and metaphors. The endings of the poems are just as bleak as their contents, and reflect the thinking of their authors. Blake's short poem, simply entitled London is redolent with his opinions of the injustices of his time, and the dismal social situation of many of the citys inhabitants. The city, for Blake, carries an aura of damp, cold, listless people and social institutions. Swifts A Description of a City Shower achieves basically the same thing, although in a more humorous manner. It does, or course, comment on the sense of entrapment and depressing monotony of life, the superficial worries that bog down human existence. It is striking how many of these problems continue to plague modern society, as we have grown increasingly commercial through time. In the works of Blake and Swift, we see a reflection of nearly any large city in Europe today, perhaps minus the extreme and abject poverty that we now only associate with third world countries....
