Jonathan Swift: The Selected Poems Literary Elements

The poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is told from the perspective of third objective narrator.

The poem “Market Women’s Cries” is written in a heroic couplet.

Life is compared in “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General” with a candle which ends when the candle has burnt down completely. The comparison used here has the purpose of transmitting the idea that life is both short and extremely unpredictable, a person never knowing when their time would end.

We find an alliteration in the lines “My children are seven,/ I wish them in Heaven;” of the poem “Market Women’s Cries”.

An ironic element in present in the poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is the way in which the woman described here is presented as being a beautiful woman despite the make-up process being described as being extremely unhygienic and appalling.

The poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is a parody.

The action described in “Market Women’s Cries” takes place in a market in a big city sometimes early in the morning.

The tone used in “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is an ironic one.

The protagonist in “Market Women’s Cries” is the woman who is the main character in the poem and the antagonist is poverty.

The major conflict in “On Stella’s Birth-day” is between the desire to remain young and the inevitable passing of time.

The poem “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General” reaches its climax when the general dies.

“Stella's Birthday March 13, 1727” poem’s title foreshadows the lavish description of the main character’s birthday.

In the first line of the poem “On Stella’s Birth-day” the narrator claims the woman is only 34. This is an understatement as the narrator later doubles her age and claims he lied the reader only because Stella was ashamed to reveal her true age.

In the poem “Market Women’s Cries”, the woman, after presenting the vegetables and fruits she had for sale, she also included herself as an available item. This is an allusion made to the high number of women who offered their services as prostitutes in the 19th century, women who were forced to do this because of financial reasons.

The term “green” in the poem “On Stella’s Birth-day” is used as a general term to make reference to those women who are still virgin.

We find a personification in the line “fire will not toast” in the poem “To Quilca, a Country House not in Good Repair”.

The lines “Support a few remaining days:/ From not the gravest of divines” from the poem “Stella's Birthday March 13, 1727” contains an onomatopoeia.

We find onomatopoeia in the poem “Stella's Birthday March 13, 1727” in the line “cries of joy”.