5. The Rape of the Lock

What dire offence from amorous causes springs,

What mighty quarrels rise from trivial things,

I sing

And yet. Is there something a shade inadequate about the word ‘quarrels’? A shade juvenile or, at least, immature? Would, say, ‘strife’ seem more in keeping with the level of high seriousness conveyed by the other words? Or, given that we need a disyllable, ‘contests’? Did such a thought occur to Pope himself when he came, in 1714, to raise his two-canto structure to a fuller, more crowded, five-canto narrative? Sure enough, in that rendition, we find that ‘mighty quarrels’ has become ‘mighty contests’. Otherwise, the couplet remains the same.

Canto 1, lines 7–8

Having assured us that ‘Slight is the subject’ (line 5), an assertion that echoes the bathetic phrase ‘trivial things’ in the opening couplet, Pope completes his introduction by giving us a foretaste of the events the poem will unfold. So,

Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel

A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?

The actual event the poem narrates is the Baron’s cutting off a lock of hair. As such, it is a belittlement of the seriousness of ‘assault’ and ‘rape’. But, conversely, the vocabulary used conveys the highest degree of moral condemnation and physical actuality. This simultaneous lowering and heightening is mock-heroic’s destabilization of perspective. We are asked, indeed obliged, to consider how easily or uneasily the deed itself—a deliberate act of violation of a female body—sits alongside that instability.

The skilful nymph reviews her force with care:

‘Let spades be trumps!’ she said, and trumps they were.

The chief set-piece in the third canto is the game played by Belinda and ‘two adventurous knights’ (line 26), one of whom is the Baron. Each player is dealt nine cards, and the winner is the one who takes the most tricks. The ombre (hombre is Spanish for ‘man’) is the player who has the option of naming the trump suit—in this round, it is Belinda. She wins the first four tricks, then the Baron wins the next four. The decisive ninth trick is triumphantly won by Belinda with her king of hearts.

The running mock-heroic joke is that a banal game of cards is described as if it were an actual battle joined by real kings, queens, knaves, and their troops. Each action is therefore elevated to a level of significance out of kilter with the trivial reality. Pope fills his lines with as many such high-flown fancies as he can. So here Belinda’s hand of cards is a ‘force’; her choice about which suit to declare as trumps requires skill and studious attention; that decision is announced as if it were a divine fiat, such as that in Genesis 1. 3 (‘And God said, Let there be light’); and the effect of her exclamation is expressed as a sublimely concise demonstration of her supreme power (‘and there was light’).

All this is playfully absurd. It is of a piece with the original purpose of the poem: to ‘make a jest’ of the trivial event which set off a real quarrel between the Petre and Fermor families. The mock war that is a game of cards resembles a ridiculous enactment of a battle of the sexes (both Belinda’s opponents, the baron and the anonymous third party, are men) which in canto 5 will degenerate into a farcical combat between belles and beaux.

And yet Pope’s vivid and imaginative rendering of the trivial minutiae of the ludicrously inflated events invests them all with vivacity and sheer delight. The cumulative result is a comic mini-epic of its own. Yes, the poem is a satirical portrait of a society taking itself too seriously, of human beings imagining themselves to be hugely more significant than they are. But the poem also enters into the spirit of those people and the world they inhabit with a gusto that carries the reader along with its energy and untiring display. Take, for example, the brewing and consumption of coffee, which follows the game of ombre.

For lo! the board with cups and spoons is crowned,

The berries crackle, and the mill turns round;

On shining altars of Japan they raise

The silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze:

From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,

While China’s earth receives the smoking tide:

At once they gratify their scent and taste,

And frequent cups prolong the rich repast.

Poetic style here presents a veritable cornucopia of elevation. Periphrasis (or circumlocution) expands the event, while linguistic register raises it and felicitous phrasing renders it as smooth as the drink itself. Lacquered tables take on the air of exotic locations and religious rites. Flames are invigorated with animation and vitality. Attractiveness and costliness are given impetus by verbal and positional repetition: ‘The silver lamp’ / ‘From silver spouts’. Scale is heightened by hyperbolic vocabulary: ‘blaze’, ‘tide’. The close verbal relationship of ‘grateful’ and ‘gratify’ (both words derive from the Latin adjective ‘gratus’, meaning ‘causing pleasure’) echoes the blended sensory delights of scent and taste. Everything takes on the grandeur and impressiveness of a ritual; and everything flows with graceful ease. The line ‘From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide’, with especial appropriateness, glides across the page with a steady euphonious flow. The whole event is a miracle of ‘taste’, in every sense.

