[In the essay below, Butt examines the inspiration behind Pope's poetry, including "the inspirations drawn from fancy, morality, and books."]

The twentieth-century reader is beginning to discover that there is enjoyment to be obtained from the poetry of Pope, but he is still in danger of misunderstanding what Pope was trying to express and the methods he used. The radical misunderstanding is that though the meaning of Pope's poetry seems so easy to grasp, it requires as active and intelligent co-operation from the reader as the work of more recognizably difficult poets. Many poems—many great poems—require in the first place little more than the reader's sympathy, his receptivity, his power of experiencing normal human emotions. We need only to have been glad at the sight of a field of daffodils to appreciate Ί wandered lonely as a cloud' and to receive from it all, or almost all, that Wordsworth has to communicate. And we need no particular training or sophistication to be excited by Keats's 'Ode to Autumn' or by Hamlet. Study will enrich our appreciation, but it is possible to enjoy reading much Elizabethan and much nineteenth-century poetry with no other equipment than keenness of sensibility, because our power of seeing and feeling is the most obvious part of that common ground of experience which we share with Shakespeare, Keats, and Wordsworth, and from which their poetry sprang.

But the common reader, fresh from the excitement of romantic poetry, is troubled as soon as he begins to read Pope. He finds some things to please him: the pathos of such a line as

To help me thro' this long Disease, my Life,

[Epistle to Arbuthnot]

or the rapture of

Belinda smil'd, and all the World was gay,

[Rape of the Lock]

or the accuracy (to call it no more) of

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
[Essay on Man]

Equally apparent is Pope's 'fine and delicate imagination', as his friend the Earl of Orrery described it. Nothing more than a sympathetic and receptive mind is required to appreciate such a couplet as this, describing the activities of eastern magicians:

These stop'd the Moon, and call'd th' unbody'd Shades
To Midnight Banquets in the glimmering Glades,
[Temple of Fame]

and perhaps nothing more than an alert mind to notice Pope's fondness for words such as glimmering in that couplet, which with its suggestion of something imperfectly seen is charged with romantic associations and possibilities. The alert reader will remember 'the glimmering light' in such an unpromising context as the Essay on Criticism; or the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock, 'trembling for the Birth of Fate'. The recurrence of 'trembling' is especially remarkable: the Priestess trembles before she begins the sacred rites of pride; the shrines tremble as Eloisa takes the veil [Eloisa to Abelard]; and later in that poem, when Eloisa kneels before the altar in religious ecstasy, one thought of Abelard puts all the pomp to flight:

Priests, Tapers, Temples, swim before my sight:
In seas of flame my plunging soul is drown'd,
While Altars blaze, and Angels tremble round.

In each of these instances the word is used to signify the uncontrollable reaction to some more than human activity, an essentially romantic effect most readily pleasing to the unsophisticated reader. But the unsophisticated reader will find comparatively little of this in Pope, and his pleasure in it will be modified by what will appear peculiar in Pope's imaginative and descriptive writing; peculiar, that is, when compared with the imaginative and descriptive writing of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Keats.

With two exceptions, the passages quoted above are taken from poems written before 1717, the year in which Pope collected and published his early work. In these poems his imagination had been specially active: devising fanciful situations in the Pastorals and The Rape of the Lock; creating a new race of beings called sylphs; placing the sculptured figures of the 'Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady' and Eloisa to Abelard in a variety of exquisitely passionate poses; describing idealized scenes in the Messiah, Windsor Forest, and The Temple of Fame, as lavish with his gold paint as Sir John Vanbrugh decorating Blenheim Palace, dropping it on the breast of a pheasant, on the scales of a carp, on the roofs of Mexican palaces [Windsor Forest], on the façade of Fame's temple [Temple of Fame], on chariots [Rape of the Lock], and on the girdles of goddesses [Windsor Forest], and even having enough to spare for a lake of liquid gold in The Rape of the Lock; then setting these off with crystal domes and countless silver ornaments, and breathing upon them Arabian gales [Temple of Fame] and the aromatic souls of flowers, [Windsor Forest] till the scenes were as gorgeously rococo as any Man of Taste could require.

