SOURCE: “‘The best of passions’: The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard,” in The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion, The Harvester Press, 1986, pp. 1-31.

[In the following essay, Ferguson analyzes the moral system and emotional goals of the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Elegy to Abelard, in relation to representations of both the human and divine in each poem.]

The period around 1717 has been aptly characterised by Reuben Brower¹ as Pope's ‘Ovidian’ phase, when there emerges a marked susceptibility to tender feelings which is brought out particularly in his letters to the Blount sisters and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Both the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard, published in that year, are unique among Pope's works in presenting a direct and sustained engagement in emotion, forging an empathy between the reader and the ‘narrator’ of each poem which is not qualified by any dimension of irony; in this respect, they should be seen as complementary works. Byron's extravagant eulogy of Eloisa (‘if you search for passion, where is it to be found stronger?’)² is reflected more soberly in Pope's letter of March 1716 to Martha Blount, in which he refers to the composition of the poem pointedly as though it embodied his own emotions:

I am here studying ten hours a day, but thinking of you in spite of all the learned. The Epistle of Eloise grows warm, and begins to have some Breathings of the Heart in it, which may make posterity think I was in love. I can scarce find it in my heart to leave out the conclusion I once intended for it.³

For Pope, the aim of both poems is to engage the reader sympathetically in their fluctuations of emotion,⁴ and in this affective and psychological emphasis their Ovidian cast is dominant; the influence is particularly striking in Eloisa to Abelard, which is closely modelled upon Ovid's Heroides.⁵ Alongside their affective emphasis, however, it is equally significant that Pope chose to moralise the Ovidian theme of love betrayed, to introduce what he terms in the ‘Argument’ to Eloisa ‘the struggles of grace and nature, virtue and passion’; these key terms express interests which are greatly elaborated in his hands, and the overall movement of both poems is designed to embody a crisis of values as well as an urgent emotional response. This synthesis has raised difficulties for the interpreter; the affective bias of Eloisa in particular seems to heighten its moral ambiguity, since through the dramatic vacillations between ‘virtue and passion’ Pope has been taken to draw the reader's sympathies towards irreconcilable values. There is no clear resolution to Eloisa's struggles, and thus the final significance of her dilemma has been the subject of some contention among recent critics, many of whom feel that the poem must reach a point of conclusion within its own moral terms.⁶ My central concern in this discussion is to consider the relationship between the moral framework and the emotive aim of both the Elegy and Eloisa, and in particular the correspondence of the human and the divine explored in each.

As one would expect from their Ovidian cast, both poems are especially sharply focused upon the experience of loss, which is encountered as a crisis in psychological and ethical terms, and death also provides the final perspective in both. However, Pope's deepening of these themes can perhaps best be characterised by observing that the subject of each of these poems is not so much the extinguishing of passion as its abiding potency and its value; the meaning of passion is explored in each with a dual emphasis on its overwhelming force in human nature and on its apparent tenuousness in the face of eternity. Thus the terms ‘virtue and passion’ set in relation to one another are crucial to both; Eloisa is directly engaged in the striving between Christian dictates and the dictates of her own nature, both of which call forth seemingly contradictory claims for what might be termed ‘virtue’, sacrifice and endurance, and although for the ‘Unfortunate Lady’ that crisis has already been resolved by suicide, the poet engages himself in these issues anew in a passionate defence of her heroism. It is the mind of the speaker which absorbs our attention and directs our responses throughout, and we are immediately made aware that his emotion is pitted against a very different, hostile order of values. Two aspects of the Elegy thus assume particular importance; the nature of the poet's close relationship to the Lady, and the view of her action of suicide (the subject of some outrage to Dr Johnson)⁷ which he puts forward.

It is the final verse-paragraph of the Elegy which overtly draws our attention to the poet, presenting a meditative close in which he resolves his diatribe against the Lady's persecutors to reflect upon his own mortality. D.C. Mell has argued cogently that the poem, following the theme of Lycidas, finally turns to the subject of the artist's own power of imagination and the tenuous standing of his creation, and that the wider problem encountered is that of universal impermanence.⁸ But he also acknowledges the central point of contrast with Milton's perspective, and that is the focus on the individual death of the Lady and the specific circumstances of her death from which these reflections take their root; it is the intensity and rhetoric of the poem, and the dramatic images of the Lady herself, which make the most forceful impression on the reader. The very extravagance of this intensity has led Howard Weinbrot to the doubtful suggestion that Pope meant to cast the ‘poet’ as the Lady's lover, fulminating against the hypocrisy of her relatives and of the established Church in a vain attempt to exorcise his own justified guilt at her death, an argument which serves to distance the emotionalism of the writing.⁹ The proposition is surely untenable, yet it does point towards what I would see as a carefully subdued intimation of love on the part of the poet for the Lady; for the greater part of the poem the reader is indeed held in doubt as to the speaker's identity and hence as to the grounds of his close concern in the Lady's fate. And it is through this intimation, consistently held in abeyance, that the closing verse-paragraph achieves a subtle and moving shift of tone and perspective; at that point the speaker comes forward in his personal identity as ‘poet’, whereas the lover is never mentioned within the poem at all. The poet here more firmly represents one who has a particular sensitivity to the Lady's plight and to the fact of her death, and the bond between them is such that he naturally relates the contemplation of her death to thoughts of his own mortality; the bond of mortality is thus in part a witness to the bond of humanity. We are left in no doubt that the Lady is ‘belov'd’ by the poet, but the meaning of the word as it appears in the final line is in fact more diffuse than before, and curiously more poignant. The poet has identified himself as the last feeling link between the Lady's memory and an indifferent world, and it is for this above all that we are made to feel that his voice is important. He does not emphasise his role as imaginative creator, or meditate upon the transience of his art as such, but upon the absolute finality of physical death and the rupturing of his tender and devoted relationship to the Lady as a consequence. The balanced half-lines which open the verse-paragraph are rhetorically structured to emphasise this fragmenting of a formerly close correspondence by the intervention of death:

Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung;
Deaf the prais'd ear, and mute the tuneful tongue.

(75-6)

Although that reflection has been raised to the abstract level, personal intimacy is again brought out in the lines which follow, stressing the painfulness of individual loss:

Ev'n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays,
Shall shortly want the gen'rous tear he pays;
Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part,
And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart,
Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er,
The Muse forgot, and thou belov'd no more!

(77-82)

The poet's response is a magnanimity of tenderness rather than a recognition of duty; his is the ‘gen'rous tear’, in pointed contrast to the ‘mockery of woe’ already satirised in the world. In the pathos of this valediction, above all, the poem does indeed belong to the speaker.

Within the full range of the poem, the speaker's declamations are in a sense both personal and public, ‘sentiment in the heightened rhetorical style’,¹⁰ a fusion of voices which is particularly reminiscent of Ovid's manner. By this fusion, the Lady's own passion is as it were set forth on a public stage; she shares the fate of Ovid's heroines, of betrayal through ‘loving too well’, and as in the Heroides, ‘honour’ is an issue of vital concern. The conceptions of honour and of heroism towards which the poet guides us are unorthodox; Brower emphasises the predominantly ‘Roman’ ethos of the poem, the recognition of the dignity of suicide as an action demonstrating Stoic fortitude in the face of an intractable choice (here presented in terms of the choice between life-in-death rather than death-in-life). Yet this fortitude is impelled not by the Stoic's dispassionate rejection of life's fleeting values, but on the contrary by an acknowledged extremity of emotion; there is a deliberate complexity embodied in the lines which elevate and lament the Lady's actions:

To bear too tender, or too firm a Heart,
To act a Lover's or a Roman's
part.

(7-8)

Passion and resolution are seen as closely analogous, and both are identified with a power of generous aspiration which is ambiguously referred to as ‘ambition’. Eloisa, in her outburst upon Abelard's enforced emasculation and retreat, makes a connection between the powers of love and of ambition in a relatively worldly sense:

There stern religion quench'd th'unwilling flame,
There dy'd the best of passions, Love and Fame.

