[Sitwell was a twentieth-century English poet who, extremely cognizant of the value of sound and rhythmic structure in poetry, experimented widely in these areas in her verse. In the following excerpt from her biography of Pope, she examines several passages from Pope's works to demonstrate various aspects of the poet's technical skill.]

Sir Leslie Stephen, in his life of Pope, complains of the monotony of Pope's technique—as though the heroic couplet, with its infinite and subtle variation (especially in the hands of Pope)—were all of one depth, of one height, of one texture….

The stupidly despised Essay on Criticism leads us to understand with what care and infinite subtlety Pope studied and worked at his texture:

But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow:
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

The dipping and bending of that line is miraculous. No swallow ever flew more lightly.

The "Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day" shows how stiff and unaccustomed Pope felt himself to be when he was not working in couplets. The poem contains beautiful lines, with occasional appalling lapses; it contains this splendor:

The first two lines are magnificent; the subsequent lines less so, but still fine, the poem contains also this lovely verse:

By the hero's armed shades,
Glitt'ring thro' the gloomy glades,
By the youths that died for love,
Wand'ring in the myrtle grove,
Restore, restore Eurydice to life:
Oh take the husband, or return the wife!

But the last line comes as a shock; it is difficult to see how so great a poet could reconcile himself to such bathos. The admiration for respectability which was such a moving power in his life, must have been at work here….

As an example of Pope's so-called monotony, let us take the difference between The Rape of the Lock, with its infinite variations, and The Dunciad, with its enormous variations of height and depth, speed, and heavy consciously dulled sloth. The Rape of the Lock, this miraculous poem, which has been most foolishly described as a work in silver filigree, is light, variable and enchanting as a little summer wind blowing down the golden spangles of the dew from the great faunal trees—the whole poem might have been woven by the air-thin golden fingers of Pope's sylphs. This thin and glittering texture, how did it ever come into being? The lines differ in no wise from the wings of the sylphs, as they float above the barge:

Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,
Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;
Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid bodies half dissolved in light.
Loose to the wind their airy garments flew,
Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew,
Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies,
Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes;
While ev'ry beam new transient colours flings,
Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.

Those lines are the only fitting description of the poem itself; it is impossible to describe it in other terms. And yet Pope has been held to be deficient in beauty! …

It has been the fashion to regard only the tempests of fury, and not the strange murky and Tartarean beauty of The Dunciad, although it is one of the greatest poems in our language. Yet it is just as beautiful in its own way, and just as strange, as "The Ancient Mariner." It has been held not to be, only because it is a satire, and people whose liking for poetry is a purely sentimental one, are unable to believe that beauty is not dependent upon subject alone.

How enormous are the opening lines, with the thick, muffled, dull thud of the alliterating "M's":

The mighty mother, and her son, who brings
The Smithfield muses to the ears of kings.

The sound is thick, gross, and blind as stupidity itself. Then take the lines:

Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave,
Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
She rul'd, in native anarchy, the mind.

The "G" sounds in the first and last words of the second line, give a designedly unwieldy lumbering gait to the line, a gait indicative of the subject; the next line, with its appalling deafening blows, caused by the alliterative "B's," placed so close together, has an overwhelming effect of power.

If we compare those varying lines with those I have quoted from The Rape of the Lock, I do not see how it is possible, for any but the most insensitive, to uphold that Pope is monotonous….

We might as well complain that the world is monotonous because it is round, and because it circles round the sun, as complain of the monotony of Alexander Pope.

One example of his "monotony" is his use of the cæsura. Now the cæsura has, for the purposes of convenience, been held to be of uniform length and depth. But this is not so. And Pope places the cæsura, the pause (of varying depths), not only to vary the music of his verse, but so as to heighten the meaning. As when, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he says:

The dog-star rages! nay, 'tis past a doubt,
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:
Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

In this, the slightness of the pauses in the second line give the effect of a disheveled procession streaming past one. In the fourth line, the fact that the first and second verbs are alliterative, and rather long-sounding, with their hard "R's," and that the third verb begins with a thick thumping "M," gives the degree of irritation which was felt by the poet.

But to return to the cæsura. If we examine these lines from The Dunciad:

One cell there is, conceal'd from vulgar eye,
The cave of poverty and poetry.
Keen, hollow winds howl thro' the bleak recess,
Emblem of music caus'd by emptiness,

we shall find that the slightness of the cæsura, in the third line I have quoted—a cœsura so shallow as to be hardly perceptible—gives it a strange chilliness, which is added to by the little cold wind of the two words beginning with "H" in the third line, the last of these two words, because it is a one-syllabled word and has a long vowel-sound, being louder than the two-syllabled short-voweled "hollow."

Compare the slightness of the cassura here with the violence of the pause, the violence of the antithesis in the last line of these couplets from the First Epistle of the First Book of Horace:

To either India see the merchant fly,
Scared at the spectre of pale poverty!
See him, with pangs of body, pangs of soul,
Burn through the tropic, freeze beneath the pole!

How perfectly he fits his substance to his meaning. Take, for instance, these lines, which convey, in spite of the perfect structure of the heroic couplet, a sense of the formlessness of primeval matter (the lines are from The Dunciad):

Till genial Jacob, or a warm third day,
Call forth each mass, a poem or a play:
How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,
How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry,
Maggots half-form'd in rhyme exactly meet,
And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.

These lines, and the eight lines which follow, have a perfectly deliberate, and most unpleasant, softness—the softness of corruption….

In Pope's minor poems, there is not much to examine. Yet Eloisa to Abelard although it is not one of Pope's most successful poems, has been, I think, rather underrated, for it is in many ways a moving poem. Unfortunately, the skilled use of the antithesis, of which Pope and Dryden were our greatest masters, was not suitable to this subject:

I mourn the lover, not lament the fault

this gives the emotion an epigrammatic effect which lessens and falsifies the emotion.

Yet how real and how moving is this:

Ah hopeless, lasting flames! like those that burn
To light the dead, and warm th' unfruitful urn.

The poem is very quiet and restrained, the restraint is moving; but I am not quite sure that it was meant to be as quiet as it is—that the quietness is not a result of Pope's ill-health—(his physical debility could never be guessed from The Dunciad or The Rape of the Lock!)

I am not qualified to judge of the translations from Homer as translations. May I not, therefore, be allowed to regard them, not as translations, but as evidences of Pope's great poetic genius? The translation of the Odyssey is bathed in the azure airs of beauty that come to us from an undying sea. The lines and the heroes walk with the pomp and majesty of waves.

In the Odyssey we do not find the astonishing variations in texture that we find in The Dunciad, nor the incredibly subtle variations of The Rape of the Lock. The poem is more uniform, but had it been otherwise, the technique would have been unsuited to the matter.