After 1717 Pope preferred to subdue his powers of imagination. Looking back upon this early poetry in later years, he regarded it with indulgent condescension as a youthful excess. He liked to think that he had not wandered long in Fancy's maze (the distinction between Fancy and Imagination was not yet recognized), but had soon stooped like a falcon upon Truth and moralized his song. The association of description and fancy implied, and the dissociation of description and truth, are worth remarking. Pope's method in description never was to keep his eye on the object and to describe that object so accurately either by realistic or impressionistic means that the description corresponded with what other men might see. He preferred to describe something laid up in his imagination, something more splendid than could be seen by anyone else. What he describes are such scenes as I have already indicated, scenes bedizened with gold and silver—something quite unnatural, as unnatural as the decoration of Lycid's hearse; for neither Milton nor Pope wished to limit themselves to the comparatively mean resources of nature. Truth of description, like all other aspects of truth, Pope reserved to strengthen his moral purpose. The fineness of the spider's touch is part of his argument that 'throughout the whole visible world, an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed, which causes a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man'. The dab-chick, which

was described so precisely to make the appearance of one of the dunces more ridiculous. To appreciate Pope's imaginative description, therefore, we must be prepared to forget for the moment our breeding in naturalistic poetry. So much co-operation is essential to avoid misunderstanding.

But though Pope allowed himself more licence in description than later poets have done, he allowed himself less licence in expounding a rule of life and the truth as he understood it. Pope was no revolutionary. He had no Utopian system to offer. He had no wish to reconstruct society. Instead, he fell in with the spirit of the times, which was to conserve and consolidate what had been won by the revolutionary struggles of the previous century. His ethical position resembles Addison's not a little. The writings of both men were intended to produce a higher level of culture and a greater social decency in the new middle class, which was just then growing up. Their methods were different—Addison preferred persuasion and raillery, Pope preferred satire: but their motives were the same. The influence of the Tatler and the Spectator on Pope's way of thinking was considerable. It was perhaps from these periodicals that he acquired his views on literature as a corrective to morals; and, as Professor Sherburn has observed, The Rape of the Lock would have been almost impossible before raillery on the fair sex had been made popular by Steele and Addison.

But we cannot merely say that the intention and inspiration of Pope's original poetry after he had escaped from Fancy's maze were ethical, for to say no more than that might suggest that Pope was imagining some ideal society and expounding some ideal rule of life. His intention and inspiration were not so revolutionary. Indeed, all his moral poetry was directed to improving the existing social state. His inspiration was therefore both ethical and topical. We shall not fully appreciate the magnificent praise of humility and political probity in the Epilogue to the Satires until we know something of the so-called 'patriotic' movement of the late thirties, a movement started by a few honest but gullible members of the parliamentary opposition, inspired by Bolingbroke, who hoped to end the jobbery and corruption of Walpole's government. Similarly, the numerous passages in praise of retirement and the simple life should be read in the light of Pope's compulsory retirement as a Roman Catholic and a Tory sympathizer. Our full understanding and enjoyment of the Essay on Man will depend to some extent upon our knowledge of the tenets of Bolingbroke and other deistic philosophers; and the epistle to Burlington, On the Use of Riches, cannot be fully appreciated without at least some recognition of contemporary taste in architecture and gardening. This applies even more to the casual references throughout these later poems. When at the end of the Epilogue to the Satires Pope thinks of himself as the last to draw a pen for freedom, because 'Truth stands trembling on the edge of Law', he is alluding to the press censorship which the government was threatening in 1738. The reason why the Law's thunder is hurled on Gin in the same poem will not be appreciated by one who has not seen Hogarth's celebrated picture 'Gin Lane' or who has not read of the disastrous effects on the physique of the population of the sale of cheap gin and the riots which followed the attempt to curtail its distribution. Or why should Pope compare Addison's fear of rivals to the Turk's, who could bear no brother near the throne? [Epistle to Arbuthnof] The answer is that Pope was retorting upon Addison the very same rebuke with which Addison had started his review of the Essay on Criticism in the Spectator, and was adapting for that purpose three lines of Denham's poem on John Fletcher's works quoted by Addison on that occasion:

Nor needs thy juster Title the foul guilt
Of Eastern Kings, who to secure their reign,
Must have their Brothers, Sons, and Kindred slain.

Without that particular knowledge, some of the point and effectiveness is lost.

