The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings

by Alexander Pope

  Though stiff with hoops, and armed with ribs of whale.

  There are hints in the poem, too, of larger concerns that the self-indulgent patrician culture chooses to ignore. Homer indicates seasons and times of day by referring to rural tasks, and Pope gives the epic convention a chilling twist:

  Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,

  The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;

  The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,

  And wretches hang that jurymen may dine …9

  A world of political and social implications is crystallized in those lines.

  Johnson once declared in conversation, ‘Sir, a thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope.’10 By ‘versification’ Johnson meant complex effects of rhythm, melody, vowel sounds, alliteration, and rhyme to which his contemporaries were far more attuned than modern readers are likely to be. From this perspective it is poets who have best appreciated Pope; Coleridge admired his ‘almost faultless position and the choice of words’.11 Above all, Pope sought to fill his lines with energy, and he was a tireless reviser. ‘He examined lines and words,’ Johnson commented, ‘with minute and punctilious observation, and retouched every part with indefatigable diligence, till he had nothing left to be forgiven.’12 The term ‘forgiven’ is notable: a reader like Johnson was offended by careless writing, such as he thought Dryden often got away with. But the ultimate purpose was to make hard-won harmony seem effortless and inevitable. As Pope himself put it,

  True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

  As those move easiest who have learned to dance.13

  He knew how to make language dance, and he was always alert to add force and sharpness to lines that were already excellent.

  These skills are apparent in the description of Belinda waking up, at the beginning of ‘The Rape of the Lock’. In the original 1712 version it runs like this:

  Sol through white curtains did his beams display,

  And oped those eyes which brighter shine than they;

  Shock had just given himself the rousing shake,

  And nymphs prepared their chocolate to take;

  Thrice the wrought slipper knocked against the ground,

  And striking watches the tenth hour resound.14

  Contemporary readers appreciated the allusions to everyday experience; in an era when it was difficult to get a light in the night-time, watches would chime the hour when a button was pressed, and ‘Shock’ was a common name for pet lapdogs. At other points elevated diction rises to the level of romance, though always with an amused sense of incongruity: ‘Sol’ is a pompous name for the sun, and London ladies are not exactly ‘nymphs’.

  Other poets of the time might well have been satisfied with these lines, but despite the poem’s success, Pope was not. Two years later the passage reappeared (with the principal changes highlighted):

  Sol through white curtains shot a tim’rous ray,

  And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,

  Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake,

  And sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake;

  Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,

  And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.15

  The sequence of ideas and even the rhyme-sounds remain the same, but everything is sharper and more energetic. Belinda’s eyes don’t just shine brighter than the sun – a conventional hyperbole – but will eclipse the sun altogether, while the bell and the ‘silver sound’ of the watch add aural richness to visual. New verbs contribute punch, as ‘did his beams display’ becomes ‘shot a tim’rous ray’. Most tellingly, with teasing irony, lovers who are conventionally sleepless have in fact slept soundly until noon, and they share a couplet with the lapdogs, foreshadowing the brilliant line later in the poem, ‘When husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last’ (III, 158). No wonder Swift declared, with affectionate envy,

  In Pope, I cannot read a line

  But with a sigh, I wish it mine:

  When he can in one couplet fix

  More sense than I can do in six,

  It gives me such a jealous fit

  I cry, ‘Pox take him, and his wit!’16

  Pope was a great poet at an earlier age than any English poet except Keats, and his range seemed limitless. In between the two versions of ‘The Rape of the Lock’ he published ‘Windsor Forest’, invoking historical associations and the landscape surrounding Windsor Castle, near which he had spent his childhood, to reflect on the Peace of Utrecht that was finally concluding the bloody War of the Spanish Succession. The poem’s theme is that violence and cruelty are all too human, and its fantasy is that the passions of war might be sublimated in the cruel but at least not homicidal game of hunting. Pope’s sympathies are entirely with the victims in both arenas. Other poets had celebrated Britain’s triumphs in war with complacent generalizations like these:

  Rivers of blood I see, and hills of slain,

  An Iliad rising out of one campaign.17

  Pope, very differently, imagines the fate of a town besieged by Britain’s ‘eager sons’:

  Some thoughtless town, with ease and plenty blest,

  Near, and more near, the closing lines invest;

  Sudden they seize th’ amazed, defenceless prize,

  And high in air Britannia’s standard flies.

  Closer to home, the deaths even of small birds are poignantly immediate:

  Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath,

  The clam’rous lapwings feel the leaden death;

  Oft, as the mounting larks their notes prepare,

  They fall, and leave their little lives in air.18

  Quoted out of context, ‘leaden death’ might seem poetic diction at its most artificial. Read in its place, it brings home the shock and weight of the pellets of lead, and the phrase ‘leave their little lives in air’ tenderly catches the last echo of the larks that sing no more.

