elevated note is sustained in the fifth line to be punctured in
the sixth by a zeugma and neat antithesis as statesmen
foredoom the fall
Of foreign tyrants, and of nymphs at home.The vocabulary remains elevated, if ironically so in the case
of the nymphs. (The split line is a favourite device; compare,
for example,
To stain her honour/or her new brocade.
(canto II, 107))A second and more famous zeugma follows in which great
Anna takes both counsel and tea, and this time the bathetic
effect of the zeugma and the antithesis is reinforced by
contrasting rhyme words, the powerful solemnity of ‘obey’
against the humdrum ‘tea’. But the bathos has further to go
yet as the scene becomes more animated. In the description of
the various talk is another favourite device in Pope, the
juxtaposition of opposites (here the portentous and the less
than portentous) not in a split line but in a split couplet:
One speaks the glory of the British Queen,
And one describes a charming Indian screen(a famous example in which this device is used in a rising climax
occurs at the opening of the fourth canto). From the high poetry
of the opening we now sink to ‘chat’ and the commonest of
language to describe the commonest of activities:
Singing, laughing, ogling, and all that.Again the rhyme words give appropriate emphasis to the
sense. The linguistic range of the poem is remarkable; it is a
poem of many voices, the silliest being that of the effete fop
Sir Plume in whose utterance Pope delightfully captures the
clipped manner of the English aristocratic buffoon. The next
lines describing noontide revert to the upper register to be
followed by a couplet of more cutting satire as the poet
suggests the truly dire effects springing from trivial causes:
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.