Alexander Pope's verses often succeed in conveying much more meaning than his words, taken at face value, suggest. foot of the letter. In The Rape of the Lock in particular, what appears at first to be a light-hearted exposition of upper-class concerns soon reads like a multi-layered meditation on class, religion, and social priorities. Certain tensions become obvious to the attentive reader, certain ironies and certain criticisms made result from the way in which the poet has manipulated the form. These individual tensions rarely find resolution, and it is these perpetually competing ideas that keep the poem relevant and worthy of continued consideration. Pope's heroic couplets, using techniques such as unexpected emphasis, antithetical rhyme, and deliberate redundancy, create a construct of pulling force upon which he is able to build complex webs of multiple meanings. It creates a suspended series of complex tensions that are never resolved, but instead conflict and conflict eternally. It is these eternal pillars of competing ideas that ensure the poem's legacy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"?Get the original essayIn the early 18th century, the heroic couplet "was by far the dominant verse form in English-speaking poetry and perhaps the characteristic form of verbal discourse in English” (Hunter 258-9). Here Pope found an agile method by which dynamic linguistic and metaphorical subtleties could be presented in The Rape of the Lock. Two poetic lines written in iambic pentameter, the heroic couplet was popular with contemporary readers and therefore provided a mechanism by which he could establish an instant connection with the audience he hoped to reach. However, popularity among his readers was not the only reason why Pope was able to choose heroic couplets to write his solicitation of marriage between Arabella Fermor and Lord Robert Petre. This particular form gives him easy access to various rhetorical techniques which will allow him to sculpt with restraint the messages he wishes to convey. J. Paul Hunter explains that “form. . . has requirements and has implications. Verse forms are not decorative reflections or neutral frames for messages” (269). Making definitive determinations about specific forms is an impractical, perhaps undesirable, pursuit, but one can study poetic patterns and trends in how forms are used to better understand their effect on the reader. Forms cannot have ideologies, but "traditions of usage create poets with habitual assumptions and readers with particular expectations, so that it may be possible – even obligatory – to think practically about the ideology of form in particular historical moments and for particular groups of authors. "and readers" (Hunter 258). Furthermore, just as the reception of a form may change among reader groups, the nature of a form also changes. While for its contemporary readership the heroic couplet provided a comfort of familiarity as well as an acceptable arena for critical thinking, over time the couplet proved, in The Rape of the Lock, an enduring beam for a poem whose relevance has not waned. Many critics believe that much of the poem's power comes from the fact that its couplets are self-contained statements. The overall themes of the poem are significant, but ifremarkable or enduring, this is due to the power of individual couplets, many of which in themselves stand alone in terms of literary value. (While I agree with this idea, not all scholars support it. Hunter, for example, disagrees, saying that Pope's thought was never complete within the confines of two verse unless he is writing a poem consisting only of a single verse (268.) Although the nature of this particular poem is narrative and plot-driven, there is still room among its various verses. for individual analysis. “Heroic couplets were not always written in the same way that Pope wrote them. We can say that he considered them as if they were autonomous stanzas; or, if not quite that, as having a beginning, a middle, and even though at the end there was a door, a door which he sometimes opened to allow the senses to pass through” (Cunningham 104). Within an autonomous unit, one can make an independent declaration. Pope achieves this through dynamic structural and linguistic manipulation of meaning and emphasis. For Pope, the action takes place within, not between, the couplets, which are “a flexible framework allowing for perpetual activity” (Chico 252). Within the two lines, ten iambs and twenty syllables, there is plenty of potential for sentence division, rhyme types and plot advancement. Pope seems to have taken up the challenge of considering this form from a new angle. How could it be manipulated to convey different levels of meaning? As forms change, “they carry within them various aesthetic hierarchies, material and theoretical cues, and ideological imperatives” (Chico 264). These layers and levels, when left