Mighty Contests, Trivial Things: Alexander Pope's Satires

Today, you get to treat yourselves to a discussion of Pope's major satirical poems: The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad.  And, as a special bonus, you get to endure a desultory introduction concerning the Beatles at a cocktail party as well as series of pop culture references that are no less than 40 years old.  

The Texts:

The Rape of the Lock: https://jacklynch.net/Texts/rapelock.html 

The Dunciad: https://congresoartistas.masonicvipclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/the-dunciad.pdf

Transcript

You know what I haven't done in a while?  And I’m sure you’ve all felt the lack – I haven’t referenced The Beatles in just a dog’s age.  Let’s remedy that right now, help you get over the shakes such sudden detox sometimes brings on.

There are several competing versions of this story, even by the band themselves, but the broad strokes are these:

On February 11, 1964, following their landmark Washington Coliseum concert, the Beatles attended a post-show reception at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., an event they found "miserable." They felt the elite guests treated them rudely, viewing them as curiosities rather than people.

The most notorious incident of the evening occurred when a guest sneaked up behind Ringo Starr and snipped a lock of hair from his famous mop-top. Ringo was furious, demanding to leave immediately. John Lennon later described the person responsible as a "bloody animal." Initially, the press reported the culprit as a "debutante" or an over-excited guest, but years later, an 18-year-old American fan named Beverly claimed she had gatecrashed the party and cut the hair to create a scene and get thrown out to beat her curfew.

The Embassy's initial denial of the event was overridden by the Beatles' confirmation and subsequent British press coverage, escalating the matter into a minor "diplomatic incident." As a result, the Beatles vowed to avoid similar official receptions in the future. Despite the anger at the time, the band later joked about the episode. Upon returning to London, Ringo humorously showed that his hair was "longer on this side," while John and Paul pretended to cut more, prompting Ringo's famous, cryptic quip, "Tomorrow never knows."

Why do I bring this up?  Well, honestly, only the most tenuous of connections between my favorite musicians and today’s poems.  Alexander Pope, maybe the pre-eminent poet of the early 18th century, wrote a famous satire called “The Rape of the Lock,” in which a lovely young lady gets a lock of her hair snipped off by a forward beau.  Yeah, that’s it.  People getting involuntary haircuts.  That’s the connection.

Welcome back to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason, and intertextual relationships are cobbled together with reckless abandon.  Today is our second episode on the work of Mr. A. Pope.  Last time we looked at his didactic poems – the teachy, preachy, philosophical ones.  This time, we’ll look at his satires, particularly those in the mock-heroic idiom, the aforementioned “Rape of the Lock” and “The Dunciad.”

But before we leap into these works, I need to express my gratitude to Michaela V. of Sweden, I presume, for she has made a generous gift in Swedish krona.  Michaela, thank you very much – so glad you find this little show enjoyable and educational.  I appreciate your kindness.  And also a welcome thank you to Eric W., who has just signed on as a monthly supporter.  Thanks, bud!  That’s going to help a lot!

OK, let’s see – last time we talked about Pope being a Catholic and suffering from a really painful disease.  Mentioned he’s the first fully professional pen-man in the English language.  Talked about his aesthetic philosophy of imitation – drawing heavily from Aristotle – and his belief in optimism, following the theory of Leibniz.  All in all, one would imagine that Alexander Pope is a pretty earnest fellow and, to an extent, that’s good imagining.  But that doesn't mean he wasn’t a dab hand with the irony.  In fact, he created some of the most quoted satirical poems ever.  We’ll spend most of today’s chinwag on “The Rape of the Lock.”

Nuts and bolts stuff: heroic couplets, as is his wont.  He originally composed the poem in two cantos – cantos are like chapters in a novel – of 334 lines.  That was in 1712.  It was a smash hit, so he released the director’s cut: five whole cantos which included an array of supernatural fairies, a blazon of women’s toiletries, a card game, and some spelunking in the Cave of Spleen.  Joseph Addison, by the by, advised against such inflation, but that’s the poem we have now and have had since 1717.

For this satire, Pope employs the mock heroic form, or what he calls “an heroi-comical poem.”  We’ve popped across this before – Butler’s Hudibras, Dryden’s MacFlecknoe.  It’s the type of poem that uses the language, tone, and tropes of high epic and applies them to trivialities.  So, Pope takes Iliad and Aeneid and Paradise Lost vibes to tell the story of the rape of the lock.  See? There’s that imitative philosophy at work.

