Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

1642 containing the celebrated lines on the Thames

which in their arrangement and sense represent an

ideal to which the Augustans aspired in their use of

the couplet:

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not

dull;

Strong without rage and without o’erflowing

full.

(191–2)

113 Denham Sir John (1615–69). Pope had already
saluted the strength of his versification in An Essay
on Criticism, line 361. ‘Cooper’s Hill’ was doubtless
one of the main inspirations in English of ‘Windsor
Forest’.
114 Cowley Abraham Cowley (1618–67) who had
written many poems in praise of retirement, and
whose muse Pope had imitated among his first
poetic efforts.
119 My humble Muse Like Virgil before him Pope puts a
modest estimate on pastoral and georgic poetry; more
ambitious muses attempt heroic themes.

[ON SICKNESS]

Printed in the Guardian, no. 132, Wednesday 12 August 1713.

9 Waller from ‘Of the last verses of the book’, ll. 13–

14.

53 the Wisdom of Solomon one of the books of the Old

Testament Apocrypha.

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

In the wake of the family acrimony that followed the jest of
Lord Petre in cutting off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor’s
hair, it was suggested to Pope by a friend of all concerned,
John Caryll, that he should ‘write a poem to make a jest of it,
and laugh them together again’. The first edition in two
cantos was published in 1712. Subsequently in 1714 Pope