A Description of a City Shower

Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” relies heavily on the pastoral form and its literary associations. In particular, Swift’s “City Shower” is within a sub-genre of mock pastoral poetry known as an “urban pastoral” or “town eclogue.” The contradiction inherent in the form’s name is intentional and points toward the genre’s ironic or mocking tone. Urban pastorals rely on the tension created by the transplantation of heightened, Classical diction to the modern urban landscape. Often, the tension created by these juxtapositions is exploited to dismantle idealized notions of urban or rural life. Swift was an early innovator of the urban pastoral, and many of his poems published between 1709 and 1711 were in this sub-genre. In fact, the name “town eclogue” comes from the title of Swift’s 1711 “A Town Eclogue.”

English pastorals also participate in a verse form called “heroic verse,” which is characterized by rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter (each line with five metrical feet, each foot consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable). Generally, heroic verse adds gravity to a poem or speech—Shakespeare, for instance, used it in a play’s dialogue to signify a character of noble rank. When employed in a mock pastoral, as in Swift’s “City Shower,” the verse form creates another ironic disconnect between the work’s high-brow form and its low-brow content. Swift’s poem is in iambic pentameter rather than the dactylic hexameter of a traditional Roman pastoral (a line with six feet, each foot made of a dactyl, or one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed), but these two meters hold similar connotations in their respective literary traditions. Some of the reasons for these meters’ similar associations are briefly explained in the literary context section of this guide.