Not with more glories, in the ethereal plain,

The sun first rises o’er the purpled main,

Than, issuing forth, the rival of his beams

Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.

Fair nymphs, and well-dressed youths around her shone,

But every eye was fixed on her alone.

On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,

Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.

Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,

Quick as her eyes, and as unfixed as those:

Favours to none, to all she smiles extends;

Oft she rejects, but never once offends.

Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike,

And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.

Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride

Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:

If to her share some female errors fall,

Look on her face, and you’ll forget ’em all.

Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike,

And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.

‘Say why are beauties praised and honoured most,

The wise man’s passion, and the vain man’s toast?

Why decked with all that land and sea afford,

Why angels called, and angel-like adored?

Why round our coaches crowd the white-gloved beaux,

Why bows the side-box from its inmost rows?

How vain are all these glories, all our pains,

Unless good sense preserve what beauty gains:

That men may say, when we the front-box grace,

Behold the first in virtue as in face!

Oh! if to dance all night, and dress all day,

Charmed the smallpox, or chased old age away;

Who would not scorn what housewife’s cares produce,

Or who would learn one earthly thing of use?

To patch, nay ogle, might become a saint,

Nor could it sure be such a sin to paint.

But since, alas! Frail beauty must decay,

Curled or uncurled, since locks will turn to grey;

Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,

And she who scorns a man, must die a maid;

What then remains but well our power to use,

And keep good-humour still whate’er we lose?

And trust me, dear! good-humour can prevail,

When airs, and flights, and screams, and scolding fail.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;

Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.’

Why do men so worship and adore beautiful women?

Male obeisance is rendered absurd by its excessive abasement, an affliction common to all men, from the ‘wise’ to the ‘vain’. ‘Vain’ here carries its etymological sense of ‘empty’ (Latin ‘vanus’) as well as its general modern significance as a moral term. ‘Wise’ and ‘vain’ are thus antithetical: however full of knowledge or empty of sense men are, they all succumb. The extravagant absurdities of male behaviour fill the whole world. They scour the planet by land and sea in pursuit of all the precious resources they can find to adorn the objects of their adoration. They allocate to women semi-divine status. The rapid repetition of ‘angel’ in line four exposes the unthinking folly of such behaviour. They also treat women as special objects of attention in social situations, in perverse contradiction of the rationale of those situations. Surrounding coaches impede movement, which is their intended function. Theatre audiences ought to be looking at the stage. The absurdity is total: it is not only the front row that bows but all rows. To idolatry, then, we can add the madness of crowds. Clarissa’s increasingly incredulous repetitions of ‘why’ dominate the lines: five times in six lines, four of them in the prominent position of the beginning of the line. Why on earth do they do it?

(b)lines 15–18 (i. e. four lines)

All this attention and glorification is in vain unless beauty is accompanied by good sense and virtue.

More vanity, again with the double sense: Clarissa is deftly driving home her principal ‘moral’. Now she adds her approved alternatives to vanity in good sense and virtue, a judicious combination of the abstract ideal of the latter with the pragmatism of the former. But how realistic is this advice? How many men, given the wry observation of their behaviour in the preceding lines, are likely to be struck as much by virtue as by beauty?

The first ten lines, then, divide into six for the absurd veneration of physical attraction, four for the accompanying moral. The order proposes the latter as a proper counter to the former, but the number of lines stack up conversely. The six/four ratio reflects one of the common rhythmic divisions of iambic pentameters, so that (a) and (b) act as an extension of an individual line into syntactic sections. Clarissa is indeed in control of her speech.

If devoting all one’s time to pleasure could ward off disease and prevent aging, we would readily scorn humble diurnal tasks and ignore moral judgements of our behaviour.

