A Description of a City Shower

Swift’s “City Shower” was written in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, in which thinkers and writers began to take a critical, materialist look at the world around them. Informed by the rise of the scientific method of inquiry, Swift’s poem is critical (and sometimes outright dismissive) of divine attribution. Though Swift himself was religious and worked much of his life as a priest, his worldview privileges rational argument and empiricism.

Science developed quickly during the early 18th century, but there were limitations. Miasma theory was still favored over the germ theory of disease, the former an antiquated medical theory holding that illness spread through miasma, or bad air; it was common for people in cities to discard their excrement and other waste products by throwing it from their window. This act of disposal most often occurred during heavy rains, as the water would help wash the waste away, as the final stanza describes. More importantly, the mixture of liquids and waste products that fell from city skies during rainfall explains the poem’s conflation of rain and human waste (as in the urine metaphor, for example) as well as its emphasis on people retreating from the rain for fear of their clothes being ruined.