wit delights in the happy combination of dissimilar images.
The effect of the wit can be subtle and various. It seems to be
purely comic when the Baron swears a great oath (canto IV,
133–8) that reminds us of the oath of Achilles at the opening
of the Iliad or when the bodkin’s ancestry (canto V, 89–96) is
described in terms reminiscent of Agamemnon’s sceptre or
when Jove weighs the men’s wits against the ladies’ hairs in
his scales (canto V, 71–4) as he had weighed the fates of
Achilles and Hector and Aeneas and Turnus in Homer and
Virgil. Both the characters of the poem and to a lesser extent
the solemnities of epic are being mocked here. On the other
hand when the characters fight like Homer’s gods, there is a
shift to apparent seriousness in the simile:
So when bold Homer makes the gods engage,
And heavenly breasts with human passions rage.
(canto V, 45–52)But underlying the seriousness is the comedy of the Olympian
gods whose passionate actions because they are not subject to
mortality are touched with absurdity. In the epic allusions
therefore the serious and the comic combine in varying
proportions. They are most finely balanced in the speech of
Clarissa added later in response to criticism that the poem
lacked a moral, and closely modelled upon the heroic speech
of Sarpedon. When it is recognized as a translation of heroic
idealism into an idealism appropriate to polite society, the
effect is, of course, finely comic but, since age, disease, and
death are transcendent facts of nature that affect man no less
in the polite than the heroic society, the comedy is
complicated by a serious elegaic undertone, apparent too
elsewhere, notably in the witty evocation of the power of time
at the close of the third canto. Pope is writing about society
people whose thoughts and actions are out of touch with the
facts of nature and time, so that with appropriate decorum
Clarissa’s speech is ignored.
The subtle variety achieved by Pope in his epic allusion is
seen too in the many tonal shifts and in the manipulation of
artistic effects within the couplet form. At the opening of the
third canto, for example, comes the majestic description of
Hampton Court in two smoothly flowing couplets. The