The Lady's Dressing Room - Poetic Structure and Symbolism of The Poem

The way Jonathan Swift structures this poem is important to the meaning the poem is trying to convey. Women deceive men, by making themselves look different during an incredibly long, vile process. The narrator tells the story of an innocent man basically opening pandora’s box of women’s secrets. In the line where the narrator says “Should I the queen of love refuse, Because she rose from stinking ooze?” By using the goddess of love referring to the Roman or Greek Goddesses Venus or Aphrodite, this one of many ways the narrator mocks Strephon, the pastoral character mortified by a woman’s dressing room. The same metaphor is used to mock Strephon is in the opening of the poem “The Goddess from her Chamber issues, Array'd in Lace, Brocades and Tissues.” This specific metaphor details this woman, is so charming that she can be defined a goddess by Strephon, when in fact the narrator knows Strephon will think anything but. The point of the poem where Strephon is most turned off and Swift’s shining moment of poetic devices is finding her chamber pot. “For here she spits, and here she spews. But oh! it turned poor Strephon’s bowels, When he beheld and smelled the towels, Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed”. Swift uses alliteration to emphasis the diction he chose for describing the use of the chamber pot. Then to relay Strephon’s reaction, Swift makes the narrator uses onomatopoeia to mock “poor Strephon” once again. Finally the final line of the quote rhymes together beheld and smelled which changes the rhythm of the lines by putting the assonance in the middle of the line. Once again, Swift used alliteration to complete the idea exaggerating the smells and complete surprise that took over Strephon. Overall the rhetorical devices and structure of the poem help to exaggerate the narrator’s will to repulse Strephon.