The plot is based on a real-life event that stirred up some Hatfield-McCoy feuding between two prominent Catholic families.  What happened was this: A fella named Lord Petre, overwhelmed by his passion for one Arabella Fermor, cuts off a lock of her hair for a love-token.  She is not at all pleased, much as Ringo had not been, and she broke off their engagement, then went on to marry another fella, name of Francis Perkins, who never, as far as we know, touched her hair.

Pope uses this incident for his poem in an attempt to kind of get these families to laugh their way out of the quarrel.  Indeed, he writes a dedicatory letter to Miss Fermor, saying the poem “was intended only to divert a few young ladies, who have good sense and good humor enough to laugh not only at their sex's little unguarded follies, but even at their own.”  Hmmm.  Not sure I would find that at all placatory, but it seems to have worked for her.

Anyway, this seems a good time for the quick and dirty:

The poem's central figure is Belinda, modeled after the real-life Arabella Fermor. She is introduced as the epitome of fashionable beauty—charming, elegant, and, crucially, utterly absorbed in the minutiae of her own appearance. The opening scene immediately plunges the reader into mock-epic territory as her simple act of getting ready for the day is transformed into a sacred ritual.

Belinda's toilet is no mere dressing table; it becomes a consecrated altar. The act of applying make-up and arranging her hair is akin to a religious service.   

And now, unveil'd, the toilet stands display'd,

Each silver vase in mystic order laid.

First, rob'd in white, the nymph intent adores

With head uncover'd, the cosmetic pow'rs.

A heav'nly image in the glass appears,

To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;

Th' inferior priestess, at her altar's side,

Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride.

The items upon the table—combs, pins, powders, and perfumes—are described as "relics," lending an absurd spiritual significance to vanity.  He also refers to this ritual as beauty putting “on all its arms,” at once an echo of the epic hero arming himself for battle and predicting the struggle which Belinda must soon face.  Through this hyperbole, Pope is already winking at the reader, establishing the poem's central theme: this is a world where outward appearance, social grace, and fashion dictate one’s entire reality.

Of course, it is Belinda’s beautiful hair that will attract all the attention:

This Nymph, to the destruction of mankind,

Nourish’d two Locks, which graceful hung behind

In equal curls, and well conspir’d to deck

With shining ringlets the smooth iv’ry neck.

Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains,

And mighty hearts are held in slender chains.

In a traditional epic, the Olympian gods intervene, guiding or thwarting the heroes. Pope replaces these powerful deities with the sylphs, a whimsical and airy breed of spirits whose sole purpose is to protect the honor and, more importantly, the clothes and hairstyles of fashionable young women. He bases them on ideas from Rosicrucian philosophy, which posits, Pope informs Miss Fermor in his prefatory letter

the four Elements are inhabited by Spirits, which they call Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders. The Gnomes or Dæmons of Earth delight in mischief; but the Sylphs whose habitation is in the Air, are the best-condition'd creatures imaginable. 

This reduction of divine power to guardian spirits of petticoats and curls is a key element of the satire.  Pope calls these supernatural beings “the Machinery” – probably from the old deus ex machina idea of classical drama.  Belinda’s primary guardian, the head sylph Ariel, delivers a warning—not of world war or a hero’s death, but that "some dreadful event" will occur that day. This vagueness and the low-stakes nature of the threat immediately deflates the epic grandeur.

Belinda’s destiny takes her to a social gathering on the River Thames at Hampton Court, a center of aristocratic gossip and flirtation. Here, she encounters The Baron, a figure consumed by a single, desperate ambition: to possess a lock of her famous hair:

Th' advent'rous Baron the bright locks admir'd;

He saw, he wish'd, and to the prize aspir'd.

Resolv'd to win, he meditates the way,

By force to ravish, or by fraud betray;

For when success a Lover's toil attends,

Few as, if fraud or force attain'd his ends.

The Baron's desire is framed as a heroic quest. He has prayed, had "to Love an altar built / of twelve vast French romances," and sworn vows to achieve this lofty goal. His motivation mirrors the burning passions of epic heroes, yet it is directed toward a snip of hair, highlighting the absurd misplaced passion of the era.

