A Description of a City Shower

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William Hogarth's Four Times of the Day, a series of four paintings, is said to have been inspired by "A Description of a City Shower", among other works.

"A Description of a City Shower" is a poem by the Anglo-Irish poet Jonathan Swift, written in 1710. First appearing in the Tatler magazine in October of that same year, the poem was considered the satirist and essayist's best poem: Swift agreed: "They think 'tis the best thing I ever writ, and I think so too".^[1] Bonamy Dobrée found it, and his other Tatler verse, "Description of a Morning", "emancipatory, defiantly anti-poetic... describing nothing that the common run of poets would seize on."^[2]

The text, much like Swift's previous poem "A Description of the Morning", concerns modern, urban life, and the artificiality of that existence. The poem also parodies, in certain parts of its structure and diction, and is an imitation of, Virgil's Georgics. Other authorities suggest that the poem seeks to mock both the style and character of the way that then-contemporary city life was portrayed by other Augustan writers and poets.^[3]

"A Description of a City Shower" is cited as part of the inspiration for William Hogarth's series of four paintings, the Four Times of the Day, among other works. One of Hogarth's more famous works, Four Times of the Day sheds a humorous light on contemporary life in London, the mores of the various social classes of the city, and the mundane business of everyday life. Among the other works said to have provided Hogarth with inspiration for his series is another of Swift's poems, the aforementioned "A Description of the Morning", which was published in the Tatler in 1709, as well as John Gay's "Trivia".^[4]

Careful observers may foretell the hour
(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Returning home at night, you'll find the sink
Strike your offended sense with double stink.
If you be wise, then go not far to dine,
You spend in coach-hire more than save in wine.
A coming shower your shooting corns presage,
Old aches throb, your hollow tooth will rage.
Sauntering in coffee-house is Dulman seen;
He damns the climate, and complains of spleen.

Mean while the South rising with dabbled wings,
A sable cloud a-thwart the welkin flings,
That swilled more liquor than it could contain,
And like a drunkard gives it up again.
Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope,
While the first drizzling shower is born aslope,
Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean.
You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stop
To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop.
Not yet, the dust had shunned the unequal strife,
But aided by the wind, fought still for life;
And wafted with its foe by violent gust,
'Twas doubtful which was rain, and which was dust.
Ah! where must needy poet seek for Aid,
When dust and rain at once his coat invade;
Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain,
Erects the nap, and leaves a cloudy stain.

Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down,
Threatening with deluge this devoted town.
To shops in crowds the daggled females fly,
Pretend to cheapen Goods, but nothing buy.
The Templar spruce, while every spout's a-broach,
Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach.
The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides,
While streams run down her oiled umbrella's sides.
Here various kinds by various fortunes led,
Commence acquaintance underneath a shed.
Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs,
Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits,
While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits;
And ever and anon with frightful din
The leather sounds, he trembles from within.
So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed,
Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed,
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do,
Instead of paying chairmen, run them through.)
Laocoon struck the outside with his spear,
And each imprisoned hero quaked for fear.

Now from all Parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell
What streets they sailed from, by the sight and smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid force
From Smithfield, or St. Pulchre's shape their course,
And in huge confluent join at Snow-Hill ridge,
Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn-Bridge.
Sweepings from butchers stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats and turnips-tops come tumbling down the flood.

–Jonathan Swift^[5]

[edit] Notes

^ Fairer; Gerrard, p. 74
^ Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 1959:466.
^ Allen, p.35
^ Paulson, p.140–9
^ Chambers, p.548

[edit] References

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

A Description of a City Shower

Fairer, David; Gerrard, Christine - Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. ISBN 1405113189
Allen, Rick - The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700-1914. Routledge, 1998. ISBN 0415153077
Paulson, Ronald - Hogarth: High Art and Low, 1732-50 Vol 2. Lutterworth Press, 1992. ISBN 0718828550.
Chambers, Robert - Cyclopaedia of English Literature. 1850.

Categories: 1710s poems | British poems

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A Description of a City Shower

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