to be linked together through narrative alone, can remain illogically discrete. However, in the hands of a competent poet, they can be woven into an intelligible, albeit multifaceted, whole through the sophisticated rhetorical techniques the poet may choose to employ. One of these techniques is the manipulation of reader expectations. The structure of the heroic couplet includes expected levels of emphasis. Playing with expectations is an immediate way to shake the reader out of complacency and present a rhetorical tension that may need to be reconciled. Manipulating these expectations goes a long way to creating and sustaining a tension that permeates the poem. “Every verse involves. . . four fundamental units. . . divided rhetorically by a caesura and syntactically by a crucial grammatical relationship that implies cause and effect” (Hunter 267). These four half-lines and their cause-and-effect relationship raise certain expectations on the part of the reader as to which of the half-lines will be emphasized. "The structure of the heroic couplet, when divided into half-lines, creates a primary emphasis for the final half-line, culminating in the word rhyme, and a secondary emphasis for the first and second halves of lines, leaving the first half of the second line without significant emphasis. » (Goosenik 191). This third half-line serves as a pause for the reader's breathing and concentration as they prepare for the punch that will come in the most important half-line of the final rhyme. Therefore, by placing seemingly unimportant elements in a position of anticipated emphasis or by placing generally accepted elements of importance in an unimportant position, the poet produces irony and puts himself in contradiction with the expectations of his drive. Such is the case in the following verse: Or stain his honor, or his new brocade; Forget His Prayers or Miss a Masquerade (2.107-8) “Prayers” is placed in the third half-line, the least stressed position. Thatindicates that for Belinda and her ilk, prayers, and we can then deduce, religion, have little importance. What is important, depending on the tension of the line, is a masked ball. “For anyone of Belinda's religion, going to prayers and witnessing the midnight masquerade is just a matter of the time of day. The functions of the two activities are fundamentally identical” (Goosenik 195). Later in the poem, when speaking of Hampton Court Palace, the poet describes the place based on how Queen Anne uses it: Here, great ANNA! Whom the three kingdoms obey, sometimes take advice, and sometimes tea. (3.7-8) The advice of her political advisors, according to the contrived emphasis of the verse, matters little compared to the conversational gossip of those she can entertain. “By placing what should be significant in the non-emphatic position and what should be trivial, but is important to Belinda's world, in the more emphatic position, Pope allows the rhetorical structure to convey irony” (Goosenik 191) . This irony therefore harbors a tension between what should be important and what is important to Belinda and Queen Anne. The attentive reader realizes this and should begin to glimpse the unlikely resolution of this tension, the unlikely shift in Belinda's outlook and priorities. The lack of moral catharsis on the part of the poem's characters, despite evidence suggesting that such catharsis is necessary, elevates it beyond the realm of mere fable or fully resolved morality play. The astute reader should feel compelled to consider the work more deeply, to find meaning in the ironies, and to hope, in vain, yes, but as humans tend to do, nevertheless hoping that the next time reading, the tension may perhaps be resolved. in other ways as well. As Belinda prepares for the day, the poet lists the "innumerable treasures" on her dressing table. Among the gifts and care products brought to him from all over the world, we find “puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux” (Pope 1.138). Each item presented in a list has a predetermined emphasis. The penultimate item in an alliterative list like this is necessarily the least emphasized and, one might think, the least important. “The Pope places the [“bibles”] that should be of primary importance in the least emphatic position in the line to show the reader that the values ​​of Belinda's world are upside down” (Goosenik 195). Instead of saying it explicitly, however, Pope uses his inherent understanding of how an audience member will read the line to subtly convey its meaning without having to articulate it. He lets particular word placement and expected emphasis work together to make his point. Instead of asserting that Belinda sees religion as just another reason to be seen in public, he sweeps away her iconography with makeup accessories and places the key to moral redemption, "bibles", in a position where she will most likely be overlooked or ignored. ignored. In addition to the mechanisms by which Pope is able to manipulate emphasis, the meter of the heroic verse provides him with a range of avenues by which to create meaning and orchestrate tension. The ten two-syllable iambics of a verse contribute to conciseness and present a “firmly controlled progression” (Cunningham 103). The aforementioned comfort that a reader of the time would have found in reading iambic pentameter lent the form a certain accessibility. This comfortable reader is therefore more susceptible to non-explicit messages in the words of the poem. “The meter whispers to the reader the meaning, the tone, the nuance for which thesewords need not be used” (Cunningham 107). The meter's potential for varied rhythms and manipulated accent work to keep the reader engaged. Pope was loath to put his audience to sleep. He wrote lines that bounced, with syllables that emphasized punctuation and invited animation. Where wigs with wigs, with sword-knots the sword-knots strive, the Fair banish the fair and the trainers lead (1.101-102). In this verse, the normal iambic accent is more emphasized. The percussive accent of the words “wigs” and “swords” equates them ridiculously. The “pleasurable effects of poetry are produced by subliminal verbal structuring” (Ligget 17). Our mind wants to find reasonable meaning in the messages it receives. The reader would therefore easily take a clue such as the words punctuated in the carefully composed meter of a line and draw parallels between them. These sorts of illogical unions are reinforced throughout the poem through the use of sophisticated rhetorical techniques such as zeugma and chiasmus. Using these tools, Pope is able to juxtapose competing ideas and thus further develop his complex web of small tensions. Zeugma is "the yoking of two idioms to a single verb [and] is Pope's most effective rhetorical trick, insofar as it creates an ironic clash between seemingly disparate orders of value" (Norris 151). In a line we looked at previously, we see the verb "stain" referring to both Belinda's "honor" and her "new brocade." The implication, of course, is that by staining her dress, Belinda's reputation or honor is thereby damaged. By connecting a verb to two incongruous nouns, Pope implies a level of parity between the young woman's character and her outward appearance. Once again we find an ironic tension between what should be important and what, in fact, is important to Belinda, nestled lyrically in a single line. The verse continues with another example: “Or lose your heart or your necklace at a ball” (Pope 2.109). "The metaphorical meaning of 'stain' and 'lose' is first underlined, then we are asked to attach to it, as an object, in an unexpected way, a name which only works with it in the sense literal. The shock of an inappropriate relationship is transmitted” (Doody 217). This discrepancy can be interpreted as humorous or disconcerting. The reader's preconceived state will affect their reaction. What does not change, however, is the tension between what should be valued and what is not at all. With chiasmus, we find two parallel sentences balanced against each other, but whose parts of speech are reversed. This technique is a mechanism by which “the poem plays with the concepts of dissimilarity and resemblance” (Cohen 207). The hungry judges soon sign the sentence And the wretched are hanged so that the jurors can dine (3.21-22). In line 21, the subject, “hungry judges” precedes the action “sign”. This imprimatur allows two things: the wretched, guilty or not, will go to the gallows sooner and the jurors will be able to go home to eat. The seriousness of what the judges did and the recklessness with which they did it are at odds. The same goes for the permanence of the death of the wretched, opposed to the temporary satiety of the jurors. “The Pope uses chiasm to connect moral significance to slight occasion” (Nicholson 84). In another example from Ariel's warning to her fellow sylphs, we see threats to character and virtue being feared just as threats to material things. Whether the nymph breaks the law of Diana, or whether a frail porcelain jar receives a defect;(2.105-106) These sorts of rhetorical origami, coupling and folding opposite ends of possible meaning to create a decorative artifact, give the pope the freedom to comment on the ambiguities he witnesses within the upper class and to create a pleasant piece of poetry. that the same upper class will buy and enjoy. When the narrator explains the Baron's desire to obtain one of Belinda's locks, "[by] force to rape her, or by fraud to betray her", the degree of his determination is implied. (Pope 2.32). A man may take something by force, but then he may be subject to ridicule from others. The speaker downplays the crime of taking something by force, however, by suggesting that once an act is done, no one really remembers how it was done. For when success is accompanied by the labor of a lover, few wonder whether fraud or force achieved his ends (2.33-34) The narrator has incited the reader to acquittal even before the crime has not been committed. A tension remains between announced guilt and an ambivalent jury. Robert Markley suggests that these complexities make “the Pope the champion of living room civility.” . . replaced by the pope, an incisive commentator on the political ambiguities of his time. (73) I would say, however, that one pope is not replaced by another. Instead, techniques such as zeugma and chiasm allow its different messages to coexist. The opposing implications stand in opposition to each other, resisting each other's attempts to alter or weaken them, thereby reinforcing the strength of each as well as Pope's statement above all else. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope addresses several pairs of competing implications: Belinda versus the Baron, the sylphs versus what threatens their lady, the upper-class insular English ensemble, and the outside world from which they obtain now their trinkets. Between these different camps, tensions exist. Pope could have chosen to write in monosyllabic masculine rhymes. The story would have been told, but not endured. The nature of the end rhyme in many of Pope's couplets is a means by which new tensions can be discovered in multiple readings. Antithetic rhyme, in which the last two words of each line rhyme but have opposite meanings, is one such mechanism. For example, the last words in each of the lines below imply completely different meanings: Know further still; whoever just and chaste rejects humanity is embraced by some sylph (1.67-68). By associating the notion of chastity with a signifier of intimate contact, Pope plays one notion of success over another. Belinda's virtue, traditionalists might think, lies in her virginity. However, in his mind, his virtue lies in the nature of his outward appearance. She doesn't mind that her honor might be compromised. She exclaims: “Oh, it was cruel, cruel! I was content to grasp/hairs less visible, or hairs other than these” (Pope 4.175-6). She wouldn't mind a more private violation so much. As long as she is stained in a way that others cannot see, to her, virginity and intimacy are one and the same. We have now entered “a world in which appearances have become substitutes for things themselves, where virtue has been reduced to reputation” (Pollak 77). When Ariel explains to Belinda that she is surrounded by protective sylphs, he says: "Certain secret truths, hidden by scholarly pride, are revealed only to maids and children." (1.37-38) Belinda has little use for anything hidden. She believes that everything valuable she owns should be on display for all to see.“These antitheses follow Pope's normal satirical pattern of value inversion” (Goosnik 193). The reader must balance what they see as a properly aligned moral compass with what they are told Belinda believes. It is more than likely that these two visions are opposed. Pope's genius lies in his ability to create language such that tension is conveyed, but does not make us stop reading. We want to keep reading, perhaps looking for a solution that might never happen. The antithesis does not only appear in the final rhymes. We see more than one antithetical couple in this verse: Safe from the treacherous friend, from the bold spark, from the daylight glance, from the whisper in the dark (1.73-4). Hunter believes that "often the strength of a verse depends on our noticing the conflict between the words. (266). In these lines we notice many things. A “treacherous friend” is an oxymoron, which Margaret Anne Doody describes as “a dominant figure of speech in Augustan poetry, a central figure in his poetic thought” (217). Which friends should you trust? What betrayal lies behind the intentions of those we believe to be our allies? “Spark,” quote Mr. Johnson in the text's endnotes, can be defined as “a vivacious, showy gay man,” someone who can be treacherous toward a virginal young woman. “Spark” is also used as a play on words, to form an antithetical rhyme with “dark”. In the second line, “the day” serves as an additional counterpoint to the sense of darkness. “Looking” and “whispering,” two potentially furtive forms of communication, also oppose each other. Ariel continues in this verse his explanation that he and the other sylphs protect "the purity of melting maidens" (Pope 1.71) when their virtue is threatened by a handsome flirt. Such circumstances are indeed moments of passionate confusion for young women, knowing in their heads how they should act; feel with their hormones how they would like to act. The contrasts in this verse capture this dissonance, the idea that something can be good and bad, light and dark, desired and unwanted at the same time. End rhyming can also be a source of tension when the two rhyming words are two different parts of speech. These oppositions are much more subtle than the techniques we have discussed so far. They nevertheless contribute to the recurring rhetorical tension in the poem. Take, for example, the passage where Belinda's hair is cut from her head. The meeting points the sacred hair separates From the beautiful head, forever, and forever! Then living lightning flashes from his eyes And cries of horror tear the frightened skies. There are no cries louder to pity the sky, When husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last, Or when rich china vases, fallen from high, In sparkling dust, and fragments sharp ones lie! (3.153-160) Three of the four couplets presented in the passage end with rhymes that combine two different parts of speech. Primarily, this technique prevents the poem from falling into a flat, predictable rhyme scheme. However, a more complex balance of ideas is also at play here. The lock takes on the character of a relic when it is described as sacred. To be divided is to end one's reign as beatific adornment. The scissors made him no longer reign. However, the finality of “dissect,” a verb meaning to remove and implying to end, is associated with “forever,” an adjectival expression indicating permanence, eternity. Belinda might have hoped that her youthful physical beauty would be unrelenting, but it is now the end of her beauty which, according to thepoem, will be eternal. The complexity of a notion like this is astonishing, especially since it serves as a perfect example of the powerful tension that can be conveyed in a single verse. The tensions existing in couplets like these work against each other to form a pulling force that serves as a strong supporting structure for any more explicit or overarching meaning (Liggett 19). Hunter recognizes this tension in the couplets and argues that this formal tension serves to encourage "preservation and acceptance of difference rather than elaboration, modification, or compromise" (266). After all, whether in terms of scholarship or entertainment, aren't two passions clashing in a state of perpetual tension far more interesting than the inevitable watered-down reality of resolution? While it is natural for the human ear, the human mind, to desire a solution, it is equally natural to viscerally appreciate the jarring journey one undertakes to find it. The last verse of the passage above is the one in which the antithetical rhyme actually creates a visual impression of opposites. This is not the first time in the poem that the idea of ​​broken precious porcelain arouses deep despair. Here, “rich porcelain vessels” can fall “from above” – from a high shelf, perhaps, from a dining table; or could this imply that the prized porcelain is in an even more respectful elevated location? The pinnacle of material things may have divine origins. The narrator suggests that their disappearance would warrant the same grief as the death of a husband. We see great attention paid to such a material object as the verse paints a picture of a delicate specimen falling from an unnaturally high place only to end up in fragments, decimated in the lowest possible position. Where it had once been used, located in a place described as particularly "high", the container now begets the verb "lie" and is scattered, ruined, in pieces, just as Belinda believes her reputation and herself to 'East. over the course of five songs, the recurrence of certain pairs of rhymes and endings of verses is not accidental. Three times, Pope rhymes “rage” with “commit”. Towards the beginning of the poem we read: In tasks so daring can little men undertake, And in soft breasts dwells a rage so mighty? (1.11-12) Soft breasts would be the last place one would expect rabies to feed. The image is dissonant and perpetuates the intertextual tensions of the poem. When we find this pair of rhymes again in Canto Three, we have a different group of players - no longer "little men" nor those with soft breasts: The rebellious valet, who challenges his prince to engage, proves to be the righteous victim of his royal rage. (3.59-60)In this verse we encounter rage in a more appropriate place than a soft breast. Furthermore, we have moved away from the “little men” and into the kingdom of princes. In the Fifth Canto, when we last see the rhyming pair, our fighters have been elevated even further, from princes to gods. Thus, when bold Homer makes the gods engage, And the heavenly breasts with human passions rage; (5.45-46) The metaphor of "breasts" returns, but this time in the form of "heavenly breasts" unleashed with passion perhaps, at this point, at home there. Through such threads, Pope's metaphor progresses from a single couplet of somewhat illogical irony to a series culminating in a divine reference and more appropriate emotion. The relevance for us lies in the fact that despite the repetition, despite the evolution of the metaphor, nothing is resolved. In this.