See also:

Alexander Pope

 

Home pages:

The Greatest Literature of All Time

Selected Authors

Selected Greatest Works

Editor Eric

 

  

 

 

 

 

 


The Rape of
the Lock

Buy in Canada

Buy in U.S.
The Rape of
the Lock
Alexander Pope
Poem 1712-14
approx. 5,500 words,
730 lines
First line:
What dire offence from
   am'rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise
   from trivial things,
I sing —
Favourite line:
Oh! If to dance all night and 
   dress all day,
Charm'd the smallpox, or
   chas'd old-age away;
Who would not scorn what
   housewife's cares produce,
Or who would learn one
   earthly thing of use?
 

It really broke them up in 1712

I'm not sure why The Rape of the Lock is Pope's most famous poem.

I can understand why it might have been popular in its day: it satirizes an incident that was infamous in a certain aristocratic crowd at the time, in which a lord snatched a lock of hair from a prominent young lady. Pope supposedly first wrote a short version of the poem to end the quarrel between the two. The names are changed but it's so clear who is being depicted that Pope prefaces it with a disclaimer telling the lady in question the poetic Belinda "resembles you in nothing but beauty".

It's humorous in a learned way. Pope himself calls it "heroi-comical". Nymphs and fairies, who have nothing better to do than devote their nether lives to watching over our heroine and swooning over her wonderfulness, help Belinda with her toilet in preparation for a social event at which a fateful card game takes place. The game is presented as an epic medieval battle and the attack on the victorious lady's hairdo by the losing Baron is as perfidious an act as ever carried out against humankind, a disaster as momentous as the fall of Rome. It's played out over pages of hyperbole intimating the end of Christendom and civilization is at hand.

So it's funny. But to get through it with your humour intact, you have to understand so many references to ancient literature and mythology. It's tiring work with little pay-off for the modern reader in my opinion.

But, now you know what I think, listen to what a present-day admirer thinks. Angus Ross writes in an introduction to Pope's Selected Poetry:

This masterpiece of mock-heroic technique starts as a joke arising from an actual incident, but contains some very powerful, even tragic, poetry. It shows several themes and attitudes characteristic of Pope's later work: his attack on his society for not realizing its potentialities; his half-unwilling admiration for English opulence; his moral concern with leading the good life; and, in Belinda, his awareness of the predicament of women, creatures of nearly irresistible passion living in a man's world of reason and reputation.

Read it and tell me which of us you agree with.

— Eric

© Copyright 2002-2004 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.