A Description of a City Shower

“A Description of a City Shower” uses the natural functions of the earth and of its inhabitants to great symbolic effect. As discussed in the earlier section on the poem’s themes, the poem’s emphasis on bodily waste draws attention to the pretensions of city living. The poem, like the city-folk’s habit of waste disposal, is incited by a naturally occurring bout of rain.

The naturally occurring rainfall not only incites these events, however, but actively brings the city’s waste to the surface and “drives with rapid force” (Line 57) the debris through the streets. The natural, inevitable functions of life, whether they be the consumption and digestion of food or the cycles of the weather, remove from life such artificial trappings as social strata; Swift uses these natural functions to symbolize humanity’s common denominators. The poem’s emphasis on the lowest parts of human life only act to raise them up until, in a sense, they symbolize human equality. This equality, of course, is not in the kind that people strive for. Instead of raising the peasant to the level of king, the poem’s idea of equality lowers the king to the level of peasant.