(39-40)

and this conception seems to be distinguished from the clearly mundane and reductive ‘Fame’ (‘reputation’) of l. 80: ‘Fame, wealth, and honour! what are you to Love?’ The speaker of the Elegy takes up the issue of the Lady's ‘Ambition’, which has been invested in her capacity for overwhelming love and testifies to her heroism:

Why bade ye else, ye Pow'rs! her soul aspire
Above the vulgar flight of low desire?
Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes;
The glorious fault of Angels and of Gods:
Thence to their Images on earth it flows,
And in the breasts of Kings and Heroes glows!

(11-16)

The heterodoxy of this outcry is manifest, but the claim is made with a conviction and conscious daring which demand the reader's consent;¹¹ the whole passage in its implications seizes on the contention of both the Elegy and Eloisa, that such greatness of spirit could not be merely a fortuitous and futile gift, but must in a mysterious way testify to the communion of the soul with heaven. The striking fusion of the Christian and pagan at l. 14 (‘The glorious fault of Angels and of Gods’) serves to strengthen the force of that contention. To accentuate the power of the passage, Pope contrives a shift of subject to the common order of the passive, lethargic world in satiric terms:

Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age,
Dull sullen pris'ners in the body's cage:
Dim lights of life that burn a length of years,
Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres;
Like Eastern Kings a lazy state they keep,
And close confin'd to their own palace sleep.

(17-22)

It is in fact the body which is said to blunt and constrict the soul of the unaspiring—the Lady's passions, far from having a fleshly bias (as her relatives and detractors might aver), bring about a sublimation above the ‘dregs’ of this earth and define the true quality of virtue. It is this concept of virtue, now tending towards the Platonic, which renders heaven the ‘congenial place’ of the soul rather than the haven forbidden to her in orthodox Christian terms; the reversal of values for which the poet argues extends to a redefining of the idea of salvation.

Passion and compassion are presented as naturally complementary, and the strength of compassion is matched by the strength of bitterness by which the Lady's enemies are as it were banished and exorcised. The poet's own compassion is imaginatively transposed to the ‘pitying sky’ and to the empathy of nature which adorns the grave: ‘There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow’ (l. 65). This universal tenderness has the power to transmute excommunication to a new sanctity, and death itself to a more serene and pervasive life than the living themselves can attain to. It is in fact the characteristic of the passionless living to be charged with death; the imagery of incarceration and the tomb at ll. 17-20 is trenchant, and rises to the retributive frenzy of death envisaged by the poet in his tirade against the persecutors (ll. 35-46):

So perish all, whose breast ne'er learn'd to glow
For others' good, or melt at others' woe.

By contrast, the second vision of the Lady herself (though at the point of death) is invested with all the attributes of vibrant life, and even of eroticism:

See on these ruby lips the trembling breath,
These cheeks, now fading at the blast of death:
Cold is that breast that warm'd the world before,
And those love-darting eyes must roll no more.

(31-4)

For the speaker, the pitch of his invective is in a sense cathartic and is gradually resolved into the conciliatory assurances to the Lady of ll. 47ff. and the resignation of the final paragraph; the structure of the Elegy, like that of Eloisa, is dominated by a succession of emotional responses brought out by a train of psychological association (the suggestion of ‘Race’ at l. 28 leads to the outburst of rage against the Lady's relatives, and her oblivion at l. 74 to the poet's own confrontation of death). Although the emotion is finally calmed, it is never in any final sense resolved into acceptance; unrequited loss remains the dominant theme, and above all the tragic forgetfulness which defines the moment and the meaning of death.

One feature of the Elegy which emerges most strongly is its structure as a poem of oppositions; varied oppositions are carefully woven into its developing imagery, expressing the dialectic of contradictory values within which the speaker voices his protest. The essence of this conflict could be expressed as a clash between the pagan, ‘Roman’ ethos invoked by the poet and the rigorous Christian doctrine by which his values (and the Lady's) are refuted, but such a reduction would I think be simplistic. The association of passion with ‘nature’, with kingliness and with liberty (ll. 15-22) is clearly of great importance, and in this the themes of the poem owe much to Ovid; at the same time, as ambition is shown to be ‘the glorious fault of Angels and of Gods’, so profound love is implicitly shown to be not only the attribute of ‘those who greatly think’ but also a link with the divine. Lines 67-8 positively suggest that the Lady's self-sacrifice will be uniquely acceptable to a ‘pitying’ heaven, identified at last with the Christian heaven, while charity is the quality conspicuously lacking in the Lady's guardian and his descendants, ‘whose souls the Furies steel'd’ and who are therefore cast into darkness. These inversions of the pagan and Christian within the dialectical framework of the Elegy are intended to be intellectually suggestive, turning upon the relationships (not the simple polarisation) of ‘grace and nature, virtue and passion’. This complexity is deepened still further in Eloisa to Abelard, which is based more overtly on an Ovidian model. It would be helpful in assessing the significance of the poem to consider briefly the treatment of Ovid in the hands of contemporary imitators and critics, and to examine more closely the qualities in Ovid which held Pope's interest.

Although Ovid's Epistolae Heroidum (Heroides) provided the formal model for Pope's Eloisa, his influence in Pope's work as a whole is widely diffused, reflecting Pope's youthful enthusiasm in translating ‘above a quarter of the Metamorphoses’.¹² Joseph Spence, in the Anecdotes, makes note of Pope's early affection for Ovid (disapprovingly, as far as the Metamorphoses in particular are concerned) and describes some of his early poetic exercises as ‘imitations of the stories that pleased him most in Ovid’.¹³ Literary historians who have traced the fortunes of Ovid through the early eighteenth century emphasise the doubtful standing of his reputation, although the terms in which they account for the marked decline in his authority and popularity after about the mid-seventeenth century are inevitably vague and can only be summed up as an evident change of taste linked with Puritan and rationalist outlooks.¹⁴ Louise Vinge, however, in her study of the transformations of the Narcissus myth, stresses the very healthy number of translations of the Metamorphoses produced during the eighteenth century (the figures ‘exceed those of the previous century’),¹⁵ which should modify the impression that Ovid was altogether a neglected author, and burlesque treatments of Ovid were particularly flourishing. It seems clear than it is more specifically in the field of original serious literature that Ovid's influence pales, so that it becomes necessary to account for a prevalent unwillingness to adapt his work creatively to suit contemporary taste. An indication of one of the grounds of this unwillingness may be found in Addison's Spectator essay of 30 October 1712 (no. 523), in which he discusses the acceptability of myth to his age; here he takes a severe attitude to the use of ‘fable’ in the place of ‘Truth’, concluding with a mock injunction to any hopeful poets who may be contemplating writing an encomium:

I do hereby strictly require every Person, who shall write on this subject, to remember that he is a Christian, and not to sacrifice his Catechism to his Poetry. … In short, I expect that no Pagan Agent shall be introduced, or any Fact related which a Man cannot give Credit to with a good Conscience.

There was also a prevalent distrust of Ovid's ‘immorality’, a subject taken up by John Oldmixon in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to his Amores Britannici (1703), an adaption of the Heroides to touching episodes in British history; he pleads that ‘I have taken Care, not to offend the Modesty of the Fair, and have banish'd those Sentiments, which as beautiful as they are in Ovid, wou'd be as dangerous to Manners, as agreeable for their Tenderness and Passion.’ In context, it is clear that there is an element of satire in his remarks, since he opens this paragraph with the observation that ‘these poems, may perhaps appear too Amorous in so Grave and so Wise an Age as this is’, but none the less he is forced on the defensive by public taste, which might question whether ‘those Sentiments’ are as appropriate to England in 1703 as they were to a pagan culture. Oldmixon does have the assurance to satirise Michael Drayton's adaption of the Heroides¹⁶ and Thomas Rymer's version of ‘Penelope to Ulysses’¹⁷ for their low style and descent into the burlesque, but he is careful to justify his own adaption of the Ovidian mode (following Drayton's example) to ‘our English History … to vary the Subject, and to instruct, as well as please, by this Variety’ (‘Epistle Dedicatory’).

