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A Brief Description Of A City Shower By Jonathan Swift

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This essay discusses the purpose of rural and urban landscapes in Jonathan Swifts ' works, by portraying the urbanisation in A Description of a City Shower and the rural scenery in A Modest Proposal. The essay also considers the context of the time Swift wrote the two works and describes the urban and rural setting to illustrate his viewpoint.

“The first readers of the "City Shower," when it appeared in the Tatter No. 238 (October 17, 1710), had, outside their own knowledge and sensibilities, nothing but a slightly misleading headnote to guide their interpretation of the poem. That headnote compared Swift 's city shower to 'Virgil 's land-shower... a shower of consequence... bringing matters to a speedy conclusion between two potentates of different sexes '” (Meaning 195). Before the poem A Description of a City Shower was written, storms and showers in poetry had never been set in the city, …show more content…

It is as if he was saying “you will come to London as a clean, pure and naïve individual and this city will stain you and ruin you forever.” A Description of a City Shower was written at the beginning of the 18th century, a time when the Government and the Aristocracy tended to spend their money excessively. This practice encouraged the lower classes to believe that the city was a place of great fortune, when in reality only a few managed to succeed. It was a time of great increase in poverty and prostitution, since for some prostitution was far better that working as a servant or not having a job at all. Some young women often resorted to such a mean to survive. In the entire poem Swift makes fun of urbanization, because it made the place so corrupted that even the elements of nature are polluted. “Swift 's urban landscapes tend to resemble his rural ones in their similar images of discord, ruin, and alienation”

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He challenged the status quo by saying that selling the kids into slavery, not killing them when they are in the womb, and the benefits of eating the children and how it would help both families and the economy. The first way that Swift challenges the status quo is that he says that they should sell their children into slavery to save their parents from having to deal with them and pay for them. He says that by selling the kids into slavery it would take the burden off the parents, after the first year. Swift says, “a child just dropped from

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Swift shapes the text in a satiric way to portray to his audience his point of view on the topic at hand, and with the use of sarcasm Jonathan Swift mocks upper-class people who are affected by the overcrowding and poverty in Dublin. The usage of a satiric tone and sarcasm help Swift develop solutions to contemporary social problems that will work. In the “Modest Proposal”, written by Jonathan Swift, diction is a key rhetorical device in this piece, because of the way Swift portrays his thoughts through satire. Diction is the style of speaking or writing determined by the choice of words by a speaker by or a writer, Swift’s audience sees his diction as inhumane because of the way he proposes solutions to the world’s problems, such as in paragraph twenty one where he

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For example on page 2 Swift says “so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends.” statements like this make Swift’s proposal even more outrageous. This is a sarcastic attempt by Swift to make the proposal look attractive, but his statement has an underlying meaning of making the idea look repulsive. Additionally on page 2 Swift states “That a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food.”

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Forget Shorter Showers and Waste Not, Want Not are two publications that are the direct opposite of each other. Forget Shorter Showers is an essay that was written by Derrick Jensen and publicized on July 8, 2009 in Orion Magazine. It is an article that counters the action of environmental conservation strategies. On the other hand, Waste Not, Want Not is a publication written seven years earlier in 1992 by Bill McKibben. Waste Not, Want Not comes up strongly to explain the ways that would help to curb the problem of having insufficient resources in our society.

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When it came to Ethos, Swift was not quite as persuasive as he could have been. He does have a background when it comes to writing about corrupt governments in tales such as “Gulliver’s Travels.” The way Swift wrote this essay, however, makes it feel slightly less objective. Even when he is writing from the point of a wealthier Irishman, his overall tone shows a large amount of contempt towards the higher economic classes. Instead of allowing the readers to read alternative arguments on this subject, he focused strictly on his own opinion.

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In his essay “Here,” Philip Larkin uses many literary devices to convey the speaker’s attitude toward the places he describes. Larkin utilizes imagery and strong diction to depict these feelings of both a large city and the isolated beach surrounding it. In the beginning of the passage, the speaker describes a large town that he passes through while on a train. The people in the town intrigue him, but he is not impressed by the inner-city life.

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Swift’s satire consisted of many “modest theories.” For example, you may have heard people talk about overpopulation. You may have your own theories about it, but what about eating children? In this instance, Jonathan Swift used his form of humor, also known as satire, to get his point across, in which wrote a pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal,” a mockery for the ideas of how to deal with overpopulation. “Satire is a technique employed by writers to

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First, he presents a problem, along with facts and calculations. Like for example when Swift discusses the “prodigious number of children” that were causing an “great additional grievance” especially in the “present deplorable state of the of the kingdom” (Swift 1200). He reels the reader in by describing images of extreme wretchedness and utter hopelessness, then he employs the use of rationalism to play down the reader’s moral considerations. He successfully uses logic to get the audience to subconsciously lower their moral defenses and seriously consider his proposal. Jonathan Swift’s use of sarcastic irony confuses the reader as to the essays true purpose, effectively causing them to put down all guards so that they will have no safeguards when he aims his penetrative

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one of the inescapable effects of industrial civilization is the dominant place in it of the large city or metropolis with its anonymous , rootless citizen. Yet there are very few poems in English after the middle of the eighteenth century which have the city as their subject or background though blake poem London is striking exception. For the poet’s of the nineteenth centrury the city was somehow alien and unsuitable as a object of poetry. Writing in the early years of the twentieth century the Georgian shared this attitude and there poetry is traditional in formal and largely rural in setting .in this context the urban setting of eliots poems was quite revolutionary and he has been righly described as “ the great master of city theme among the modern poets “.

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