handout: a number of poems by and about women. Fair warning: you may be somewhat appalled. The most that we will have time to do on Thursday is to set up the debate, so all you need to do is read the first two poems so you'll have some sense of what the whole thread is going to be about. Where we're going with this, however, is to an in-class debate, with students playing 18th C men and students playing 18th C women, debating over the nature of women. We can split this up however you like: men playing men and women playing women, women playing men and men playing men, random groups playing the two roles, etc.
Want to start our discussion of this poem by doing some appreciating, as we did with "Essay on Criticism."
The first way I want to do this is just by pointing out what this poem is, and thoroughly it does what it does.
What it is: a mock epic. What's that?
Why one would do this--for example, why one would write an epic poem in five cantos about a lock of hair--is something that we will no doubt discuss as we go along. For now, though, I just want to point out how thoroughly the poem does what it does. The epic has a huge number of different conventions that are parodied in Pope's poem:
We'll look at a couple of these over the course of the next two days, but not in a systematic way; for now I'm passing out the handouts to give you a better sense of the whole.
Second way I want to appreciate this poem is by pointing out the sheer craft of the poem, an in particular Pope's use of the heroic couplet. (Heroic couplets, again, are rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines; it is conventional to have occasional triplets in a poem with heroic couplets, marked with a bracket, and sometimes, especially at the end of a verse paragraph, a closing alexandrine.) Put it this way: why heroic couplets? They are, if you think about it, a very artificial form--the rhyming is so constant that you can never just get caught up in the language and let it go. But there are at least a couple of advantages to rhymed couplets that make them particularly appropriate to this era. Let's take an example:
"True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
Compare that with
True wit is nature dressed to advantage,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
Just doesn't have the same punch, does it? And the reason it doesn't is easy to see: the rhyme yokes the two lines together, bringing them into a whole which is epigrammatic like a proverb, perfectly balanced, emphatic, memorable, aurally pleasing, and witty in every sense of the word. You almost can't help but quote it, which is no doubt one reason why so many of Pope's lines have made it into our common vocabulary. And note further that the rhymed words fit together: expression is in this view the outward appearance of meaning, a kind of decoration, just like dress is to a body. There's a whole theory of poetry as well-decorated truth just in the implicit pairing of the two words, even before you get to what the couplet actually says!
This kind of verse fits perfectly with the neoclassical era's view of poetry, as expressed by Pope in "An Essay on Criticism" (and as we've noted before, he is not trying to be original in this poem in the sense of expressing maverick views; he is trying to articulate principles which he considers tested and true). "Follow nature" is how he puts it; or in other words, "tell the eternal truth as fully as human limitations will allow." OK, you can tell the truth in prose; why bother with poetry? Because "dress" is important: the added pleasure of meter and rhyme and figurative language and all the rest makes the medicine go down nicely. The purpose of poetry, says Horace, is to instruct and to delight; the "delight" part matters.
Where I want to go this: the power of rhyme to couple words and ideas. I've said that "dressed" and "expressed" fit together conceptually; they just go together because of their compatible meanings. But this should give us pause for a moment. Remember from last time that in "Essay on Criticism" Pope criticizes the use of predictable rhymes, where the words
...ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze,"
In the next line, it "whispers through the trees";
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep";
Critic Hugh Kenner calls these "normal rhymes"--for our purposes today, we'll define as "rhymes which seem to fit together, either because the ideas they represent seem to cohere, or because there's a tradition which reinforces their pairing.An example from Shakespeare's Cymbeline:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. [here reinforced by religious tradition]
Whether normal rhymes are in fact reprehensible or admirable depends on how they are used. Here's Pope in his "Winter Pastoral":
Her Fate is whisper'd by the gentle Breeze,
And told in Sighs to all the Trembling Trees.
Sounds pretty trite--but in this case, it's very appropriate, because the person it's describing is named Daphne, the same name as Ovid's nymph who was turned into a tree. The test is this: are such "normal" rhymes" used to a deliberate effect, or are they the result of a lack of inventiveness?
What happens if you turn this principle on its head? You get satire: Mankind/behind. Aha--so rhyming couplets can also yoke together concepts that DON'T fit together. And again, this is the perfect tool for the neoclassical era, because it's a great tool for satire. You can set up something high and mighty in the first line, and then tumble it down with a mocking rhyme.
As it happens, the rhyme is more subtle: 2.19-20. Decide for yourself whether you think the idea is still implicit, as the suggestion of scatology is implicit in "City Showers." Here's an unambiguous example, in Pope's description of Hampton Court.
3.7-8 Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take--and sometimes tea.
This is very carefully done--it would be unwise in the extreme to insult a queen, and Pope, as a general friend of the Tories, would have appreciated Anne. There is no insult in this line. But there is a deflation: even queens are human and drink tea. What this line does is make perfectly clear, without ever saying it, that whatever happens after this, despite the Hampton Court setting, is going to take place in the lower realms of the merely human.
Pope is, again, the master of the heroic couplet, not least pulling back and forth between normal rhymes and comic rhymes. Ariel's speech to the assembled sylphs et al, Canto 2 ll. 73 ff.:
Another example of the same principle:
Both the sylphs and the ascension of the lock into the lunar sphere are examples of mock epic form. The sylphs are parody of the "machinery" of the epic, the gods and goddesses that populate classical Greek and Roman epics; the ascention of the lock is a parody of the ascension of the epic hero into the heavens (but not up to the stars, where heroes go, but only to the lunar sphere). Want to move now to other examples of the mock epic form. How specifically does the parody of the epic form work?
What's the satire aimed at?
But let's take a look at the vanity issue again.