The mock-epic conventions are perhaps most brilliantly employed in the description of the card game Ombre in Canto III: “At Ombre singly decide their doom / And swells her breast with conquests yet to come.”  Pope narrates the complex rules of Ombre as if it were a full-scale battlefield, a miniature Aeneid of strategy and combat. Cards become soldiers, suits become armies, and every move is described with a level of absurd grandeur:

And now (as oft in some distemper'd State)

On one nice Trick depends the gen'ral fate.

An Ace of Hearts steps forth: The King unseen

Lurk'd in her hand, and mourn'd his captive Queen:

oHe springs to Vengeance with an eager pace,

And falls like thunder on the prostrate Ace.

The intensity of the players over a card game mirrors the exaggerated fervor of epic warriors before a siege.

The climax arrives when, during a moment of distraction—aided by the clumsy intervention of a gnome—the Baron seizes his opportunity. Using a pair of scissors, a tool of domesticity rather than war, he snips off a lock of Belinda's hair.

The Peer now spreads the glitt'ring Forfex wide,

T' inclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.

Ev'n then, before the fatal engine clos'd,

A wretched Sylph too fondly interpos'd;

Fate urg'd the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain,

(But airy substance soon unites again)

The meeting points the sacred hair dissever

From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!

Shock and horror!  You notice that even the one moment that might be genuinely poignant – when Ariel gets cut in half by the scissors – is undercut in the very next line?  He was cut in two, but quickly came back together.  I think that actually parodies a line of Milton’s.  I should have checked that.

Anyway, this is a good time to comment upon Pope's title, “The Rape of the Lock.” It’s deliberately shocking. We discussed the historically various definitions of the word “rape” all the way back in our Chaucer episodes.  In addition to meaning a violent sexual assault, the term could mean "seizure" or "theft." That is its meaning here – the taking of a lock of hair. However, by using such a loaded word, Pope underscores that Belinda and her society perceive the theft of her hair as a profound violation, a catastrophic loss of honor analogous to actual physical assault in its social impact.  I think, as per the Beatles anecdote with which I opened, that we still think of it as a violation of our person and our dignity.

There is now outrage on a cosmic scale. Pope catalogues Belinda’s fury with a rhetorical device called anaphora.  Don’t know if I’ve mentioned this one before, but anaphora is the repetition of an initial word or phrase in successive clauses, so

Not youthful kings in battle seiz'd alive,

Not scornful virgins who their charms survive,

Not ardent lovers robb'd of all their bliss,

Not ancient ladies when refus'd a kiss, 

Not tyrants fierce that unrepenting die,

Not Cynthia when her manteau's pinn'd awry,

E'er felt such rage, resentment, and despair,

As thou, sad Virgin! for thy ravish'd Hair.

The repeated nots create this cumulative, almost avalanching effect, gathering up the fury of kings and goddesses in its turmoil. The entire social gathering descends into a melodramatic uproar.  A physical, though highly stylized, "battle" ensues between the men and women. This skirmish has not swords, but flirtation, insults, sneers, and snuff. Yes, “Sir Plume of amber snuff-box justly vain” threatens the Baron with a single, stinging pinch of snuff, a ridiculous substitute for a weapon.

The poem ultimately resolves the conflict through a moment of absurd transcendence. While the stolen lock is temporarily lost amidst the chaos and confusion, it is then magically rescued and sent on an improbable journey.  The lock of hair rises to the heavens and becomes a star, forever immortalized as a constellation: “This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame, / And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.”

(pause)

All right, so there you have the quick and dirty version of the poem.  I want to talk a little now about a little controversy surrounding its categorization by critics.  Everyone agrees its mock-heroic or mock-epic, whatever.  There is some disagreement, however, about whether it is a parody or a burlesque.  And to quote from the first line of the poem: “What mighty contests rise from trivial things!”  So here’s the split-hair – I’m not sure if I intended that pun.  

Parody is a specific imitation of a particular work, author, or style, often focusing on literary imitation, while burlesque is a broader, coarser form of exaggeration that mocks a subject by treating it with high-brow absurdity or low-brow vulgarity.

Parody operates through specific and detailed imitation where the humor derives from the skilled reproduction of a particular author's style, a specific literary work, or a recognized genre. It highlights the distinguishing features, idiosyncrasies, and often the flaws of its source material by adopting its form, rhythm, and diction. 

Burlesque, in contrast, is broader, often coarser, and usually employs extreme exaggeration. The primary goal is to mock a subject—be it a person, an idea, a social custom, or a literary form—by creating a radical disproportion between the subject matter and the style used to treat it. 