  Pope nearly always wrote in rhymed couplets (known at the time as heroic couplets), not just because they were then in fashion, but because they embodied his artistic ideal, distilling order and harmony out of the welter of experience. In classical theory the function of art was to hold a mirror up to nature, but Pope knew well that an image must always transform what it represents. In a lovely passage in ‘Windsor Forest’, when an imagined nymph called Lodona metamorphoses into the rural river Loddon, she becomes literally the mirror of art, with a virtuoso range of colours, textures, and movement:

  Oft in her glass the musing shepherd spies

  The headlong mountains and the downward skies,

  The wat’ry landscape of the pendent woods,

  And absent trees that tremble in the floods;

  In the clear azure gleam the flocks are seen,

  And floating forests paint the waves with green.19

  Modern literary theory has had much to say about the evocation of presence in absence, and Pope does have ‘absent trees’ in the inverted watery landscape, but he also has the immediacy of pleasure in the presence of beauty. And as always in his writing, the lines are filled with movement and life: the reflected mountains seem to have fallen ‘headlong’ into the stream, the reflected trees ‘tremble’ with shimmering mobility, and they ‘paint’ their watery reflections even as Pope (who became an accomplished amateur painter) seeks to paint with words.

  In 1717, when he was not yet thirty, Pope brought out a volume of Works. By this point in his career he had engaged with many of the traditional themes of poetry: love in ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ and ‘The Rape of the Lock’, death in ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’, religion in ‘Messiah’ (not included in this edition) and in ‘Eloisa’, art in ‘An Essay on Criticism’, and nature and war in ‘Windsor Forest’. By then he had also published the first instalments of his Iliad, which Johnson, half a century later, would call ‘the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever
seen’.20 But his career now took an unexpected turn. After completing the translation of Homer, which occupied most of the next decade, he astonished his public in 1728 by issuing an altogether different kind of poem, the mock-epic ‘Dunciad’, in which scores of contemporary writers were derided as venal and incompetent ‘dunces’.

  One final flight of high seriousness did remain, ‘An Essay on Man’, but in his other writings Pope abandoned the mode of elevated, urbane art to explore a different imaginative realm, one that was embedded in – or even dragged down by – the complexity of contemporary politics and culture. As he himself put it, he ‘stooped to truth, and moralized his song’.21 Scholars gloss this as alluding to the fierce ‘stoop’ or plunge of a hunting falcon upon its prey, and Pope may well have intended that, but in any case it was a descent. In earlier days the elderly playwright William Wycherley had predicted that Pope’s career would mirror Virgil’s:

  Whose muse did once, like thine, in plains delight;

  Thine shall, like his, soon take a higher flight;

  So larks, which first from lowly fields arise,

  Mount by degrees, and reach at last the skies.22

  Larks are singers, falcons are killers, and Pope transformed himself into a trenchant and sometimes furious satirist. If he had once sought ‘truth’ as an ideal realm of eternal verities, now it was just a modest standard of integrity against which to measure a world that was ‘mean’ in the eighteenth-century sense of ‘low’:

  Truth guards the poet, sanctifies the line,

  And makes immortal, verse as mean as mine.23

  In this diminished context, the very notion of truth was compromised by the myriad ways in which people invoked, manipulated, and dissembled it. In a pregnant aphorism Pope acknowledged, ‘In the cunning, truth itself’s a lie.’24

  ‘The Dunciad’ is filled with anger at individuals who irritated Pope, and the project became an obsession, reappearing in three expanded editions over the next fifteen years. From the very beginning of his career, in fact, he had been wounded by personal attacks by jealous rivals. His mildly sarcastic reference to the older critic John Dennis in ‘An Essay on Criticism’ provoked Dennis to publish a cruel description of Pope’s physical deformity. More insidiously, Joseph Addison, eminent poet and essayist – it was he who celebrated ‘rivers of blood’ in battle – seemed at first inclined to assist Pope’s career but then turned against him by promoting a rival translation of Homer. Addison’s covert malice is immortalized in the portrait of ‘Atticus’, published after Addison’s death and given final burnishing in the 1735 ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’. To give him the name of an ancient Roman called ‘Atticus’ was a deliberately transparent disguise, not just because ‘Atticus’ and ‘Addison’ sound much alike, but because the portrait is immediately preceded by actual mention of Addison’s name. After a brief compliment to his ‘genius’, his behaviour as the dominant writer of the age comes into focus:

  Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,

  Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne;

  View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,

  And hate for arts that caused himself to rise;

  Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

  And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;

  Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,

  Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike …

  Who but must laugh if such a man there be?

  Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?25

  Still more powerful in ‘Arbuthnot’ is another counterattack, this time on a sly and worldly courtier called Lord John Hervey. Hervey was a close friend of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with whom Pope had once been infatuated, and the friends had collaborated to satirize Pope mercilessly. His response this time was a masterpiece of eloquent disgust, wickedly casting Hervey as ‘Sporus’, the name of a handsome youth whom Nero caused to be castrated and then married. With elegantly balanced antitheses Pope skewers his enemy:

  Amphibious thing! that acting either part,

  The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,

  Fop at the toilet, flatt’rer at the board,

  Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.