If we turn to a more unreservedly sympathetic critic in Dryden (the ‘Preface’ to Jacob Tonson's 1680 edition of Ovid's Epistles, the collection to which Pope later added his Sapho to Phaon), we again find the charge of lasciviousness levelled at the ‘Elegies’ (Amores) and Ars Amatoria, but Dryden does go on to defend Ovid warmly as a poet of love:

yet this may be said in behalf of Ovid, that no man has ever treated the Passion of Love with so much Delicacy of Thought, and of Expression, or search'd into the nature of it more Philosophically than he … I know no Authour who can justly be compar'd with ours, especially in the Description of the Passions. … His thoughts … are the Pictures and results of those Passions.

He approves the Heroides above all as they are ‘tenderly passionate and courtly’, that is in so far as they treat of passion in a refined way. This defence is of great importance, and we may be certain that Pope would have read it with attention not only as the contributor of Sapho to Phaon but in view of Dryden's standing as a critic whose opinion carried great authority;¹⁸ perhaps the most suggestive claim of Dryden's critique is the view that the passion of love may be treated ‘Philosophically’ by a writer of perception, which implies that the analysis of emotion is as much a merit of Ovid as his power to be evocative.

From these comments, both reserved and commendatory, we can form some idea of the context informing Pope's reception of Ovid, and consider this in charting his steps ‘from translation to imitation, from imitation to creation’ (TE, [The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope,] I, 329). As the editors of Pope's early translations in the Twickenham Edition point out, his version of the ‘Polyphemus and Acis’ story from the Metamorphoses is marked by a refusal to descend into burlesque distortion and by a more ‘courtly’ tone; Pope is able to treat Ovid's myth seriously and with sympathetic engagement, and the same sympathy is more fully apparent in his rendering of the mysterious relationship between man and the natural world in the Vertumnus and Pomona translation (1712). The opening lines of this version (ll. 1-18) convey the idea of nature humanised as an innocent analogue to ‘Venus and the Nuptial Joy’, and the same consciousness underlies the latent eroticism embodied in natural description (ll. 59-62). The delicacy of the man/nature relationship is of course central to the Metamorphoses, and Pope's sensitivity in evoking the transformation of Dryope (The Fable of Dryope, 1717) is further evidence of his responsiveness to that concept; in an early letter to Henry Cromwell, he gives approval (after some prevarication) to the idea of ‘sensitive trees’ as ‘not only defensible, but beautiful’.¹⁹ These characteristics have some importance when we consider the suggestive effects of natural description in Eloisa to Abelard (written in the same year as the Vertumnus and Pomona translation). In a wider sense also, Pope finds means of infusing his poem with the imaginative dimension to which he is undoubtedly receptive in Ovid by giving full rein to the flights and range of Eloisa's ‘fancy’; hers is the power of the ‘visionary maid’ (l. 162), religious mystery and intensity of passion uniting within the psychological complexity which Pope explores.

It appears also that Pope was not especially perturbed by Ovid's alleged ‘lasciviousness’, as we may judge from one of his letters to Cromwell (July 1710):

I give you thanks for the Version you sent me of Ovid's Elegy. It is very much an image of that author's writing, who has an agreeableness that charms us without correctness, like a mistress whose faults we see, but love her with them all.²⁰

Pope goes on in this letter to single out the eleventh Elegy of Book II, the eighth of Book III and the eleventh of Book III as ‘above all my particular favourites, especially the last of these’. The three which he has selected show Ovid developing a variety of modes: the first elegiac, a sustained lament at the pains of separation, the second satiric and cynical, dwelling upon the intrusion of materialism into the realms of free love, and the third a bitter dismissal of love succeeded by a contest of love and hate which is never fully resolved. Despite key differences of mood and attitude, it is this third choice of Pope's which is particularly interesting with relation to Eloisa to Abelard; the opening to the second section of this poem shows love's victim struggling vainly against the bewildering, contradictory forces of his own heart, a portrait which takes on some poignancy after the disillusionment expressed in the preceding section:

Luctantur pectusque leve in contraria tendunt
hac amor hac odium, sed, puto, vincit amor.
odero, si potero; si non, invitus amabo.

(‘Struggling over my fickle heart, love draws it now this way, and now hate that—but love, I think, is winning. I will hate, if I have strength; if not, I shall love unwilling.’)

(33-5)

sic ego nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum,
et videor voti nescius esse mei.

(‘Thus I can live neither with you nor without, and seem not to know my own heart's prayer’).

(39-40)²¹

The poem provides a good example of Ovid's strength in exploring, not simply dominant moods, but the transition from one state of mind to another; Pope remarked upon Ovid's sense of design to Spence (Anecdotes, I, 226), probably following Dryden in referring to the principle of psychological movement which is so important in the Elegy and Eloisa. Further points which attracted his interest are well illustrated by his own translation of Sapho to Phaon, in which some of his striking elaborations are original, and a few derived from hints in Sir Carr Scrope's incomplete rendering, which had been first published in the 1680 edition of Ovid's Epistles.

The foremost feature of Pope's translation as against Scrope's is his heightening of the emotional tone to something less forced and freer in Ovid's manner, and that sense is reinforced when Pope boldly follows Ovid in making the erotic allusion of ll. 17-18 specific (Scrope evades these lines, and one of Cromwell's marginalia to the manuscript of Pope's version suggests that they should be suppressed for reasons of decency).²² Later Pope chooses to develop Ovid's passage describing sex (Ovid, ll. 43-50), in a style of hyperbole:

In all I pleas'd, but most in what was best;
And the last Joy was dearer than the rest.
Then with each Word, each Glance, each Motion fir'd,
You still enjoy'd, and yet you still desir'd,
Till all dissolving in the Trance we lay,
And in tumultuous Raptures dy'd away.

(57-62)

There are hints which link this rendering with Scrope's (cf. TE, I, 342-3), but altogether the effect is more direct than the more highly wrought Scropian manner, particularly in ll. 59-60 which attempt to convey a sense of urgency rather than of brooding sensuality. Pope heightens the idea of rapturous intensity far more than Ovid does, adding l. 58, emphasising by rhyme ‘fir'd’ and ‘desir'd’, and following Scrope in transforming Ovid's ‘ubi amborum fuerat confusa voluptas’ (49) into ‘all dissolving … / … in tumultuous Raptures', and it is in this stress on the very highest peaks of physical and emotional experience that there emerges a language closely bordering on the language of the spiritual. It is not incongruous to find Pope in the Essay on Man (I.278) setting forth the idea of angelic love as rapturous and consuming rather than serene, and the blending of the two orders of experience is brought out most clearly in comparing ll. 95-106 of Sapho to Phaon with Eloisa ll. 61-8, both of which share a language of adulation and hyperbole which embraces the ideas of sexual and spiritual love. For Sapho as for Eloisa this quality of experience is closely linked to the strength of imagination; Eloisa declares that in the first dawning of her love for Abelard ‘My fancy form'd thee of Angelick Kind’ (61) and in the dream-passage of Sapho (ll. 145-58), which does of course have vital relevance to the parallel passage of Eloisa (ll. 223-48), it is by the agency of ‘Fancy’ that the ‘visionary Charms’ are called to life in despite of physical absence. Ovid treats the dream more as an externalised apparition which arrives to comfort Sapho and then deserts her (l. 125: ‘illic te invenio …’), whereas Pope's interest in ‘Fancy’ leads him to retain the concept introduced in Scrope's version, ll. 64-5: ‘The dear deluding Vision to retain / I lay me down, and try to sleep again.’ Pope makes more dramatic use of the idea again in Eloisa ll. 239-41, where although Eloisa finds herself bereft of the power to invoke the ‘visionary’ her will is striving towards that power and the role of the imagination in achieving the fulfilment of desires denied by the world is selfconsciously understood.