While both parody and burlesque utilize imitation and exaggeration, parody targets the form and style of its source with precision, often as a form of literary criticism, whereas burlesque targets the subject matter with broad strokes, using the manipulation of style (either too high or too low) as its chief weapon for social or moral commentary.

It seems to me that, as usual, categories are insufficient to capture actual works of art. There’s some burlesque in The Rape of the Lock, but it’s not very coarse.  There is certainly the discrepancy between style and subject.  And, of course, there’s no question that Pope is comically imitating the style of classical epic, so parody.

Here’s my quibble, though.  When we think of parody, maybe we think of Mel Brooks movies like Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein or High Anxiety, in which westerns, monster movies, and thrillers, respectively, are mocked.  Brooks mocks the tropes, formulae, and suspensions of disbelief that allows us to enjoy the films.  We do enjoy them, but Brooks asks us to laugh at them a little.  We are in the sophisticated position looking down at debased art.

But that’s not at all what Pope’s doing.  He is not mocking Homer and Virgil and Milton.  He is mocking a debased modern culture, a culture so absorbed in its own superficial triviality that the language of the epic no longer applies.  Here, it is the art that is too great for the culture, not the other way round.  Part of the Ancient/Modern dispute that’s popped up a few times lately.  Epic sublimity has declined in the face of human pettiness, in the gap between what we claim to value and what we actually do.  The vanity of modern life is the object of scorn here.

(pause)

I have managed, friend listener, to get through nearly four episodes on Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope without once mentioning the Scriblerus Club.  My apologies.  The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of Tory writers – the key members being Swift and Pope – who enjoyed sitting around, clapping each other on the back, and “owning the Whigs.”  They were obsessed with – it should come as no surprise to listeners – the false tastes in learning.  “The Battle of the Books,” “A Tale of a Tub,” the Essays on Criticism and Man, we’ve sampled this menu plenty.  Together, these guys created the persona of one Martin Scriblerus, a pedant’s son who indiscriminately dabbled in every art and science, and as a result, embodied all the flaws of contemporary learning: pretension, shallowness, ignorance, impracticality.

Pope’s other major satirical poem, The Dunciad, in its variorum edition, contains a good deal of pseudo-scholarly apparatus attributed to Martin Scriblerus.  The poem’s got a weird publication history.  The first version came out in three books in 1728 and was dedicated to Swift.  Readers of Dryden’s MacFlecknoe will get a bit of deja vu: it’s a poem mocking the crappy writing that gets celebrated nowadays.  It celebrates the goddess Dulness and all her dunce followers, the greatest of whom is Lewis Theobald, a playwright at the time, for their mediocrity, pedantry, and lack of taste and refinement. But the next year, to hype the joke, Pope put out the variorum, with  a catalogue of scurrilous comments aimed at rivals and enemies as well as “The Prologomena of Scriblerus,” a collection of criticism, testimonies, and commentary which spoofs pretentious literary critique of the day (which Pope sought to remedy with the “Essay on Criticism”).  But then, a dozen years later, we get the 12” single remix of the variorum, with all that stuff, plus a whole new fourth book!  And a new hero!  Gone is poor Lewis Theobald (who’s only remembered today because he features as Pope’s incarnation of bad literature) and welcome Colley Cibber (who’s only remembered today because he features as Pope’s incarnation of bad literature).  Now, usually, when a show makes a major cast change late in its run, things don’t go well.  Kirstie Alley was a risk replacing Shelley Long in Cheers, but it was one of the rare successes.  When Bo and Luke left The Dukes of Hazzard, there was a notable falling off.  But Pope hit the jackpot – Cibber was a smash hit dunce – and what became The New Dunciad hit the streets in 1743.  Phew!

The fourth and final book of Pope's Dunciad marked a profound shift in the scope and ambition of his satire. Abandoning the limited, if spirited, battles of the literary world that had characterized earlier books—a world where the mock-epic spirit of Mac Flecknoe still reigned—Pope broadened his focus to a scathing, comprehensive indictment of the entire intellectual and social fabric of Georgian England. This is no longer a contest; it is the revelation of the final, irreversible endgame: the absolute, triumphant apotheosis of Dulness herself.

The Goddess, far from merely presiding over the crowning of minor literary fools, now actively and systematically dismantles and reconstructs the foundations of human thought and culture. Her victory is not the result of a sudden cataclysm, but a slow, comfortable, and comprehensive process of intellectual decay, where the institutions designed to preserve and advance knowledge become the very instruments of its destruction.  She charges her minions: 

"Go, Children of my care!