A commentary when reading Pope's later works is therefore essential, 'a necessary evil' as Dr. Johnson said of commentaries on Shakespeare, something to be cast aside and ignored when the reader starts a later reading of the poem. Pope was quite well aware of the topical difficulty of his poems, as he showed by setting an example in annotation. Few of his later works were issued without explanatory notes, and as further editions appeared when the immediate occasion of many lines had been forgotten, the notes were increased in number. It is inevitable that the common reader should neglect what is merely topical in the literature of former ages, when there is so much being written by his contemporaries which more nearly concerns him. He must therefore be assured of the compensations for his trouble in tackling the antiquarian problems of Pope's later poetry before he pays it much attention.

To say merely that Pope's ethical and topical poetry transcends its occasions is asking too much of a reader's faith. Yet this is the result of Pope's treatment of his materials. A tempting example of this transcendence is the striking applicability (though it must be allowed to be mere coincidence) of Pope's political poetry to the political state of England just before the present war. Walpole had an unassailable parliamentary majority behind him; he had the moneyed interests on his side and the poets and the wits against him; and he was trying to avoid war by methods which the Opposition did not approve of. It is therefore not surprising that we can read to-day with a certain relish such irony as this addressed to the head of the government:

Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing,
Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing!
What seas you travers'd! and what fields you fought!
Your Country's Peace, how oft, how dearly bought!
How barb'rous rage subsided at your word,
And Nations wonder'd while they dropp'd the sword!
How, when you nodded, o'er the land and deep,
Peace stole her wing, and wrapt the world in sleep;
Till Earth's extremes your mediation own,
And Asia's Tyrants tremble at your Throne.
['Epistle to Augustus']

But the historical parallel here is a mere coincidence: Pope's ethical and topical poetry is often more profoundly and more permanently true. In contemporary extravagances and follies, Pope always sees the abuse of a general principle. In Timon's tasteless display of wealth or in Sir Balaam's mercenary spirit he sees a neglect of the rule of simple living: in the variety of Wharton's escapades [Moral Essay], an immoderate desire of admiration. And the converse is equally true: in Lyttelton he sees the type of the incorruptible politician, or in Ralph Allen's secret philanthropy [Epilogue to the Satires] a model of what every charitable man should be. These particular examples are, like a nightingale or a Grecian urn to Keats, the exciting perceptions which moved Pope to the expression of something which has universal significance. Their purpose in his poetry is to give illustrative force to the expression of universal truths.

It is worth remarking that a comparison of earlier and later versions of a poem will show that Pope's method in revision was often to omit unnecessary particulars and to generalize. Thus the 'Irish Poetess' of an early version of the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, a reference either to Mrs. Barber or to Mrs. Sykins, later becomes the 'maudlin Poetess', and by omitting the only direct reference to his quarrel with Addison he converted his character-sketch of Addison into 'Atticus', the type of all insincere yet influential men of letters.

Often Pope's method of generalizing seems to have been to conflate two characters. Thus Bufo, the mean and tasteless patron in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, seems to be a conflation of Halifax and Bubb Dodington; Pitholeon, the sponging poet, a conflation of Welsted and Cooke; Atossa, the termagant in the Characters of Women, a conflation of the Duchess of Buckingham and the Duchess of Marlborough. No doubt it was economical and guarded to lampoon two people in one character, because if either protested Pope could declare the character was intended for the other. Such a reflection may have appealed to him, but of course Pope knew that he was more certain of describing a universal type by taking characteristics from a number of people than by confining himself to one. This should be a warning against an attempt to define each of Pope's characters as invariably the character of one of his contemporaries.

The problem whether to use his contemporaries' characters as his examples or to invent imaginary characters continually exercised Pope's mind. He discussed it again and again both in his poems and in his letters, but his attitude is briefly summarized in a passage from a letter to his friend Caryll: I shall make living examples, which enforce best'—enforce, of course, the universal truth whether the character be vicious or virtuous. Pope would seem to have agreed with Milton that Virtue needs no fanciful decoration to set off her beauty. His verse, whenever he reflects on virtuous behaviour, is quite unadorned. The swell of emotion is enough to carry such passages, as when he cries, in the Epilogue to the Satires:

Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:

Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,
Yet touch'd and sham'd by Ridicule alone.