This interest in the psychological complexity of love moves Pope to accentuate its central importance even more (if possible) than Ovid does; in ll. 73-80 he omits many of Ovid's details concerning Sapho's lifetime of suffering as an undesirable distraction from the central concern, and likewise at ll. 19-20 he abridges Ovid's enumeration of Sapho's former Lesbian loves into two lines:

All other Loves are lost in only thine,
Ah Youth ungrateful to a Flame like mine!

This could of course be an evasion for reasons of decorum, but since Pope has already not scrupled to be explicit regarding the ‘dear objects of my guilty Love’ (l. 18), that explanation seems inadequate. Instead we may suppose that Pope does not wish to divert the reader's attention from the overwhelming strength of Sapho's love, a strength of which she herself seems conscious with more assumed dignity than Ovid's reproachful Sapho (‘improbe, multarum quod fuit, unus habes’, l. 20); the force of Pope's ‘a Flame like mine’ brings to mind Eloisa's claim for pre-eminence in love: ‘[may] Saints embrace thee with a love like mine’ (l. 342). Another change in mood is the softer despair conveyed in Pope's ‘heav'nly Looks, and dear deluding Eyes’ (l. 22) in place of Ovid's more fierce ‘o facies oculis insidiosa meis!’ (l. 22). Pope continually exploits the source of pain which lies at the heart of Sapho's complaint, that love has the force to transform the soul irremediably from its former peace and self-sufficiency, preventing any return to former pleasures and comforts; Sapho's heightened lament of ll. 51-2 is centrally the source of anguish to Eloisa:

No time the dear Remembrance can remove,
For oh! how vast a Memory has Love?

The slightly altered phrase at l. 7, translating Ovid's ‘flendus amor meus est’ (7) as ‘Love taught my Tears in sadder Notes to flow’, also contains the seeds of the idea that love comes as a form of knowledge, and with this concept the presence of ‘shame’ (central throughout the Heroides) assumes great significance. Pope retains Scrope's rearrangement of lines 135-42 to give the full weight to Ovid's ‘non veniunt in idem pudor atque amor’ (121), ‘Such inconsistent things are Love and Shame!’. Equally interesting is Pope's couplet on the ‘shame’ of Sapho at her erotic vision, in which there seems to be a suggestion that guilt may actually testify to pleasure: ‘Then fiercer Joys—I blush to mention these, / Yet while I blush, confess how much they please!’ (ll. 153-4); by blushing, the ‘conscious Morn’ is also implicated in her guilt at l. 98. The distinction which might be drawn between private ‘guilt’ and public ‘shame’ does not in fact present the same acute dilemma for Sapho as for certain other Ovidian heroines (notably Dido, Canace, Phaedra, Deianira and Medea), whose sense of crime has as great a part in their anguish as the pain of loss. Pope's Eloisa shares all the intensity of Sapho's despair, but she shows also the more wilful recklessness which invites destruction as a necessary legacy of love; Oenone begs of Paris that he should ‘swiftly come to my undoing’ (‘ut venias in mea damna celer!’, Oenone Paridi, 58).

Pope is clearly interested in the force of an absolute commitment to love, and a generous triumph over the false dictates of shame, yet his handling of that concern is remarkable in bringing outbursts of defiant conviction into play beside Eloisa's very active sense of approaching spiritual damnation as well as personal guilt; her very insecurity gives emphasis to her capacity for heroism. The force of her will and her intellectual grasp on the nature of her dilemma are immediately apparent in relation to the conflict of love and honour as experienced by Ovid's Helen, for example, and if we note a further interesting analogy between her imaginary defence of Abelard from his attackers and Acontius' possessive frenzy in Ovid (Heroides, XX. 146-7), another distinctive dimension to her heroism is emphasised which will be discus sed more fully later, and that is her generosity in love. As with the Lady of the Elegy, sheer extremity of emotion can represent the feminine equivalent of valorous action, and the heroines of the Heroides undergo the fluctuations of response from high tragic passion to lachrymose despair which are so characteristic of Eloisa. Love, for the Ovidian heroine, is a complex force in that it absorbs all loyalties, all passions and all relationships into itself (compare Briseis Achilli l. 52: ‘tu dominus, tu vir, tu mihi frater est’, and Hermione Orestae l. 29: ‘vir, precor, uxori, frater succurre sorori!’, with Eloisa's ‘Come thou, my father, brother, husband, friend’ (1.152). Because of this there is a strong emphasis on passions conflicting in varying degrees of violence, and in Pope's Sapho to Phaon the syntax is very carefully balanced to stress oppositions of feeling:

I rave, then weep, I curse, and then complain,
Now swell to Rage, now melt in Tears again.

(131-2)

In adapting Eloisa to Abelard to the ‘heroical epistle’ form, however, Pope was introducing two essential deviations from the models of Ovid; he followed the path of Drayton and Oldmixon in treating of a known historical episode, and he introduced a Christian setting and morality in place of the pagan—the personification of Love at ll. 73-84 is the only significantly pagan reference of the whole poem. But as Pope gives the fullest possible scope to the range of Eloisa's imagination so he is able to heighten the very intensity of her passion and mental suffering by stressing the dilemma imposed upon her by Christian faith; this is not to argue that the Christian moral framework is of secondary importance within the poem, but the claims of religion cannot be approached by the reader except through the medium of Eloisa's intense feeling, and the nature of her response remains the focus of attention. Passion and imagination are so active throughout the poem that it becomes impossible to reach an objective vantage point from which to judge Eloisa's position. This greatly exalted interest in an acute moral dilemma clearly owes much to the ethos of the Restoration tragedies,²³ in which love and heroism are closely identified and forge an alliance against the encroachments of a hostile (and sternly moralistic) world. One helpful analogy which can be drawn is suggested by Eric Rothstein in his study Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (1967), in which he discusses the differences between the ‘heroic’ ethos of the earlier tragedies and the ‘pathetic’ of those which were written after the 1680s. With the movement towards pathetic tragedy comes a shift in values away from the high heroic ideals and the firm morality which attends them in favour of what Rothstein (p. 118) describes as a complex ethos of Epicureanism; there is a marked self-sufficiency on the part of the tragic hero or heroine which reflects the way in which ‘the plays are dominated by love, a refined hedonism’ (pp. 120-1). The morality thus entails a curious fusion of the Stoic and the Epicurean, emphasising self-reliance, and yet a prescriptive moralising emphasis is strikingly absent in the pathetic tragedies. There is, however, considerable emphasis on moral dilemma in the greatest of Otway's tragedies, and it is significant that Pope spoke to Spence with particular approval of his ‘two tragedies out of six that are pathetic’, observing that ‘'Tis a talent of nature rather than an effect of judgement to write so movingly’ (Anecdotes, I, 206).

A further point with important relevance to Pope's poem is that ‘pathetic tragedy gives the characters an imaginative, even poetic faculty that heroic heroes do not have’ (Rothstein, p. 134), and this faculty, which as I have already remarked is greatly intensified in Eloisa, is shown in its purest form in the projection of pastoral vision into the very heart of the drama. Rothstein isolates the pastoral ideal (which is always the exclusive province of the victimised protagonists) as again inherently Epicurean, depending upon the ‘exercise of the imaginative will’ and embracing a form of escape from the hostile environment of ‘necessity’ (p. 124). He relates the combined ideal of retirement and love to a passage of Aphra Behn's (cit. p. 122) treating of love in the Golden Age when pure reason was synonymous with ‘nature’ and love unrestrained by the invocation of artificial ‘Honour’. These ideals have a very close affinity with Eloisa's two imaginative projections of the ideal states of earthly love (‘When love is liberty, and nature, law’, ll. 92-8)²⁴ and divine bliss (‘How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!’, ll. 206-22), and Brower (p. 80) points out the close link in phrase and thought between ll. 217-20 and Pope's pastoral Autumn, ll. 24-6. Eloisa's momentary breaking out of her dilemma to the terms of pastoral (she is brought immediately back to earth at l. 223) owes nothing to the Hughes translation of her letters²⁵ and nothing directly to Ovid, but there is a significant allusion in her celebrated line, ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot’ (208) to Horace's Epistle I.xi.9, on the retirement theme.²⁶ It would seem that the immediate precedent for the ‘blameless Vestal’ passage may well be the conventions of the pathetic tragedy, although the ‘escape through imagination’ which the pastoral idyll offers to the protagonists of the drama is not fulfilled for Eloisa.

