Eighteenth-Century London

The poem is set in a brutally realistic location: the London of Swift's own era. He is careful to ensure that the reader knows exactly where this poem takes place. He repeatedly names locations like "Drury-Lane," a street in London that, at the time, was known as a slum, inhabited by semi-legal gin distilleries and rampant street prostitution. This is where Corinna lives. It is a world of men looking to buy sex, police officers and religious reformers who look the other way or take advantage of her themselves, and is full of despair. It is also filthy, with a description of the "oozy" banks of the river and the "hundred stinks" that they let off (48-49). It is a viscerally horrible place: not the imaginative wonderland of most romantic poetry, but a real and repulsive world.

Corinna's Room

The setting that is described most vividly in...