FullReads

Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they “contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint.” And here are lines from a tragedy, for me anonymous:

Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings,
Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds,
And seat him in the Pleiads’ golden chariot,
Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures.

Again:

Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll,
Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.

It was the age of common-sense, we are told, and truly; but of common- sense now and then dissatisfied, common-sense here and there ambitious, common-sense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent tone. I find this little affectation in Pope’s word “sky” where a simpler poet would have “skies” or “heavens.” Pope has “sky” more than once, and always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in that masterly and most beautiful poem, the “Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady”:

Is there no bright reversion in the sky?

“Yes, my boy, we may hope so,” is the reader’s implicit mental aside, if the reader be a man of humour. Let me, however, suggest no disrespect towards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have an inimitable greatness, a tenderness and passion which the “Epistle of Eloisa” makes convulsive movements to attain but never attains. And yet how could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century in closer–in slighter yet more significant–comparison with the eighteenth than thus? Here is Ben Jonson:

What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

And this is Pope’s improvement:

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and nobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:

‘Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is “music” in English verse–the counterpart of a great melody, not of a tune.

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a like craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, so magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious in France, was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet-gardeners. Why? Because it was “artificial,” and the eighteenth century must have “nature”–nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope’s grotto, stuck with spar and little shells.

Truly the age of the “Rape of the Lock” and the “Elegy” was an age of great wit and great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I think no other century has cherished so persistent a self-conscious incongruity. As the century of good sense and good couplets it might have kept uncompromised the dignity we honour. But such inappropriate pranks have come to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merry Barnsdale, “danced in his boots”; but he was coerced by Robin Hood.