A History of English Literature

caused by Lord Petre’s snipping a love-lock from the head of Arabella Fermor, the
Belinda of the poem. These were Catholic families, and it has been suggested that an
insufficiently appreciated aspect of the poem is that its critique of the triviality of
their manner of life is also a comment on the emasculating effect of the penal laws.
Pope’s magnification of this storm in a coffee-cup did not, as was hoped, ‘laugh
together’ the parties. If this is satire, its tone is not harsh by the brutal standards of
that elegant age, in which the critic John Dennis had already described Pope in print
as a crippled papist dwarf whose physique showed that he had the mind of a toad.
Where Swift used logic and optics to maximize and minimize, Pope uses epic frames
to reduce trivia to their proper proportions. Epic allusions provide much of the
poem’s wit. Belinda at her morning make-up session is described as ritually worship-
ping her own reflection:

First,robed in white, the nymph intent adores,
With head uncovered, the cosmetic powers.
A heavenly image in the glass appears;
To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;
Th’inferior priestess at her altar’s side i.e. the maid
Trembling begins the sacred rites of pride.
In Homer the priest sacrifices to cosmicpowers, and it is the hero who arms; here,
the epic is feminized. Some of the satire is simple: ‘The hungry judges soon the
sentence sign, / And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.’ But Pope’s fun usually
involves zeugma (the yoking of the incongruous) and anticlimax, as in line 2 of this
account of Queen Anne’s Hampton Court:

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey England, Ireland and Scotland

Dost sometimes counsel take – and sometimes tea. ‘tay’

Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort,

To taste awhile the pleasures of a court;

In various talk th’ instructive hours they passed,

Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last;

One speaks the glory of the British Queen,

And one describes a charming Indian screen;

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 193

Alexander Pope, aged about 26: a fine young

gentleman in a full-bottomed wig. The pose does

not allow Pope’s humped back to be seen. By

Charles Jarvis, c.1714.