The Rape of the Lock

Pope wrote this mock-epic poem at the request of his friend John Caryll to help heal a rift between two prominent Catholic families. In real life, Lord Petre had taken a lock of Arabella Fermor's...

In his mock epic The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope focuses on several major themes. The primary theme is the emptiness and frivolity of courtly, upper-class life, which Pope satirizes...

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....

Belinda's toilet scene occurs at the end of canto 1, running from lines 121 to 148 and starting with And now, unveiled, the Toilet stands displayed, Each Silver vase in mystic Order laid and...

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...

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...

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...

In his address of the poem to the heroine, Miss Arabella Fermor, Pope tells why there is supernatural machinery in the poem: The Machinery, Madam, is a Term invented by the Criticks, to signify...

Let me start with listing a few themes in the poem. Sex and sexuality, femininity, narcissism, and vanity. Those are not the only themes present in Pope's poem, but when a reader thinks about...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

One of the brilliant aspects of this mock epic is the way in which Pope exposes the focus of his society on various superficial aspects such as outward appearance. This is of course shown through...

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...

Pope describes The Rape of the Lock as a "heroi-comical" poem—heroic because he uses the Homeric epic to frame the poem and comical because he is attempting to defuse a serious argument between two...

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...

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 Rape of the Lock is a wonderful poem, but different readers are going to gravitate to certain sections more than others. Additionally, different readers are going to have different themes and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Wow, there are a lot of really great questions being asked here. This particular Pope piece is a wonderfully comedic bit of poetry, and once students begin to understand what is being presented to...

Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," generally considered to be the finest mock-heroic poem in English literature, was written as a favor to Pope's friend, John Caryll, to help smooth over a dispute...

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...

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...

Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock" is separated into five different parts (Cantos). The lines below are from Canto Two of the poem, lines 16-18: Might hide her Faults, if Belles had faults to...

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...

This quote actually comes towards the beginning of this excellent mock epic, and is part of the description of Pope's speculation of what might happen to the poor Belinda on a particularly...

The short answer is that "The Rape of the Lock" is both mock epic and mock-heroic epic. Mock epic and Mock-heroic epic are often considered the same thing. Pope's subtitle is "An Heroi-Comical...

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...

Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" is a mock-epic, meaning that it is written in the style of an ancient epic poem but that the events it contains are utterly trivial. The entire poem is based around...

Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" (1712; 1714) is based on an actual incident in which Lord Petre took some scissors and snipped a bit of hair from Miss Arabella Fermor, an action which caused a...

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...

"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 similiarity between these two sections of the poem lies in the way that Pope creates a world where the normal world interacts with a kind of fairy world, with a number of attendant fairies that...

The questions are posed in Canto I, lines 7–10. First: Say what strange motive, Goddess, could compel A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle? The second question: O say what stranger cause,...

In The Rape of the Lock, Pope satirizes human vanity and specifically the fashionable upper-class English society of his own time. At the start of canto II he describes his heroine, Belinda, in...