The Columbia History of British Poetry (69 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
12.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 295
Notice also how the reference to Ceres contains within it the memorybut not the mentionof her daughter's abduction by the god of miserable wealth, and Proserpine's cyclical release from Pluto's bonds. Our memory of the myth is given to us here to guide our judgment of the ruin of bad wealth, given to us precisely in Pope's brilliantly reticent refusal to insist upon the myth's more literal, old-fashioned, form. In just this way does Pope's sophistication make a world of fine fabling authentically and poetically present to his modern-minded reader. It is an act of high imagination.
Along with this adroitness in its re-creation of classical genre,
To Burlington
reveals a supple tonal movement from which we derive our sense that the poem is uttered by a dramatically active speaker, a speaker whose own presentation of himself evolves in the course of his speaking his poem, or writing his letter. The curve of feeling shaping
To Burlington
is traced in Pope's movement from a voice chatty and intimate, then aggressive and irritated, to the high, authoritative, and visionary speech of the poem's close. Pope comes to this voice as he comes to the vision of the virtuous polity a grand architect might design, a good king might build, and a poet/prophet might celebrate, and the meaning of the poem is very much entailed in the poet's discovery of that high voice. It is precisely the discovery that vatic and heroic authority can be asserted in a modern voice and directed to an urbane audience: what he begins as an apparently informal letter to a respected and accomplished friend, a set of musings on the use and misuse of wealth, Pope transforms into nothing less than a visionary representation of the conditions under which a poet will stand at the political center as spokesman and celebrant, as the epic writer of what Milton called "a poem doctrinal to a nation"for a nation that deserves it. Such a notion about poetry's high purpose has its sources in the humanist Renaissance.
But this heroic sense of career is as much a subject for scrutiny as for celebration in the major poems of Pope's last decade:
The Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot
, the several imitations of Horace's epistles and satires, the two dialogues known as
The Epilogue to the Satires
, and the revisions of
The Dunciad
. In these poems, taken together, Pope explores his career in poetry as it developed, not in the terms envisioned in
An Essay on Criticism
and
To Burlington
, but in response to a public world falling far short of the ideal envisioned thereand in response perhaps to personal impulses as aggressive as they were gen-
 
Page 296
erous, as congenial to satire as they were to celebration. In satire, Leopold Damrosch observes, the rebellious and anarchic impulses in Pope "could define themselves as custodians of moral order." And certainly, there is much in these later poems that exists in oblique relation to their high humanist ideal of ethical and imaginative equilibrium in the person of the poet capable of epic. It is Pope's achievement to have managed, in the aggressive, the angry, and the
modern
voice of the satirist, a scrutiny of self and career that both preserves and questions the humanist stance implied in his epic vision of the connection possible between poet and polity.
Nor is it possible to distinguish the ethical from the stylistic project here. If indeed Pope was interested in "placing" his individual talent within the humanist tradition he goes so far to redefine, then this undertaking was shaped by a skill in writing couplet verse unmatched by any other. It is this skill that constructs, for example, the rapid rhythms of animated conversation that permit Pope to dramatize and scrutinize what distinguishes himnow from his admired friends, now from his detested enemies:
Let
Sporus
tremble"What? that Thing of silk,
"
Sporus
, that mere white Curd of Ass's milk?
"Satire or Sense alas! can
Sporus
feel?
"Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"
Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings. . . .
Here, at a critical moment in the
Epistle to Arbuthnot
, the interchange marks the difference between Pope's own fury at the "enemy," Lord Hervey ("Sporus"), and the bemused contempt of his friend, Arbuthnot. Against Arbuthnot's fine, dismissive, ridiculing wit"who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel"Pope's passion can seem excessive, itself somewhat ridiculous, even an embarrassment. All this he acknowledges in the drama of the exchange, and then goes on triumphantly to vindicate his fury in the grander, darker vision of the enemy he suddenly constructs from his friend's milder, merely dismissive wit: a butterfly to you, an insect to me; beautiful, but also painful, also insidioushe stinks, he stings, he buzzes, he annoys. More, it is the "witty and the fair" he annoys. And more, when looked at directlythat is, poeticallythis insect enemy of mind and beauty is no less than another ver-
 
Page 297
sion of Satanfor to possess the social arts and then to trivialize them as "Sporus" does, is to be damned in small talk: to transform wit to gossip, puns, politics and lies, so to impose on the grand innocence of civility, and so to re-create in society the first sin of the first garden.
Eve's
Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest,
A Cherub's Face, a Reptile all the rest. . . .
There is perhaps no more powerful an instance of Pope's familiarizing an ancient myth than in this reenvisioning of Satan in the contemporary figure of a well-known and sometimes sparkling presence at court, and there is no more powerful an assertion of Pope's imagination than in this definition of civility as heroism against its trivializedor merely decentembodiments.
The triumphant note of that assertion is heard throughout Pope's Horatian poems, and in various keyssometimes a grand declaration of self-sufficiency, sometimes a statement of resignation felt as victory, sometimes as heroic boast delivered as satiric wit:
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me. . . .
And, in perhaps Pope's most dazzling moment, he links this triumphant claim for satire not only to the heroic, but also to the holy:
O sacred Weapon! left for Truth's defence,
Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!
To all but Heav'n-directed hands deny'd,
The Muse may give thee, but the Gods must guide.
Such a grand assertion, in which Pope promotes satire into epic and prophecy, gains its authority from the daring virtuosity of the couplet rhetoric that sets up its moment. The rapture of this instance is cannily prepared for in Pope's play against the conventional notion that satire is a "low" genre, that it works by demeaning its subject, unlike the "high" genres of epic and tragedy which were said to heighten and ennoble their material. But here Pope daringly conceives a rapturous and heroic close for his satirical poem by first insisting upon the obscenity that satire licenses, asin a moment of outrageous scatological withe attacks the joint literary projects of some members of the House of Commons:

Other books

Phoenix Rising by Bryony Pearce
A Clean Slate by Laura Caldwell
El taller de escritura by Jincy Willett
H. M. S. Cockerel by Dewey Lambdin
Tapestry of Trust by Mary Annslee Urban
Mute by Piers Anthony
Sunshine Yellow by Mary Whistler
Yvgenie by CJ Cherryh