But it must not be supposed that his delight in sensuous description, so evident in the early poems, was extinguished when he ceased to make Fancy the intention of his poetry. He always took a trembling delight in the observation of beauty, and though the beauty of a virtuous action now chiefly detained him, he still had his use for sensuous experiences and fancies:

To happy Convents, bosom'd deep in vines,
Where slumber Abbots, purple as their wines:
To Isles of fragrance, lilly-silver'd vales,
Diffusing languor in the panting gales:
To lands of singing, or of dancing slaves,
Love-whisp'ring woods, and lute-resounding waves.

But for the second line, one might well suppose that these lines are to be found in Windsor Forest or the Pastorals. In fact, they are part of Pope's satirical argument in the fourth book of the Dunciad, and are a description (like the Bower of Bliss in the second book of the Faerie Queene) made to show how the young can be debauched by sensuality. It is a triumph of Pope's virtuosity that he reserves most of this later sensuousness for his satirical verses, as though he were trying to rid them of any taint of irritation, or demonstrating with what gracious ideas his mind was filled when he conceived these lampoons. This is especially true of the Dunciad, where Pope's enemies and the traditional enemies of good taste and sense are flayed in his most grave and imaginative poetry. Here we find Shadwell in the limbo of forgotten poetasters 'nod[ding] the Poppy on his brows', and Lord Hervey, now renamed Narcissus,

and Pope's arch-pedant reclining in sensuously Spenserian repose:

As many quit the streams that murm'ring fall
To lull the sons of Marg'ret and Clare-hall,
Where Bentley late tempestuous wont to sport
In troubled waters, but now sleeps in Port.

In these lines the imaginative beauty is as evident as the mischievous pun, and surely gave Pope as much delight. One is bound to ask what was the nature of Pope's animosity against Theobald as he wrote the Dunciad. Was he really considering Theobald at all when he described him in that beautiful couplet?

Him close she curtain'd round with varpours blue,
And soft besprinkled with Cimmerian dew.

Or was he any longer consumed with anger when he described the altar of books which Theobald erected as a sacrifice to the Goddess, and concluded his description with an allusion to the duodecimo edition of Theobald's translation of Sophocles?

Quarto's, Octavo's, shape the less'ning pyre,
And last, a little Ajax tips the spire.
[The Dunciad Variorum (1729)]

It is difficult to reconcile the poet who cared for such thrilling precision with the vicious little satirist of popular imagination. If there is petulance there, it is petulance recollected in tranquillity.

In these and in many a more extensive passage in the Dunciad, Pope is working at two levels. At one he is avenging the wrongs done to good sense and culture by contemporary dunces, and attempting with partial success to make his own particular revenge of universal significance; at another level he is satisfying his imagination with poetry which is beautiful in itself, apart from any satiric significance.

There is another sense in which Pope's verses may be said to have differences of level, differences most easily illus trated from the Imitations of Horace. In the first 'Imitation', for example, he is making a particularly clever rendering of the first satire of Horace's second book and at the same time defending himself from certain specific charges, and in the 'Epistle to Augustus' he is turning Horace's praise of Augustus into ridicule of George II and at the same time making some astute judgements on poets of his own and previous generations. As a critic of Pope has expressed it, 'The Imitations of Horace show the poet bound hand and foot and yet dancing as if free' [G. Tillotson, in Essays in Criticism and Research]'. But such a dance could only be performed by one who had had constant practice in earlier measures:

True ease in writing flows from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
[Essay on Criticism]

All his life Pope had been active in verse translation. He was an accomplished translator long before he started on the Iliad. Translation, in fact, had been his early training. He told Spence that as a boy he read eagerly through a great number of English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets, not with any system, but dipping in here and there, and whenever he met with a passage or story that pleased him more than ordinary, he endeavoured to imitate it, or translate it into English: 'this', he said, 'gave rise to my Imitations published so long after'. It was by these translations and imitations that he shaped his own original work. 'My first taking to imitating', he told Spence, 'was not out of vanity, but humility: I saw how defective my own things were; and endeavoured to mend my manner, by copying good strokes from others'. This, according to his own account, must have been evident in his first extensive poem, an epic of 4,000 lines on Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, which he kept by him until 1722, when he burnt it on Bishop Atterbury's advice. Ί endeavoured in this poem', he said, 'to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece: there was Milton's style in one part, and Cowley's in another; here the style of Spenser imitated, and there of Statius; here Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudian'. The revealing account of his method in this early poem is to some extent true of his method in every poem he wrote. To call it plagiarism is too crude. It is better to connect it with Pope's imaginative, ethical, and topical inspiration, and call it Pope's literary inspiration, the appreciation of which presents one more difficulty to the common reader.

