Explication of A Description of the Morning
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
In his poem "A Description of the Morning," Jonathon Swift offers an objective, realistic vision of a typical urban morning. Although Swift utilizes the traditional rhyme scheme of heroic couplets in iambic pentameter, he diverges from the conventional Romantic description of the morning. Swift's attempt to challenge this Romantic idealism can be interpreted from the title alone. A scientific analysis would seem to follow "A Description of the Morning" better than a poem. Swift employs such rhetorical devices as factual diction and an indifferent tone to portray morning not as delightful and fresh but as mundane and routine as the people who participate in it.
The speaker narrates the poem in the present tense as a detached observer advancing Swift's departure from the Romantic. Until the last four lines, the speaker patterns his description after the gradual increase in noise and activity that characterizes the morning. The speaker begins by describing a few departing coaches, then a mistress discomposing her bed, and by line fourteen a "brickdust Moll" screaming in the streets. In addition, chronological words such as "now" (1,3,7), "prepared" (8), and "meet" (13) signal the progression of the morning.
The alliteration and odd syntax of the first line, "Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach," mimics traditional fairytale openings such as "once upon a time...