It is through the medium of Eloisa's imaginative consciousness that a pattern of suggestion is established which unobtrusively draws together on certain levels the apparently antithetical or disparate values of ‘grace and nature, virtue and passion’. By confronting the moral dilemma itself, Pope persuasively implies that such a rigid separation of ideals is by its very nature fraught with inconsistency; both David Morris and Henry Pettit²⁷ have suggested that the terms of the Essay on Man, II. 81-6 have an important relevance to this false opposition, and, as different as the works are, the point is just. In reflecting on the oppositions between the erotic and the spiritual, eros and agape, the complexity of vision and values which Pope elaborates is deepened by the fact that the material of the Heroides and the content of Eloisa's letters from the Paraclete have remarkably close affinities, sometimes extending to very close parallels of detail. Eloisa's dream-vision of Abelard as related to Sapho to Phaon ll. 145-58 is one striking instance of this, as is the seeming coincidence of l. 152 (‘Come thou, my father, brother, husband, friend’), taken from the letters but already mentioned as a close echo of lines in Ovid. Both sources inevitably share a stress on lost experience and on importunate desires cruelly denied by circumstance, and although Eloisa's profound concern with salvation so deeply complicates the nature of her spiritual suffering, none the less we are constantly made aware that she, like Ovid's heroines, has been transformed by her experience of love and can only attempt to understand the nature of the world and of the spirit in terms of that overwhelming experience. Throughout the poem, however closely she approaches the resolution offered by divine love, it is never fully accepted as a compensation for the relinquishing of human feeling. Hughes speaks in the ‘Preface’ to the letters of the ‘most extravagant Passion’ which is their principal feature, and tempts the reader further with their ‘surprising Mixtures of Devotion and Tenderness, of Penitence and remaining Frailty, and a lively Picture of Human Nature in its Contrarieties of Passion and Reason, its Infirmities and its Sufferings’. Pope's drawing together of these observations into the succinct oppositions set forth in his ‘Argument’ to Eloisa subtly suggests a struggle which will take place on a higher idealistic plane; ‘grace’ and ‘virtue’ take the place of Hughes' ‘Devotion’ … ‘Penitence’ … ‘Reason’ (Pope was probably also thinking of Eloisa's fifth letter in the collection: ‘I am sensible of the Motions both of Grace and Passion, and by turns yield to each’, p. 200), and likewise ‘nature’ and ‘passion’ represent much more than ‘infirmities’ in his hands. The passion of Eloisa and Abelard is for Pope ‘unfortunate’; it is cut short by circumstance, and it is the force of irreversible circumstance that is most deeply felt in the convent and its setting. The delicate changes which Pope has made in his emphasis prepare us both for the force of aspiration and the driving intensity of despair to which he is so responsive.

The setting of the convent is used evocatively to express the heightened responsiveness of Eloisa's mind, a sensitivity which is accentuated by the condition of isolation, and which is brought into play from the moment when her memory of Abelard is reawakened. The ‘deep solitudes and awful cells’ to which she is confined bear an affinity with the Platonic ‘cave of the mind’, the source of oppressive memories and of the ‘lov'd Idea’ of sublimity. In its recesses lie the terrors of vacuity and of active nightmare, which are yet bound in with a mystic sense of the divine, and the poem dramatises the anguished fluctuations between these psychological extremes. Eloisa's consciousness is seen as intensely active; from Abelard's name alone, and from her own name inscribed in his letters, their ‘long train of calamities’ is recalled in all its potency and depth of emotional association, and emotion is transmuted by impulse into action (9-16), that is, the action of utterance in speech and writing, ambiguously distinguished in the poem. At certain key moments of crisis, Eloisa invokes her own name in the third person, which in itself represents a form of self-assertion; at such moments her name is made synonymous with the force of love, and within the rhetoric of the verses love is made synonymous with life itself. The tragic lament of l. 37, with its allusion to Dryden's version of Palamon and Arcite (‘Now warm in love, now with'ring in the grave’) associates sexual with physical death, and the elegiac note is restated in the lines which follow (39-40):

There stern religion quench'd th'unwilling flame,
There dy'd the best of passions, Love and Fame.

Hence the convent as ‘this last retreat’ embodies both death and the tomb, a burial in the self where no reciprocity is ossible. Likewise, emotion is presented metaphorically in physical terms as the essential vigour of the body, a conception which is brought out in figures of speech in the earliest lines of the lament: ‘What means this tumult in a Vestal's veins?’; ‘Nor pray'rs nor fasts its stubborn pulse restrain’.

Like Ovid's Hypermnestra, Eloisa takes comfort and strength from the mysterious power communicated by sympathetic grief, which in confinement can alone compensate for physical separation; Pope intensifies Eloisa's defence of this last remaining power to a degree which is expressed as devotional. This devotion is the more remarkable when we are reminded that Eloisa's incarceration in the convent is itself a sacrifice which she has chosen to make through love: ‘Sad proof how well a lover can obey!’ (172). The duty done to love is indeed a personal form of piety:

Tears still are mine, and those I need not spare,
Love but demands what else were shed in pray'r.

(45-6)

In this devotion Eloisa is extravagantly magnanimous (‘Ah more than share it! Give me all thy grief’), and both the warmth and the constancy of human dedication are in marked contrast to the forced and frozen enactment of Christian devotions; statues ‘learn to weep’, tears are ‘taught to flow in vain’. Constriction and deprivation exert an almost unbearable pressure on the mounting force of passion, not merely in the ‘gothic’ chill of the setting but in the emptiness of prayers unanswered; there is a double significance in Eloisa's outcry:

Relentless walls! whose darksome round contains
Repentant sighs, and voluntary pains.

For her at least, the acts of contrition are literally ‘contained’ in a cycle of futility, achieving no relation to any receptive presence outside the convent, and her confession of ll. 23-4 declaring the persistence of ‘rebel nature’ has something of the defiance of hopelessness (cf. Hughes, p. 129: ‘O Vows! O Convent! I have not lost my humanity under your inexorable Discipline!’). This sense of futility is above all contrasted to the felicity of human love, the greatest bliss being that of reciprocation:

All then is full, possessing, and possest,
No craving Void left aking in the breast:

(93-4)

It is Eloisa's emotional state, Brendan O'Hehir has argued, which is responsible for the ‘pathetic fallacy’ taking place at ll. 107-17 and again at l. 274, rhapsodies which he presents as visual distortions caused by her tears. Yet there is also an extraordinary reversal taking place in Eloisa's consciousness which makes the fallacy boldly double-edged in its implications. Eloisa's inspiration at both these moments is not her Christian piety but her devotion to Abelard and to the force of love:

Not on the Cross my eyes were fix'd, but you;
Not grace, or zeal, love only was my call.

(116-7)

Her avowal that ‘Saints with wonder heard the vows I made’ hence endows her love with a sanctity of its own in the very moment when it is ostensibly forsworn. Again, there is an underlying dignity and defiance in Eloisa's emphasis on her own passionate and enduring nature which greatly modifies the more confessional, ‘pathetic’ note which follows her evocation of ‘that sad, that solemn day’:

Still on that breast enamour'd let me lie,
Still drink delicious poison from thy eye,
Pant on thy lip, and to thy heart be prest;
Give all thou canst—and let me dream the rest.

(121-4)

The boldness with which Pope treats the passage extolling the freedom of love might be contrasted with the long discussion which is given to the issue in Hughes' introductory ‘History’, where he comments upon Eloisa's preference of love to marriage:

Indeed a Refusal of this Nature is so extraordinary a thing, that perhaps another Instance of it is not to be found in History. … It often happens that the Passion of Love stifles or over-rules the Rebukes of Conscience; but it is unusual for it to extinguish the Sensibility of Honour … but Heloise had a Passion so strong, that she was not at all concern'd for her Honour or Reputation. … An excess of Passion never heard of before, made her chuse to be Abelard's Mistress rather than his Wife.