Literary inspiration is not essentially different from inspiration derived from life. The reading of a book can be an emotional experience as much as the sight of a field of daffodils, as Keats found when he looked into Chapman's Homer. Literary experience, therefore, is part of a store of emotional experiences upon which the poet can draw for his work. There is this difference, however, that whereas most emotional experiences will be recollected in some form unconnected with words, a literary experience will return with some memory of the words which the writer has used. There is also the frequent possibility of literary experiences mixing with other experiences, of our recollecting at some emotional crisis the literary expression which had once before been given to it. Thus it seems possible that when Gray, in whom literary inspiration was as powerful as it was in Pope, stopped to contemplate some elm, the description of that tree in Comus recurred to his mind,

Or 'gainst the rugged bark of some broad Elm,

and the tree and Milton's description were thereafter so indissociably connected, that when in turn he came to mention the tree in the Elegy, 'Beneath those rugged Elms' became the inevitable choice of words.

Like Gray's, Pope's ideas and emotions were closely associated with the expression which former writers had used in similar circumstances. Regret at the too quick passing of years seems to have recalled to Pope Milton's sonnet on his twenty-third birthday as being, perhaps, the best expression which that emotion had received, so that even when Pope had Horace's words before him in the 'Imitation' of the second Epistle of Horace's second book, it was to Milton that he turned when he wrote

This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time,
What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime?

And when in the 'Messiah' he needed to versify Isaiah's description of the earth bringing forth its earliest fruits as offerings to the new-born child, he passed over Isaiah and Virgil, whom he was ostensibly imitating, to choose a passage from the ninth book of Paradise Lost:

which in his digesting memory he transmuted to

See Nature hastes her earliest wreaths to bring,
With all the incense of the breathing spring.

Canto 4 of The Rape of the Lock ends with Belinda's despairing cry at her misfortune. She wishes she had never visited Hampton Court and had rather lived in some distant northern land, where she could have kept her charms from mortal sight; and as Pope searched for an image to describe beauty in concealment, it was Waller's lines he associated with this idea. In 'Go, Lovely Rose', Waller had written

And Pope adapted them to his purpose as follows:

There kept my Charms conceal'd from mortal Eye,
Like Roses that in Desarts bloom and die.

Here as well two different levels may be observed in the poetry. The more apparent level is the beauty of expression, the less apparent is the pleasure which our memories have in associating Pope's words with a former poet's. A quotation from Guardian No. 12, a paper which has been attributed to Pope, may serve to reinforce this:

But over and above a just Painting of Nature, a learned Reader will find a new Beauty superadded in a happy Imitation of some famous Ancient, as it revives in his Mind the Pleasure he took in his first reading such an Author. Such Copyings as these give that kind of double Delight which we perceive when we look upon the Children of a beautiful Couple; where the Eye is not more charm'd with the Symmetry of the Parts, than the Mind by observing the Resemblance transmitted from Parents to their Offspring, and the mingled Features of the Father and the Mother.

It has been assumed in commenting on the three passages quoted above that Pope's imitation was intentional. It may not have been, for a poet may not know whom he is imitating. But when Pope did know, his frequent (if not invariable) practice was to quote his source in a footnote, thus indicating once more the way in which editors must annotate his work.

Pope's indication of his sources serves many purposes. It is an acknowledgement of indebtedness. More important, it demonstrates Pope's inheritance of traditional ideas passed on from one reputable writer to another; this is especially true of the Essay on Criticism with its footnote references to Cicero, Horace, Persius, and Quintilian, and of the Dunciad with its reminders of grave epic parallels to Pope's ridiculous incidents. But most important, the acknowledgement of indebtedness invites comparison between the earlier and later expression of the idea. The Augustan age was an age of consolidation, an age when men stopped to chew and digest the experiences of former ages. Pope was best serving the men of his generation by giving the expression of those experiences 'an agreeable turn', a turn so agreeable, in fact, that we may often remember Pope though we forget his originals.

