Page 22 - Gullivers

Whatever he may have written in his classically-inspired verse, Swist was not immune to the attractions of modern city life. Spending much of the period between 1707 and 1714 in London – initially looking aster the affairs of the Church of Ireland – Swist wrote to friends in Dublin of his experiences in a London that was not simply a place of business but of a world of new friends, new buildings, new books, new plays, new places to dine, new opportunities for shopping. Not everything was ideal. In comparison to the country, London was noisy, dirty, even dangerous. Despite such drawbacks, however, the novelty of the city made it a place of endless fascination.
To describe such a city, new forms of writing were required. Newspapers, periodical essays, and the emerging form of the novel all addressed the pleasures and challenges of urban life. How might the pœt represent the city in ways
that acknowledged its attractions? Novelty seemed the answer. And here Swist was a genuinely innovative pœt. Like his well-off contemporaries, he had
been educated to admire classical pœtry. Could classical genres be turned to good effect in depicting the city? In two mock-pastoral pœms – one imitating the eclogue, the other the georgic – Swist offered readers of, respectively, The Tatler and The Spectator parodic versions of classical pœms. ‘A Description of
the Morning’ (1709) and ‘A Description of the City Shower’ (1710) invert
the traditional relationship between the city and the country or between the representations of these in pœtry offering, for example, a vision of rain that
dœs not refresh and renew the countryside but rather brings chaos to the city. Surveying the streets of central London aster the rain, the pœt describes how:
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