(pp. 21-2)

Although Tillotson refers to Hughes' tone here as marked by a ‘slightly vulgar relish and insistence’ (TE, II, 325n.), there is also a feeling of astonished admiration which grows into the recognition that ‘Honour’ is a concept which appears to be outside the heroine's frame of reference, and Pope elaborates this feeling into assertive dignity. He also adds to the human basis of the argument the poetic evocation of love's divinity; love is spoken of as the ‘jealous God’, calling to mind the rival God (Exodus 20:5) vying for Eloisa's exceptional soul.

It is through her love for Abelard that Eloisa's first transition from the human sphere to the spiritual is represented, effortlessly and innocently by the agency of imagination (‘My Fancy form'd thee of Angelick kind’) and there is perhaps a deliberate ambiguity as to whether Abelard's ‘truths divine’ are in fact his doctrines as her instructor in religion or relate to the precept that ‘'twas no sin to love’ (l. 68); but we are made conscious of a certain moral courage in her setting aside of ‘Fancy’ to encounter the joys of physical reality:

Back through the paths of pleasing sense I ran,
Nor wish'd an Angel whom I lov'd a Man.
Dim and remote the joys of saints I see,
Nor envy them, that heav'n I lose for thee.

(69-72)

The telling shift here from past to present tense indicates what is still the direction of her commitment. In this passage there is an awareness that in some way her former ‘guiltless’ self has been left behind, but that state of innocence becomes pale beside the warmth of love. When Eloisa strives to regain innocence by contrition, it is inverted and condemned by her love as a sin:

Now turn'd to heav'n, I weep my past offence,
Now think of thee, and curse my innocence.

(187-8)

These central concepts of humanity and divinity, innocence and sin, are charged with suggestions of paradox throughout the poem. Innocence may be seen as a state of unknowing, undivided consciousness, or instead as the conscious refusal to embrace a false morality and to acknowledge ‘shame’. Among the passages which reflect upon guilt and self-expression, there is the interesting transition from the appeal to the artificial language of letters, which express the reciprocal ‘soft intercourse’ of love without betraying the physical signs of shame, to the ideal state of ‘shamelessness’ when intuition takes the place of speech, to the dramatically pictured scene of Abelard's castration, when literal speech is overcome in Eloisa and she is reduced to the now impotent language of the body: ‘By shame, by rage supprest, / Let tears, and burning blushes speak the rest’ (105-6).²⁸ The powerful later passage on the unfettered violence of guilt (223-48) presents, both in its content and context, further depths; ‘conscience’ as modesty is set aside to make way for the soul's immersion in a rapture of the subconscious, which positively embraces consciousness of guilt:

All my loose soul unbounded springs to thee.
O curst, dear horrors of all-conscious night!
How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight!

The two meanings of ‘loose’ (unrestrained, and wanton) are equally apt. Structurally, this whole visionary rhapsody—evolving into nightmare—is strikingly set between two evocative passages on the peace of spiritual purity (207-22, 249-56), superficially variations on a similar theme of retired innocence. In the first, the pastoral and paradisal idyll of the ‘blameless Vestal’, reciprocity is discovered, desires are reconciled, emotion and imagination find understructive ends, and finally spiritual marriage is united with unalloyed pleasure. Thus the image of marriage is revitalised after Eloisa's earlier repudiation, and is set against the depiction of her marriage to the convent as a parody of sterile matrimony: (‘Sad proof how well a lover can obey! / Death, only death, can break the lasting chain’). By contrast with the imagery of physical consummation as the culminating bliss of the ‘vestal’, the release from passion which is Abelard's lot cannot fail to strike us with a sense of tragic deprivation, despite its premonition of a ‘promis'd heav'n’:

Thy life a long, dead calm of fix'd repose;
No pulse that riots, and no blood that glows.
Still as the sea, ere winds were taught to blow,
Or moving spirit bade the waters flow;

(251-4)

The word ‘ordain’ of l. 249 in context evokes a sense of fatality, of a rigorous and definitive sentence which suggests retribution as much as redemption. The whole passage resembles other lines of Pope's concerning passion as an animating force, in particular the images of still water as a negative metaphor for Stoic detachment within the Essay on Man, reinforced by the suggestion here of a regression to the time before Genesis (when ‘the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters'). The same metaphor in Hughes does not imply a negative ‘gain’: ‘The Punishment of your Body, has cured the deadly Wounds of your Soul. The Tempest has driven you into the Haven’ (p. 176). Eloisa herself speaks of Abelard's condition as a living death (251, 257, 261-2), and there is a logical link between the earlier recollection of the physical assault upon Abelard and the succeeding image of Eloisa and Abelard as sacrificial victims to religion (108). Yet ironically it is also Abelard who is the founder or ‘Maker’ of the Paraclete as a house of religion, and (as Eloisa recalls) the instructor or ‘creator’ of Eloisa as a lover. If he becomes merged in her consciousness with God, it is perhaps quintessentially as the source of her abiding passion, an emotional awakening into life, which persists even when he is metaphorically dead. The emphasis on faithfulness in the reference to Eloisa's ‘hopeless, lasting flames’ becomes clearer by analogy with her second letter in the Hughes collection: ‘When we love Pleasures, we love the living and not the dead. We leave off burning with Desire, for those who can no longer burn for us’ (p. 12). The connection of tombs with ‘dying lamps’ recurs again at ll. 303-8, and significantly the lamps fade at the time of Eloisa's taking the veil (112). Gradually fear begins to take precedence over courage, and the desire of flight gains in intensity; this fear for salvation is matched with a more personal sense of relationship in Eloisa's apprehension of God: ‘Thy image steals between my God and me’ (l. 268). Pope makes a rhetorical motif of Eloisa's strangely invoking/repelling call to Abelard to ‘Come … and solicite me to love you’ (Hughes p. 144) and adds to it the fiercer note of challenge ‘… if thou dar'st’ (281); he also intensifies the opposition between the rival claims on her soul in transferring Abelard's ‘Assist the Evil Spirits, and be the Instrument of their Malice’ to Eloisa's highly dramatic, ‘Snatch me, just mounting, from the blest abode, / Assist the Fiends, and tear me from my God!’ (287-8). One might see in this crisis Eloisa's final breaking-point, the point at which the terror of the consequences she is inviting upon herself bears down on her more forcibly than anything else, and her appeal to the powers of redemption immediately afterwards (297-302) is both impassioned and eloquent. In the same impulse, her repudiation of Abelard is still suffused with a spirit of (partly reproachful) generosity:

Ah come not, write not, think not once of me,
Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.
Thy oaths I quit, thy memory resign.

(291-3)

As at several other points of the poem, Pope has transferred to Eloisa one of Abelard's fairly rare expressions of selflessness. Eloisa's state after this outburst is itself close to death (304), and consistent with her final letter in the Hughes edition in which it is the prospect of death made real during a long illness which acts most persuasively on her sense of her spiritual condition. The ‘Christianising’ of the spiritual apparitions which are familiar from the Heroides (appearing both to Sapho and Dido) is a remarkable stroke, and Pope has brought out a shift from the pagan to the Christian explicitly: ‘Love's victim then, tho' now a sainted maid’ (312). Yet the undeniable closeness of lines 333-4 to the conclusion of the Elegy restates the tragic note which has been present throughout, emphasising the sorrow of a love not only forgotten but lost to the memory of posterity:

See the last sparkle languish in my eye!
Till ev'ry motion, pulse, and breath, be o'er;
And ev'n my Abelard be lov'd
no more.
O death all-eloquent! you only prove
What dust we doat on, when 'tis man we love.