It should not be supposed that the three inspirations of Pope's work, the inspirations drawn from fancy, morality, and books, exist separately in his poetry and are never associated. On the contrary, the variety of levels in his poetry shows that he could satisfy more than one poetical impulse within the limits of the same verse. Occasionally, indeed, his inspiration is a blend of all three. When Pope revised The Rape of the Lock for the first collected edition of his works in 1717, he added a passage of twenty-six lines to the fifth canto, which will serve for illustration. The revision of his works had been a respite from the translation of Homer, in which he had proceeded at that time as far as the twelfth book of the Iliad. This book describes an attack upon the Greek entrenchments by the Trojan forces, the success of which was largely owed to the valour of Sarpedon. Sarpedon had encouraged his friend Glaucus in a speech which Pope had translated and published separately some years before; but it was doubtless the occasion of fitting the speech into its place in the translation of the twelfth book at that time, which suggested that an imitation of it might suitably be put into the mouth of the grave Clarissa before the battle begins in canto v of The Rape of the Lock. Here are the two passages, Homer translated first:

Why boast we, Glaucus! our extended Reign,
Where Xanthus' Streams enrich the Lycian Plain;
Our num'rous Herds that range the fruitful Field,
And Hills where Vines their purple Harvest yield,
Our foaming Bowls with purer Nectar crown'd,
Our Feasts enhanc'd with Music's sprightly Sound?
Why on those Shores are we with Joy survey'd,
Admir'd as Heroes, and as Gods obey'd?
Unless great Acts superior Merit prove,
And vindicate the bount'ous pow'rs above.
'Tis ours, the Dignity they give, to grace;
The first in Valour, as the first in Place:
That when with wond'ring Eyes our martial Bands
Behold our Deeds transcending our Commands,
Such, they may cry, deserve the sov'reign State,
Whom those that envy, dare not imitate!
Could all our Care elude the gloomy Grave,
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For Lust of Fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting Fields, nor urge thy Soul to War.
But since, alas! ignoble Age must come,
Disease, and Death's inexorable Doom;
The Life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to Fame what we to Nature owe;
Brave tho' we fall, and honour'd if we live,
Or let us Glory gain, or Glory give!

Homer burlesqued follows:

Say, why are Beauties prais'd and honour'd most,
The wise Man's Passion, and the vain Man's Toast?
Why deck'd with all that Land and Sea afford,
Why Angels call'd, and Angel-like ador'd?
Why round our Coaches crowd the white-glov'd Beaus,
Why bows the Side-box from its inmost Rows?
How vain are all these Glories, all our Pains,
Unless good Sense preserve what Beauty gains:
That Men may say, when we the Front-box grace,
Behold the first in Virtue, as in Face!
Oh! if to dance all Night, and dress all Day,
Charm'd the Small-pox, or chas'd old Age away;
Who would not scorn what Huswife's Cares produce,
Or who would learn one earthly Thing of Use?
To patch, nay ogle, might become a Saint,
Nor could it sure be such a Sin to paint.
But since, alas! frail Beauty must decay,
Curl'd or uncurl'd, since Locks will turn to grey,
Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid;
What then remains, but well our Pow'r to use,
And keep good Humour still whate'er we lose?
And trust me, Dear! good Humour can prevail,
When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scolding fail.
Beauties in vain their pretty Eyes may roll;
Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul.
[The Rape of the Lock,]

The grave Clarissa's speech is both an imaginative episode in The Rape of the Lock and a parody of Homer. But it is an unusual parody, for while the memory of Homer's lines produces a ludicrous effect as it is read, the good sense of it, so elegantly expressed, opens 'more clearly the Moral of the Poem', as Pope explained in a note. Pope is stooping unerringly to Truth, although he is still wandering in Fancy's maze. It is the many-layered richness of such a passage as that which demands our profoundest admiration for his poetry.

Notes

²Moral Essay, iv. 99 ff.

³ Ibid. iii. 339 ff.

⁴ Ibid. i. 178 ff.

⁵Imil. Hor. Ep. I, i. 29.

⁶Epilogue to the Satires, i. 135 f.