November 30, 1667

Jonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 to October 19,1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer, educated at TCD and by the end of his career Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. His environment, philosophically, assumed the limitations of knowledge. His physical environment was, often, 18th century urban and this also informed his writing. His poem, "A Description of a City Shower" contains these lines:

Careful observers may foretell the hour
(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink
Strike your offended sense with double stink.
....
A coming shower your shooting corns presage,
Old achès throb, your hollow tooth will rage.
.....
Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope,
While the first drizzling shower is born aslope:
Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean:
You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stop
To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop.
Not yet the dust had shunned the unequal strife,
But, aided by the wind, fought still for life,
And wafted with its foe by violent gust,
’Twas doubtful which was rain and which was dust.
Ah! where must needy poet seek for aid,
When dust and rain at once his coat invade?
Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain
Erects the nap, and leaves a mingled stain.
Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down,
.....
Here various kinds, by various fortunes led,
Commence acquaintance underneath a shed.
Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs
Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
....

This poem begins considering the possibilities of prediction, and then combines his philosophy and his physical surroundings, gracefully indeed.