Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

So many flames before proud Ilion blaze,

And lighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays.

The long reflections of the distant fires

Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires.

A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild.

And shoot a shady lustre o’er the field.

In what is italicized (all additions to Homer) Pope artfully
evokes behind the present scene the future doom of flaming
Troy. The dusky horrors cast by the piles (the fires) are no
mere poetical cliché. There is a poignant contrast, most
delicately suggested, between the peace, serenity, and order of
this night and the trembling terror of that future night, and
between the exultant mood of the Trojan troops fresh from
their triumph and eagerly expectant in their shining armour:

The troops exulting sat in order round...

And ardent warriors wait the rising morn

and what awaits them when proud Ilion falls. The
embellishment of Homer is not gratuitous artifice but the
product of the poet’s imaginative involvement with the great
moral and psychological drama of the Iliad vividly present in
every line he translates.
Johnson offers these specimens for every one who ‘delights
to trace the mind from the rudeness of its first conceptions to
the elegance of the last’ and so that the reader of Pope’s Iliad
may see ‘by what gradations it advanced to correctness’. This
latter is a cold word which when applied to eighteenth-
century poetry has not usually helped its reputation
subsequently. But we may recall that Pope, who is always held
to be the most ‘correct’ of poets, ridiculed the ‘correctly cold’
in An Essay on Criticism (ll. 239–52), and in these lines,
though there is certainly a masterly polishing up in matters of
metre, sound, and diction, what is striking is that there is a
gradually evolving conception of the whole as the poet sorts
out precisely what picture and feeling he wishes to conjure up
and as he finds the best words to express them. It is, as
Johnson suggests, conceptions that change not merely the
surface as Pope’s imaginative engagement with the raw
material of Homer deepens. The method of composition that