeit to different extents.