The Rape of the Lock

Keep in mind that "The Rape of the Lock" is a mock epic. Pope is satirizing--skewering, really--the silliness of high society of his day by placing an incident within the form of an epic, complete...

Pope’s poem is a mock-epic: that is, a poem that treats insignificant events in the manner of epic poetry. The opening couplet, which you quote, sets the stage for the entire poem, suggesting that...

The following lines appear in "The Rape of the Lock" Canto Five, lines 25-26: But since, alas! frail Beauty must decay, Curl'd or uncurl'd, since Locks will turn to grey, In Canto Five, the...

Canto 1 opens with the lines, What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things. These lines, especially the words "trivial things" signal that this...

The following line appears in Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock" in Canto One, line 37. Explanation of the line needs to be completed within the context of Canto One as a whole. In Canto One, Pope...

Pope wrote this poem in an attempt to defuse a real-life quarrel that had erupted between two Catholic families. Lord Petre had taken a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair without her permission. The...

Belinda is presented by Pope in "The Rape of the Lock" as a bundle of contradictions. This makes her not just a more interesting character, but also a reflection of the society in which she lives....

The Rape of the Lock is a mock epic, meaning that it is written in the form of an epic poem but uses satire to make fun of the society in which Pope lived. Pope saw this society as one which had...

The background to "The Rape of the Lock" is a trifling dispute between two families of English Catholic aristocrats over the unauthorized cutting—the "rape" of the title—of a lock of hair. The lock...

The Rape of the Lock is a "mock epic" or as Pope calls it in the subtitle, an "Heroi-Comical Poem in Five Cantos." This poem was meant to poke fun at the aristocracy. This poem is a classic form of...

The game of Ombre is played in Canto III of The Rape of the Lock. This card game, which is similar to bridge, was played with three players in the 17th century, although it began in the 16th...

Ariel is Belinda's guardian sylph, a spirit of the air whose whole purpose in life is to protect a lady's chastity. Ariel also guards Belinda's beauty, ensuring that she always looks her best when...

In canto 3 of The Rape of the Lock, the speaker refers to Queen Anne's activities at Hampton Court. The speaker addresses her directly (the literary device known as apostrophe) as "great Anna." The...

This quote is part of the opening stanza of "The Rape of the Lock," which reads as follows: What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things, I...

The four types of spirits which dead women take on in Alexander Pope's The Rape of Lock are mirrored by the four elements: air, earth, water, and fire. In lines 59–60, we are introduced to...

A Muse refers to one of seven sisters in Greek mythology, each of whom were responsible for a particular branch of art or science. It was typical for epics such as Homer's Odyssey and Milton's...

These lines, from the beginning of Canto Five, represent the voice of reason, Clarissa, in the midst of the chaos. Through the literal interpretation of the lines, she closes her speech by...

The Rape of The Lock by Alexander Pope exposes the fickle nature of society. Pope intends to show how minor occurrences pervade our existence as if they were major catastrophes. Ariel, a sylph,...

Traditionally, writers of epic poems would invoke the Muses, ancient goddesses who protected the arts. Pope, however, invokes the name of his friend John Caryll, ('Caryl' in the poem) who...

These lines use hyperbole (exaggeration) to mockingly foreshadow the "crisis" that will soon erupt: Belinda's loss of a lock of hair to the Baron. Horrors! The poem pokes fun at a real-life furor...

In one sense, the answer to this question is fairly straightforward: Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714), which he subtitled "An Heroi-Comical Poem in Five Canto's"—that is, a mock epic—was written...

The lines "Now lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake, / And sleepless lovers, just as twelve, awake" appear in the third stanza of canto 1 of Alexander Pope's mock epic The Rape of the Lock....

The Rape of the Lock is a narrative poem written by the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope about a Baron who steals the main character Belinda's flowing locks. Belinda is guarded by 50...

The following lines appear in "The Rape of the Lock", Canto Five, lines 15-16: How vain are all these Glories, all our Pains, Unless good Sense preserve what Beauty gains: The lines refer to the...

This couplet is part of a series of observations Pope makes about what was usually referred to as "the inconstancy of women." The behavior of women, in Pope's mock-heroic scenario, is controlled by...

These lines occur in Cant III of Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In these lines, Pope is speaking satirically with significant irony and something of mocking ridicule. The setting Pope is describing...

The quote in question is only understandable in reference to the stanza that precedes it. The Baron had been contemplating schemes for attaining a lock of Belinda's perfectly curled and styled...

These lines appear in canto 2. The speech in which the lines are contained is Ariel’s instructions to his army of sylphs on what each of them will do to guide and protect Belinda. For instance, he...

The style used in "The Rape of the Lock" is mock epic or, as Pope calls it in a subtitle, "An Heroi-Comical Poem." Pope treats these relatively trivial events as if they were wars and journeys...

In Alexander Pope's eighteenth-century mock-epic, The Rape of the Lock, the main character, Belinda, arrives by boat at an extravagant party held at Hampton Court Palace. Pope writes at the...

"The Rape of the Lock" is a mock epic or an "heroi-comical poem" as Pope describes it in the epigraph. The poem uses the form, tone, and seriousness often reserved for genuine epics which are...

Although The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope is a satire and at times exaggerates for comic effect, it also gives its readers insight into many elements of the culture of its period. It should...

Alexander Pope, the author of this hilarious mock-epic, was renowned for his use of heroic couplets in his work. These are called heroic couplets because both Pope and his literary predecessor John...

These last two lines of Canto Four resemble a huge rhetorical "WHY?" or "If only..." uttered plaintively in the wake of the serial mock-disaster caused by the snipping of a lock of hair. After the...

Both of these works are famous for their satirical approach to satire, and stylistically how these works achieve this purpose is worthy of examination. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope uses heroic...

"The Rape of the Lock" is considered to be perhaps the best mock-heroic poem in English literature because of Pope's incredible ability to incorporate themes, language and characters from Classical...

The general theme of the poem is the vanity of the English upper classes, both men and women. Belinda's vanity, her obsession with her looks and the clothes that she wears, is merely the most...

First of all, let us define the so-called supernatural machinery. Here is a helpful quote from a letter Alexander Pope added to the second edition of the poem: The Machinery, Madam, is a term...

The following lines in Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" are found in Canto Two, lines 32-34: By Force to ravish, or by Fraud betray; For when Success a Lover's Toil attends, Few ask, if Fraud or...

Canto 1 begins with a traditional invoking of the muses as well as setting up the subject matter of the poem, "The Rape of the Lock." This does not concern a sexual rape but rather, in the parlance...

Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" is a mock-epic, which means it is written to be funny. Humor works by using overstatement, surprise, and exaggeration: We as readers are so startled by the...

The following line appears in Canto One of Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock": This to disclose is all thy Guardian can. The line is 113 and lies as the second to last line in stanza 10. Canto...

Belinda represents not so much eighteenth-century women as she does an ideal of glamor and womanhood that was typical of the upper-class mentality of the time. In this sense, she's not much...

Additionally, though Belinda is never fully named in the text of the poem, she does have a brother in the story--Sir Plume. Therefore, it could be deduced that Plume is her last name, too, though...

As in the Iliad, the supernatural has a part to play in this mock-epic poem. In the Iliad,it is gods and goddesses who interact with and help their favorites, such as Achilles. In The Rape of the...

The following quote is found in Canto 2 of Pope's The Rape of the Lock: Favours to none, to all she smiles extends; Oft she rejects, but never once offends. Here, Pope is offering a direct...