Schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands

My second setting poem is A Description of the Morning by Johnathan Swift on page 905 of the Norton.

Most poems written about the morning tend to speak of its calm, peaceful quality, of starting anew, or (as we saw a lot of in this chapter) of love. A Description of the Morning, however, shows little of that. It depicts an unglamorous city scene as it wakes up in the "ruddy morn." As the poem progresses, more and more people wake up to go about their routine business; the streets fill with people but do not have any more of a warm, welcoming feel about them. Moll's "dext'rous airs" as she mops and the grooves in the road "worn" by coach wheels passing over it every day show the dull monotony these people live with.

Despite this feeling of mundane repetition, the poem also reveals some out-of-the-ordinary (but perhaps not uncommon) occurences. The glimpse into the servant's affair with her master and the prisoners stealing back into jail after a night out lend a sense of forbidden excitement. While there is now a more dynamic feeling to the city, it is not a necessarily positive addition to the reader's perception of it. Altogether, this poem offers a different, harsher (but more realistic) depiction of the morning.