(332-6)

From fearing that the love of heaven may snatch Abelard from herself, Eloisa now comes to hope that the divine love extended to him may equal her own (342); this, and the concern with posterity and the earthly ‘fame’ invested in exemplary love, argues again a persistent value for human feeling. Pope elaborates this theme greatly in the final verse-paragraph, which owes nothing to the Hughes letters but which, like the ending of the Elegy, dwells upon the sharing of sympathetic grief; the ‘mutual pity’ and the ‘human tear’. The feeling of resistance in ll. 355-8, the return to a vision of religion once more in conflict with earthly sentiment, and the more unexpected appeal to ‘some future Bard’ for solace, all imply a recognition which is made explicit at l. 365; that the lover's ghost will still be ‘pensive’, that memory will disturb spiritual peace even after death.

Subjectivity is thus reasserted even in this final valediction; throughout the poem, the central tension of the earthly and the divine is seen as a subjective experience, with its shifting interchanges of memory, association and imagination. Perhaps the most eloquent lines in Eloisa express the irremediable nature of her conflict as rooted in the complexity of the mind:

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,
And love th' offender, yet detest th'offence?
How the dear object from the crime remove,
And how distinguish penitence from love?

(191-4)

Memory presents at once the firmest constancy to her human affections, and the most insuperable barrier between the soul and heaven; in the Hughes edition of the letters (p. 174), Eloisa refers to the extinguishing of the memory of pleasures as ‘the last violence to our Nature’. Forgetfulness is then a condition of mind which must be actively achieved (190), a psychological impossibility. The only countering force which may be invoked is direct intervention by God, portrayed as an act of violence (201-2) which parallels the imagery of physical rupture expressing Eloisa's human love (196). There are many indications that her capacity for love may be rivalled by her capacity for ecstatic religious experience; Joseph Warton appropriately commented on these lines (TE, II, 366n.): ‘here is the true doctrine of the Mystics. … There are many such strains in Crashaw.’ The mystic quality is a remarkable strength of Eloisa, reinforced by the element of ‘gothic’ gloom and psychological melancholy with which the poem is suffused, and which of course owes much to Milton's minor poems, notably Comus and Il Penseroso. The ‘gothic’ strain represents a deepening of that pathetic fallacy of scenes strongly coloured by mental association which Pope developed from Ovid (see Pope's Sapho to Phaon, 163-78), and it is brought out at a great many points of the poem. Pope was probably referring in part to the evocative power of setting when he wrote to William Cowper in February 1731/2: ‘I should not be sorry if you tryed your hand [as translator] upon Eloisa to Abelard, since it has more of that Descriptive, and, (if I may say so) Enthusiastic Spirit, which is the Character of the Ancient Poets.’²⁹ The reflection of Eloisa's state of mind in her projection of the scenes around her is developed from the earliest passages on the convent, and is most powerful in the striking personification of ‘Melancholy’ in ll. 161ff.; the full extent of the passage, which effectively begins at l. 132, represents a series of settings which variously reflect Eloisa's changing spiritual vision, both of the past and the present. The image of the Paraclete as pastoral retreat, a ‘Paradise’ of spiritual aspiration amid the desert, gives way in Abelard's absence to the ‘noon-day night’ cast by its walls, recalling the images of the convent in the opening lines of the poem. The transition which has taken place in her mind is subtly developed and yet profound; in certain respects, Abelard comes to assume a dual role of lover and Christ-figure, although Eloisa is here alert to the distinction between eros and agape (‘Oh pious fraud of am'rous charity’). Her yearning towards the repose of contemplation is also a yearning for the fulfilment which has been lost through him, and is expressed in the delicate, slightly Spenserian lines which evoke an erotic, sensitive natural world:

The darksom pines that o'er yon' rocks reclin'd
Wave high, and murmur to the hollow wind,
The wandring streams that shine between the hills,
The grots that echo to the tinkling rills,
The dying gales that pant upon the trees,
The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze;

(155-60)

The quality of these lines, with their blending of sensuality with fine delicacy, has been described as ‘rococo’,³⁰ and it is in contrast to this imaginary state of receptive motion that the ‘dread repose’ of the spectre Melancholy has such morbid power, a power which impels Eloisa towards thoughts of her own death and the ‘cold dust’ of eternity. This spiritual landscape represents the deepest point of the suffering and repression forced upon her; set against it are the moments of greatest emotional and imaginative exaltation, the dimension which is most aptly termed ‘mystic’. We are made aware of Eloisa's facility for high spiritualising of experience in the metaphysical terms of her first image of Abelard: ‘My fancy form'd thee of Angelick kind, / Some emanation of th'allbeauteous Mind’ (61-2), and Eloisa's conception both of the earthly and divine is throughout coloured by an emphasis on ecstasy and rapture. Thus her imaginative projection of the ‘blameless Vestal's lot’ culminates in rapture which seems distinctly sexual by analogy with the ‘marriage’ metaphor (219-22), and her first vision of her own death is also sensuous and finally climactic. Again, Eloisa pictures the death of Abelard in terms of a rhapsody of the divine (339-42), with the plea, ‘[May] Saints embrace thee with a love like mine.’ It might be possible to dismiss these conceptions as a poignant reminder of the strength of Eloisa's human bonds; but earlier in the poem her vision of the intensity of divine communion (‘Not touch'd, but rapt; not waken'd, but inspir'd’) has no hint of pathos or self-deception about it, and the ‘hopeless, lasting flames’ of human love are ultimately sublimated in a ‘firing’ of the soul, the ‘flames refin'd’ (320) which burn in heaven. The imagery of light and fire throughout the poem, though conventional, unites the conceptions of human and divine love, and it is significant that the full force of Eloisa's passion should overwhelm her in the very acts of Christian devotion. Despite the fact that Pope introduces a few lines of satire on florid extravagance in religion (135-40) which anticipate the redundant splendours of Timon's chapel, religious ceremony is used to express something more than external pomp and apparently deeper than the emotional fallacy which plays upon Eloisa's vision at ll. 111-14 and 271-6; if human passion is active here in bringing about a state close to divine ecstasy, there is at least an implication through the poetry that divine love has part in the experience:

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

(274-6)

Pope seems to have forgotten ‘such plain roofs as piety could raise’ in his vision of ceremony with its profusion of lamps and altars and incense rising in ‘clouds of fragrance’. He clearly has an interest in an exuberant descriptive and experiential dimension which can best be characterised as ‘baroque’. In this relation it would however be misleading to identify the baroque tendencies with counter-reformation Catholicism specifically, since Pope's conception of rapturous spiritual experience owes much to the verse of the Nonconformist Isaac Watts, to the point of a close debt in l. 275 (TE, II, 304). What is important is that the interest in ‘extasy’ in Eloisa does frequently tend towards the mystic, and this peak of spiritual experience is intimately linked with the quieter meditational note which significantly is much indebted to Crashaw (see lines 270, 300, 328 and the specific allusion of l. 212). Although Pope's response to Crashaw was in many respects unsympathetic,³¹ he did express his admiration for the ‘soft and pleasing’ verses of ‘The Weeper’, including stanzas 16 and 17, which contemplate the ‘kind contrarieties’ of the Magdalene's redemptive grief.³² As Austin Warren points out in his study of Crashaw, ‘Catholicism has persistently affirmed that, as the body, the senses, the affections and the imagination are integral parts of man, they must all collaborate in God's service’;³³ this concern could be seen as dominant in the baroque, and in so far as Eloisa expresses the affinity between the earthly and divine in terms of a sublimated but pervasive sensuality, its devotional content seems distinctively to reflect Pope's Catholic sensibilities.

