Alexander Pope: Master of Couplets
Alexander Pope
“An Essay on Criticism”
1685 saw the birth of three great composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps the greatest artist who ever lived; George Frederick Handel, almost his peer; and Domenico Scrlatti, who composed hundreds of keyboard sonatas. Scarlatti was the least of the three, but he merits our attention.
I thought this as I listened to a recent piano performance which began with some Scarlatti sonatas. I have always loved Scarlatti: His clarity, his sense of balance on the most immediate levels (each musical phrase poised against the one which follows), his concision (none of his sonatas is very long). The performance of his music brought into my mind the poetry of Alexander Pope, who was born in 1688, just three years after Bach, Handel and Scarlatti. Pope too was a master of clarity, balance and concision.
Pope wrote in couplets. Couplets may either be closed, with two lines, each rhyming with the other, with a full stop or lengthy pause at the end of the second line; or open, with the lines spilling forward so that the rhyme is over-run by what comes next. The closed form is itself quite formal, easy to try (it is so short) and very, very hard to master – most people who try to write a poem tend towards a series of closed couplets, because the rhymes come quickly and are emphasized: This is poetry! Yet any longer formal construction is hard to manage. We tend to consign closed couplets to amateurism and very bad poetry.
We have before us Alexander Pope, who wrote in closed couplets. His mastery of this seemingly ‘simple’ form was so complete that there has never been his like. Others preceded him in the use of couplets – Chaucer, in part of the Canterbury Tales; the couplet which closes each of Shakespeare’s sonnets; John Donne; Andrew Marvell in his magnificent “To His Coy Mistress;” America’s first poet, Anne Bradstreet; John Dryden. Many of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were in couplets, particularly the former. Wordsworth used them.
We tend to think of couplets as ‘old fashioned.’ Yet much of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is in couplets (closed and open). The greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats, often wrote in couplets; so did Robert Frost and W.H. Auden. So did Wilfrid Owen with his peculiar rhyming. Robert Lowell uses them; so does Philip Larkin and Maxine Kumin. So it seems that couplets have not disappeared, although the twentieth century seems more oriented toward open couplets.
Yet today we are considering the closed couplet – two lines with a ‘stop’ at the end of the second line, usually a period. A small poem in itself, even within a longer poem. This form, often called a ‘heroic couplet,’ was the medium in which Alexander Pope wrote. Brevity, for sure; balance – one line against the next, rhyming lines as a polished pair. Clarity – well, Pope brought that. Consider this self-referential line, one of his most famous:
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,
Short, balanced, extraordinarily clear. The line, which prizes the excellence of the writing over the originality of the thought within it, is one with which we can disagree, but we do so at our peril. For is not the best writing that which says what cannot otherwise be said as well?
Pope sure said things well. He wrote this poem at twenty-three – twenty-three! – and some of what he wrote still endures in our speech and in our communal store of what we think of as wisdom. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” Wow. Twenty-three!
This concision, this ability to put succinctly in a few words what he took to be true, is one of Pope’s great virtues. I do not agree with much that he wrote, but I admire how concisely he expresses what he has to say. In Pope we encounter what is remarkably rare in poems: The expression, in the compass of just two lines, of a whole stance toward being. His poems, and especially this one, reveal ‘poem-making’ on the level of the sentence. That is not to say that there are not arguments, and complexities to his poems; but it is to insist that we pay attention to this poet’s capacity to express a great deal within a short compass. Two lines. A couplet.
And the couplets are, like the phrases in Scarlatti’s sonatas, balanced, one sentence against another. The first half of the couplet against the second. Later, Pope would develop as a great satirist like his contemporary and friend, Jonathan Swift. “The Rape of the Lock” and The Dunciad ridiculed literary genres (especially the epic) at the same time as they made fun of the seemingly dominant intellectual figures of his age. They too are written in couplets, but it is not to them we are looking. It is that early poem, “An Essay on Criticism.”
Consider its opening:
'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
The first couplet announces the theme of the entire poem, posed as a question, though the poem, like the next couplet, makes the question spurious. We know already by that second couplet that Pope will conclude that faulty judgement a far greater ill than faulty writing. For Pope, judging wrongly is far more egregious (and easier) than writing badly. Here is the second couplet, and then the third, which reinforces his point:
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
They’re not hard, are they? Couplet two tells us that bad writing wastes our time, but bad criticism leads us to think wrongly – and of the two, the misleading of sense is the graver result. So many, so many, find that their carping is a lot easier than writing, even if the writing is done badly.
The wit is remarkable in the fourth couplet:
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
Once, probably long ago, a writer might reveal his ignorance, but none were implicated but himself: His own foolishness stood forth for all to see. Now, Pope claims, when a bad writer writes (or a good writer!), dozens of people opine with judgments, so often based in foolishness. The amount of bad thinking that passes for criticism far outweighs the bad writing that occasioned it. Let’s reconsider that couplet:
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
In two lines, Pope makes a complete argument: Witty, clear, self-contained – and devastating. Long ago, he says in that first line, a poet could expose his deficiencies in his writing. His own deficiency. But nowadays, so ubiquitous are critics, that faulty judgments run endemic, and for every error in verse there are many more in judging that verse. We can marvel at that concision, at Pope’s ability to render his own judgement, his own view of things-as-they-are, in two matched lines.