To practice now from theory repair.

All my commands are easy, short, and full:

My sons! be proud, be selfish, and be dull.

Guard my prerogative, assert my throne:

This nod confirms each privilege your own.”

Under Dulness's new reign, the ancient pursuit of education transforms into mechanical, soul-crushing drudgery: “Whate'er the talents, or howe'er design'd, / We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.”  Perhaps Roger Waters was inspired by a later line: “Pity! the charm works only in our wall.”

The liberal arts are supplanted by rote memorization and practical, soulless utility. True learning is replaced by the accumulation of useless facts, creating a generation of scholars who are well-trained but utterly incapable of original thought or genuine insight.  I’m glad we’ve overcome this particular obstacle today.

Similarly, science ceases to be a search for universal truth and degenerates into empty, trivial pedantry:

“O! would the sons of men once think their eyes

And reason given them but to study flies !

See Nature in some partial narrow shape,

And let the Author of the Whole escape:

Learn but to trifle; or, who most observe,

To wonder at their Maker, not to serve."

Natural philosophers obsess over collecting and classifying minute, insignificant details—butterflies, shells, ancient artifacts—while utterly failing to grasp the grand, unifying principles of the universe. Their labor is vast, but their knowledge is vain, a celebration of the meaningless.

Philosophy suffers a more insidious fate, collapsing into deliberate obscurity for its own sake. Thinkers pride themselves on complexity and impenetrable jargon, not clarity. Abstract speculation becomes a refuge for those who have nothing to say, and the search for wisdom is replaced by the worship of difficult, self-referential systems that serve only to confuse the uninitiated.  Again – glad we’re past that now.

I think what Pope is broadly lamenting is the death of a theistic worldview and the rise of what we now call scientism (which is different from science):

All-seeing in thy mists, we want no guide,

Mother of Arrogance, and Source of Pride!

We nobly take the high Priori Road,

And reason downward, till we doubt of God:

Make Nature still encroach upon his plan;

And shove him off as far as e'er we can:

Thrust some Mechanic Cause into his place;

Or bind in matter, or diffuse in space.

Or, at one bound o'erleaping all his laws,

Make God man's image, man the final Cause,

Find virtue local, all relation scorn

See all in self , and but for self be born:

Of naught so certain as our reason still,

Of naught so doubtful as of soul and will.

The attack here on Descartes, Hobbes, and others is the ironic inverse of Pope’s sentiments in the “Essay on Man” that we looked at a couple of episodes ago.  A lack of deference for tradition, of intellectual humility, infects the civilizational institutions. Universities are willing collaborators, the courts are corrupt, and the arts are reduced to vapid, commercialized spectacle, a parade of false taste and uncritical consumption.

In Book 4, the notion of language itself is a primary focus.  It notes that what separates humanity from other animals is language: “"Since man from beast by words is known, / Words are man's province.”  Language itself, the foundation of reason and communication, is warped into a tool of confusion, propaganda, and meaningless noise, undermining the possibility of shared understanding or rational debate: “Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain, / Confine the thought, to exercise the breath.”

Pope's final vision is chillingly absolute, rising to an almost apocalyptic grandeur. It is not a violent end, but a quiet, universal surrender. Dulness is the ultimate vacuum that draws all meaning into itself, ending in a state where thought simply ceases. The final lines describe a terrifying, yet eerily serene, conclusion: a comfortable, all-encompassing stupidity that settles upon the world like a shroud. This final darkness is final, absolute, and profoundly tranquil—a devastating portrait of intellectual and cultural entropy:

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,

And unawares Morality expires.

Nor public Flame, nor private , dares to shine;

Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine !

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And universal Darkness buries All.

pause

So, a little more bleak than Dryden’s MacFlecknoe.  Yeah, if you corrupt language, you corrupt all meaning.  There’s those famous lines from astronomer Carl Sagan: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself” and “we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness.”  Pope argues that knowledge and self-awareness are only accessible by language.  If language becomes untenable . . . well.  Food for thought.

Thanks to everyone for listening.  I hope you feel your time well-spent.  Please take a minute to post a 5 star review on your listening platform – it raises the show’s profile so more folks can discover it.  Word of mouth is great, too, so if you know anyone who likes this sort of thing, put them in the picture.  Be safe, be well, and see you in a bit!