If we take the smallest contrasts first, vigorously active dancing is contrasted with night (normally a time for sleeping), dressing (usually done before the day begins) is contrasted with the day, ‘Charmed’… is contrasted with the disgusting smallpox, and the nimbleness of ‘chased’ contrasts with ‘slow old Age’. Then dancing all night is contrasted with dressing all day, and the insinuating gentleness of charming away the smallpox is contrasted with the rough expulsion of old age. Finally, the entire idea of dancing all night and dressing all day (the first line) is set against certain grim consequences with which it is unable to deal in the second line.

Thus, the four half-lines contain their own antitheses; the two full lines are themselves antithetical; and the entire couplet consists of two antithetical lines, an inter-relationship pointed and heightened by the consonance of its rhyming (‘day’ / ‘away’). Pope—and Clarissa—have managed to pack seven instances of antithesis into two lines of poetry and eighteen words.

But because our beauty will, however we try to enhance and preserve it, fade with time, all we can do is to retain our good humour and trust to merit rather than appearance.

Clarissa’s emphatic opening conjunction, ‘But’, indicates the turn in her argument towards its principal conclusion. All dreams of eternal youth become insubstantial when we are obliged to confront waking reality. Her language brooks no qualification: ‘frail beauty must decay’, ‘locks will turn to grey’, ‘all shall fade’, ‘must die’. Her moral is sustained by emphatic repetition, both within these concluding lines (‘good-humour’ in lines 30 and 31) and in picking up on the earlier ‘vain’ (lines 10, 15, and 33), ‘beauties’ (lines 9 and 33) and ‘charm’ (lines 20 and 34). The entire speech is thus carefully held together.

The rational clarity of its structure produces a clear weighting towards its real point, its ‘moral’. These ten lines are set against six lines of wishful thinking (section (c)). The longest sub-section is the speech’s conclusion. Clarissa’s moral proposes an appropriate and dignified response to the grim but unavoidable fact: the inevitability of time’s destructive power. Clarissa’s speech here alters the shape and tone of Sarpedon’s. But the divergence is not that stark. The premise, after all, is the same—we are all mortal—so that both speeches share an elegiac basis; and one could say that each is, in its way, a logical or at least understandable reaction.

Note on Terminology

‘What time would spare, from steel receives its date,

And monuments, like men, submit to fate!

Steel could the labour of the Gods destroy,

And strike to dust the imperial towers of Troy;

Steel could the works of mortal pride confound,

And hew triumphal arches to the ground.

What wonder then, fair nymph! thy hairs should feel

The conquering force of unresisted steel?’

So, too, in the world of mock-epic time acts as the inescapable path to loss, to mortality; except, of course, that it is all reduced in scale: wars to card games, swords to scissors, bodies to locks of hair. What is not reduced is the human reaction: hence the mock-epic gap between language and action. The last couplet in canto 3 represents this divergence: the loss here acknowledged is the lock of hair. Surround it, as language can, with the grand register of ‘conquering force’ (cf. the ‘force’ renewed by our skilful nymph in the form of her hand of playing cards), and the outcome is distance between words and actions, the bathos we have seen to be characteristic of mock-heroic.

Yet that last couplet comes to rest on the passage’s key word, ‘steel’. Indeed, ‘steel’ resounds through the lines with the force of swords beating on shields, its harsh ‘st’ sound reflecting its martial object and the events of epic where steel ‘strike[s] to dust the imperial towers of Troy’. Does mock-epic inevitably bring to mind epic itself, sharing its ground and its language? Or is this to take it—and life—all too seriously? The final paragraphs of the whole poem suggest the latter by reverting to another classical paradigm, metamorphosis.

But trust the Muse—she saw it upward rise,

Though marked by none but quick, poetic eyes:

(So Rome’s great founder to the heavens withdrew,

To Proculus alone confessed in view)

A sudden star, it shot through liquid air,

And drew behind a radiant trail of hair.

Not Berenice’s locks first rose so bright,

The heavens bespangling with dishevelled light.

The sylphs behold it kindling as it flies,

And pleased pursue its progress through the skies.