  Eve’s tempter thus the rabbins have expressed:

  A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest;

  Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust,

  Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.26

  The description shrewdly acknowledges Hervey’s genuine gifts – he does have wit, in the sense then current of ‘intelligence’, and he is a man of ‘parts’ – but the gifts are spoiled by sycophancy and self-display, so that he resembles the rabbinical image of the tempter in Eden with a lovely face above and reptilian coils below. There was indeed something equivocal about Hervey – Lady Mary herself remarked that there were ‘three sexes: men, women, and Herveys’27 – but the way Pope exploited it quickly got him a reputation of being thin-skinned and vindictive. Satire, he said proudly in another poem, was ‘my weapon’, adding that he was ‘armed for virtue when I point the pen’; but when he derided Hervey’s use of milk to treat a skin condition – ‘Sporus, that mere white curd of asses’ milk’ – or when he hinted that contact with Lady Mary might result in venereal infection, it was not obvious that he was – in a claim he borrowed from Horace – ‘to VIRTUE ONLY and HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND’.28

  More sympathetically, one can say that Pope never felt really at home in a culture that was turning literature into commercial speculation and that honoured the absurd actor-playwright Colley Cibber as Poet Laureate (as a Catholic, Pope was in any case ineligible). ‘Windsor Forest’ had been published when Queen Anne, last of the Stuart line, was on the throne and when traditionalist Tories whom Pope admired controlled her government. A year later she was dead, the Tory ministry had collapsed, and a German who spoke no English had arrived as George I. The politics of the ensuing decades – the final thirty years of Pope’s life – were repugnant to him, as were the larger social and economic changes of that era.

  For years Pope dreamed of creating an immense Opus Magnum, a systematic cycle of ‘moral’ poems in which the ‘Essay on Man’ would be just one of many parts. In the early 1730s he did compose four major poems in a newly developed conversational style, addressed to individual friends – three noblemen, and his closest female friend, Martha Blount – that were meant to form part of this grand design. The topics are at first sight rather miscellaneous: they are subtitled ‘Of the Knowledge and Characters of MEN’, ‘Of the Characters of WOMEN’, and ‘Of the Use of RICHES’ (two). But the latter emphasis was not at all eccentric, for Britain was being shaken by the tectonic tremors of what has become known as the financial revolution, which Pope and other Tory sympathizers saw as the deplorable ascendancy of an acquisitive middle-class culture that was amassing fortunes from colonial exploitation and risky financial speculation, encouraged by Sir Robert Walpole’s Whig coalition that held power through bribery and patronage for twenty years. The frightening collapse in 1720 of the investment scheme that became known as the South Sea Bubble, which took down many of Pope’s friends (he himself got out in time to save most of his money), convinced him that the impersonal operation of the modern capitalist marketplace was little short of criminal:

  While with the silent growth of ten per cent

  In dirt and darkness hundreds stink content.29

  More and more, the Opus Magnum project seemed unattainable, and when it became evident that the group of four poems was unlikely to expand, Pope collected them under the modest title ‘Epistles to Several Persons’ (after his death his executor William Warburton gave them the grander name of Moral Essays).

  For the rest of his career, Pope was firmly committed to the conversational mode, and in a series of superb adaptations of the Epistles and Satires of Horace, he invoked his classical forebear as a kindred spirit, seeking to rise above a vulgar culture but constantly dragged back in
to it. Pope’s poetic gifts were in no way diminished. ‘In dirt and darkness hundreds stink content’ enacts an almost physical disgust, with the jammed-together ‘k’ sounds in ‘stink content’. But he deliberately relinquished the grace and loveliness that he had deployed with such mastery in his early work; he was now ‘Verse-man or prose-man, term me which you will’.30 And although his poems continued to sparkle with ironic wit, there was seldom much of the amused humour that made ‘The Rape of the Lock’ so buoyant. Johnson thought it telling that according to people who knew Pope, ‘he sometimes condescended to be jocular with servants or inferiors, but by no merriment, either of others or his own, was he ever seen excited to laughter’.31

  Traditional Pope scholarship used to be anxious to clean up his image, exalting him as a high-minded spokesman for Western civilization who was righteously indignant at the unjust prominence of bad writers, but many of the so-called ‘dunces’ were actually very intelligent, and some were even good writers. What really baffled and frustrated Pope was that the traditional hierarchy of aesthetic value was in a state of collapse, yet as his critics were quick to point out, he himself was hardly above exploiting publication for gain. He sold his Homer, in an opulent edition, by advance subscription to highly placed admirers, and when he tried to capitalize on that success with an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, a pompous but competent scholar named Lewis Theobald detailed its faults and followed with an edition of his own that greatly outsold Pope’s. Theobald’s reward was to become the ignoble hero of the ‘Dunciad’, where even his name was made ludicrous as ‘piddling Tibbalds’,32 and Pope found himself embroiled in a permanent war against commercial publishing in which a horde of badly paid hack writers inhabited the maze of alleys and garrets that was known in those days as Grub Street. In Pope’s conception, a soporific goddess of Dullness presides over a sick civilization in which literary incompetence mirrors social disorder:

  There motley images her fancy strike,

  Figures ill paired, and similes unlike.

  She sees a mob of metaphors advance,

  Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance: