ies, which neither the rich nor the poor can escape. The people of London are thinking and feeling their environment to an acute level, and this is what is causing their morose condition.Such a theme of the universality of suffering is evident in Swifts poem as well. A Description of a City Shower describes a sudden shower and plays on the reactions of the people caught in it. Susan takes down her linens from the line, women crowd into stores and pretend to peruse the goods, and Tories and Whigs "forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs"(line 41). All the people of the city are placed in the same position: they must find shelter from the shower, no one better off than the other. He goes on to discuss the incredible stench and filth of the London sewers, and this serves its purpose as well. Swift describes what can be found floating up out of the sewers when there is a downpour (dead cats, turnip tops, butchers' scraps, etc.). The effect is to level all the pretensions of the street's human dwellers to a more dirty, animalistic sense of humanity. The disgusting things that spring from the city gutters during the rain serve to eliminate the illusion of difference between the people and force them to acknowledge their fundamental similarities.The politically and economically divided London seems to a main focus for both Swift and Blake. Blakes use of the word ban in line 6 can have many connotations. The word ban can mean a political prohibition, a curse, or an announcement of marriage. The political or social meaning is an obvious one in this poem, Blakes dislike of the rampant commercialism and the focus on science and technology is not a hidden agenda. Societys narrow and aggressive pursuit of material things was in direct violation with Blakes devotion to the spiritual and natural, yet provided an important dichotomy that is evident in much of his work. Commercialism, so it would seem, is a curse on the very people w...