If Eloisa might be seen as sharing in part a ‘baroque’ sensibility, then certain elements in its conception—its complex sensuality, its often extravagant pitch of emotion, and the finally inconclusive nature of its moral emphasis—may seem less disturbing than many critics have found them. The greatest difficulty posed by the poem, it seems, lies in its subjectivity; Patricia Spacks, seeing Eloisa as ‘psychotic’, is highly critical of the fact that ‘the poet's voice … indicates no awareness of anything wrong with his central figure’ (An Argument of Images, 1971, p. 237). She alleges that Pope shows an inability to analyse the ‘imbalance’ displayed in Eloisa, and observes by a pejorative comparison with The Rape of the Lock that ‘he appeared unable to replace the complexity of satire with any other real complexity: the alternations of an emotional seesaw involve only shifts of attention, not of perspective’ (pp. 237-8). This assertion is profoundly misleading, since the complexity of Eloisa is on a quite different plane from that of the Rape, and lies within its subjectivity; it is achieved through the very enclosedness, the submergence of the poet's voice in the imagined experience and consciousness of his protagonist. The evocation of the relationship between ‘grace and nature, virtue and passion’ in terms of an extreme conflict is thus a means of exploration, and the urgency of the opposition is expressive of a struggle which does not point to mere confusion or capitulation on Eloisa's part, but a sustained moral idealism.

Notes

1. Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: the Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959), 64.

2. Cited by Geoffrey Tillotson, Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, II, 301n.—volumes of this edition are hereafter referred to as ‘Te’; see List of Abbreviations.

3. Correspondence, I, 338 (March 1716; the date assigned by Sherburn is conjectural). See List of Abbreviations.

4. The representation of emotion in the poem is discussed in the light of contemporary aesthetics by Brewster Rogerson in his article, ‘The art of painting the passions’, JHI, 14 (1953), 68-94.

5. See Tillotson, TE, II, 308-11, and Hoyt Trowbridge, ‘Pope's Eloisa and the Heroides of Ovid’, in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, edited by Harold Pagliaro (Cleveland and London, 1973), III, 11-34.

6. Robert P. Kalmey (‘Rhetoric, language and structure in Eloisa to Abelard’, ECS, 5 (1971), 315-18) sees the four traditional stages of penance—contrition, confession, absolution and purgation—as enacted in the course of the poem. Stephen J. Ackerman (‘The vocation of Pope's Eloisa’, SEL, 19 (1979), 445-57) argues that the Holy Spirit finally commands Eloisa's soul and enables her fully to distinguish eros from agape. Brendan O'Hehir (‘Virtue and passion: the dialectic of Eloisa to Abelard’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2 (1960), 219-32) similarly concludes that at the close of the poem ‘no obstacles remain to the consummation of [Eloisa's] marriage to Christ’ (231).

7. Johnson (Lives of the English Poets, edited by George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), III, 226) refers bitterly to Pope's ‘illaudible singularity of treating suicide with respect’, and William Roscoe (The Works of Alexander Pope, 1824, III, 223) speaks of the poet's sentiments as ‘unpardonable’.

8. D.C. Mell, A Poetics of the Augustan Elegy (Amsterdam, 1974), 39.

9. Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘Pope's Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’, MLQ, 32 (1971), 255-67.

10. Rachel Trickett, The Honest Muse: A Study in Augustan Verse (Oxford, 1967), 165.

11. Tillotson (TE, 363n.) points out an important analogue from Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel which lends authority to the concept.

12. Spence, Anecdotes, I, 14; see List of Abbreviations.

13. ibid., 232.

14. See L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955), 439-44 and Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. 1937), 3-50.

15. Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Lund, 1967), 253.

16. Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles (1598-9).

17. ‘Penelope to Ulysses’ was included in the 1680 Tonson edition of Ovid's Epistles, and Pope's own translation of Sapho to Phaon was added to a later edition of this volume in 1712.

18. See An Essay on Criticism, ll. 458-65, and 482-3, in which Pope praises Dryden's critical powers.

19. Correspondence, I, 97 (August 1710).

20. Correspondence, I, 92.

21. Amores, III. 11; I have quoted from the Loeb Library edition of Heroides and Amores, translated by Grant Showerman (London, 1921), which is used throughout this chapter.

22. The manuscript of the translation is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

23. The point is brought up by Tillotson, TE, II, 299, and by David B. Morris, (‘“The visionary maid”: tragic passion and redemptive sympathy in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard’, MLQ, 34 (1973), 247-71).

24. Pope used l.92 once more in An Essay on Man, III. 208 to describe the ‘Origin of Political Societies’, as yet uncorrupted.

25. John Hughes, Letters of Abelard and Heloise … Extracted chiefly from Monsieur Bayle; I have consulted the fourth edition (1722), to accord with the pagination of quotations given in TE, II.

26. Stephen J. Ackerman (‘The vocation of Pope's Eloisa’) also remarks that ‘Pope portrays the life of the nun in terms characteristic of the Happy Man theme of Augustan literature’ (454), a life in harmony with nature which Ackerman, in accordance with his reading of the poem, represents as culminating in the apprehension of the ‘True Nature’ of Eden.

27. Morris, ‘“The visionary maid”’, p. 262; Henry Pettit, ‘Eloisa to Abelard: an interpretation’ University of Colorado Studies: Series in Language and Literature, 4 (1953), 67-74.

28. An excellent article by Gillian Beer (‘“Our unnatural no-voice”: the heroic epistle, Pope, and women's gothic’, YES, 12 (1982), 125-51) considers the struggle to make language fill the void as presence, and ‘substitute for the potentialities of the whole body’ (141).

29. Correspondence, III, 269.

30. James E. Wellington, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (Miami, 1965), 46.

31. See Austin Warren, ‘The reputation of Crashaw in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Studies in Philology, 31 (1934), 385-407. Warren is so puzzled by Pope's apparent hostility to Crashaw that the postulates that he was contriving ‘to give an impression which he certainly could not have received,’ in order to mask his own Catholic sympathies. This conclusion is open to doubt, however, since Pope would certainly have found Crashaw's metaphysical strain over-ingenious and lacking in taste.

32. Correspondence, I, 110 (December 1710).

33. Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw (Louisiana, 1939), 66.

Unless otherwise stated, all texts listed below bear a London imprint.

A Note on Texts and Abbreviations

Unless otherwise stated, the text of Pope's poems used throughout is that of the Twickenham Edition (general editor John Butt; 11 volumes, 1939-69), abbreviated as TE, followed by volume number, as follows:

Volume I (1961)—Pastoral Poetry, and An Essay on Criticism. Edited by Émile Audra and Aubrey Williams.

Volume II (third edition, reset, 1962)—The Rape of the Lock and other Poems. Edited by Geoffrey Tillotson.

Volume III (i) (reprint, 1964)—An Essay On Man. Edited by Maynard Mack.

Volume III (ii) (second edition, 1961)—Epistles to Several Persons—Moral Essays. Edited by F. W. Bateson.

Volume IV (second edition, 1953)—Imitations of Horace, with An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Edited by John Butt.

Volume V (third edition, 1963)—The Dunciad. Edited by James Sutherland.

Volume VI (reprinted, 1964)—Minor Poems. Edited by Norman Ault, completed by John Butt.

Volume VII, VIII (1967)—The Iliad of Homer. Edited by Maynard Mack, Norman Callan, and others.

Volume IX, X (1967)—The Odyssey of Homer. Edited by Maynard Mack, Norman Callan, and others.

Volume XI—Index (1969).

Other abbreviations used are:

Anecdotes: Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, edited by James M. Osborn (2 vols, Oxford, 1956).

Correspondence: The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn (5 vols, Oxford, 1956).

Dryden, Poems: The Poems of John Dryden, edited by James Kinsley (4 vols, Oxford, 1958).

Dryden, Essays: ‘Of Dramatic Poesy’ and other Critical Essays, edited by George Watson (2 vols, 1962).

EC: The Works of Alexander Pope, edited by W. Elwin and W. J. Courthope (10 vols, 1871-89).

Spectator: The Spectator, edited by Donald F. Bond (5 vols, Oxford, 1965).

Swift, Prose Writings: The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, edited by Herbert Davies (12 vols, Oxford, 1939-55).

Periodicals

ECS: Eighteenth Century Studies.

ELH: English Literary History.

HLQ: The Huntington Library Quarterly.

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

JHI: Journal of the History of Ideas.

MLN: Modern Language Notes.

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly.

MLR: Modern Language Review.

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

PQ: Philological Quarterly.

REL: Review of English Literature.

RES: Review of English Studies (n.s.: new series).

SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900.

YES: Yearbook of English Studies.