Some with pomatams paints and slops
And ointments good for scabby chops.
(ll. 19–22, 33–6)The advice of Clarissa had been good-humouredly and
gracefully given in the ‘Epistle to Miss Blount with the works
of Voiture’ and in the ‘Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving
the town, after the coronation’, Zephalinda is surely a literary
younger sister of Belinda. In the witty contrasting parallel
between her plight in the country where the only male
company is the bluff country squire and the plight of the poet
who would dearly wish to escape the vexation of the town is
an elegant comedy of manners, a delicate blend of irony,
sympathy, gallantry, and amusement in ‘social’ verse that
looks beyond social values. ‘Windsor Forest’ is a poem of
patriotic idealism celebrating the peace of Utrecht in 1710;
the natural landscape in which the poet sees ‘order in variety’
reflecting the greater order and variety of the cosmos is
admired not because it is wild, unspoilt, or apart from man,
but as it has been shaped by improving human culture into an
harmonious order. The poem is inspired by the Georgics in
which Virgil celebrates the fruitful cultivation of nature made
possible by the Augustan peace. Similarly elevated in its
design is the heroic epistle Eloisa to Abelard inspired by the
Heroides of Ovid, a series of verse letters in which the
heroine, usually abandoned or forlorn, expresses feelings of
intense passion addressed to her unattainable lover. Pope’s
subject is drawn from Christian history rather than pagan
myth, and in it the conflict between two kinds of love, love
for God and love for Abelard, is passionately and tenderly
treated. The dialectical form of the couplet is an ideal medium
for the exploration and expression of conflicting emotions.
The description of the Gothic setting is justly famous. The
‘Elegy to the memory of an unfortunate lady’, an unusually
obscure poem for Pope, is similarly renowned for its tender
pathos. Together with An Essay on Criticism with its strong
affirmation of a critical ideal, all these poems of Pope’s early
career show a sensitive and aspiring idealism allied to a strong
intellect given expression in a wide variety of forms.
After he had translated Homer, Pope, who had in