After a stanza break, the following couplet is based on a slant rhyme (none/own).
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
There is a homely simile (using ‘as’) in which judgements are compared to watches. (This was prior to the age of automation, and the more recent age of computerized measurement of time.) As each man or woman’s watch, telling the time as the dial indicates, so with judgements: Like watches, they differ; like watches, we each believe in our own measurement. Self-regard triumphs over any need for accuracy or facticity. The larger point, true even in our time of calibrated temporal measurement, is that we believe in our ‘take’ on things, even if that perspective is wrong. Self-belief triumphs over any other measure. If I can, let me ask you to reread those two lines: the homely metaphor reveals, with great clarity, how we will not be moved from our trust in our own instrument of measurement. Our “want of skill,” as the opening line of the poem proposes, infects our judgements. That’s it: the whole poem, in miniature. And that miniature is repeated every two lines, in every couplet.
I suggest we look at a section in the middle of the poem to see Pope at work, at his most remarkable.
A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit
With the same Spirit that its Author writ,
Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find,
Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind;
Nor lose, for that malignant dull Delight,
The gen'rous Pleasure to be charm'd with Wit….
Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
It begins with that famous phrase, “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” but qualifies it in a way that we encounter less often. Either learn deeply, as in taking a deep draught of the fount of knowledge, or don’t drink at all. For, as the second couplet tells us, we become drunk with sparse knowledge, thinking we know everything, while attaining greater knowledge shows us how little we actually know. The young think that their little knowledge – their first glimpse of “what the Muse imparts” – empowers them to attempt to put into verse the knowledge they think they have. But this knowledge is “bounded” by the little they know. Here, the metaphor is not depth but length. Still, the passage tells us that those with greater knowledge (science, scientia in Latin) know the pursuit of knowledge goes on and on…and on.
So the young attempt to scale the heights of knowing (remember, this is the 23 year-old poet writing!), those “towring Alps.” Marching through valleys, seeming to climb as high as the sky, the young poet reaches the snowy peak, and advances. But having reached that first height, instead of seeing valleys beyond, the poet will surprisingly to him “tremble to survey” what still lies ahead: More peaks, more peaks, a very lengthy hike. What has been surmounted is only a hill, compared to the mighty range of mountains that constitute knowledge. The couplet that concludes the stanzas is, I believe, among the finest ever written:
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
The imagery is of a traveler who climbs, and having risen to the top of a mountain, sees a whole range of mountains – the Alps – spread before him, peak upon peak.
Pope insists that pursuing knowledge iontemplate that labor, we “tremble” what it entails, the relentless struggle to mount each successive peak in the journey toward knowing.
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!s work.
We, perhaps rightly, shirk that work, knowing that much labor is certain to “tire” us out. As we c
No sooner do we gain a modicum of knowledge, than we realize that there is much more knowledge to be gained. The alliteration – “labours/lengthen’d” – indicates that going onward will, indeed, be a labor, much work, and we will be tired as we “wander” the “way” before us. Hills follow on hills and, miraculously, are transformed into mighty peaks. The repetition of “Hills” and then of “Alps” drives home the endless panorama of searching for “learning,” [for it is with “a little learning” that this section began], which he calls “Th’ increasing prospect.” We thought to take a little hike, and find ourselves confronted with a grand, overwhelming, range of mountains before us.
As T. S. Eliot was later to write in his Four Quartets, “for us, there is only the trying.” Here is Eliot’s line, in fuller context:
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure….
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying.
Pope, centuries before Eliot, understood that there is no victory to be won: The search for knowledge is as good as endless, like those mountains, rising one beyond another in a grand chain of unscalable peaks. The following stanza concludes,
Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
It uses alliteration in the first line of the couplet, first on “s” (including the “c” in piece), and then in the second on Ne’er/nor/nor using both the n’s and the r’s,; as well, that final line plays on the major tenses of the verb ‘to be’: was/is/shall be. This is bravura writing, as self-referential and contained, within the compass of two rhyming lines, as poetry can be. (We note as well the relation suggested by the rhyming, which makes an equivalence of seeing and being, in lines which refer both to the mountains before us as well as to reading.)
As I wrote earlier, there is a lapidary concision one finds time and again in Pope, a recognition that order and signifying must exist even on the smallest scale.
We might learn from Pope, and his careful scrupulousness. In a time of excess, of excess in falsehood as well as other things, a careful consideration of what we say has relevance. I find it hard in reading him not to think of our present moment of Trumpian excess, which may crush us yet. Pope, after all, was Catholic in a Protestant England biased against Catholics, a hunchback (as a result of tuberculosis) who was only four and a half feet tall: An outsider if there ever was one, though he was not what we would call today a liberal or a progressive. Nonetheless, I find warning in his verses:
Nay, fly to Altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread[HG1] .
He offered advice the opponents of Trump might do well to consider, that “blunt truths” are not always beneficial, and Tt political teaching is slow, arduous, audience-attentive.
'Tis not enough your Counsel still be true,
Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice Falsehood do;
Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And Things unknown propos'd as Things forgot…
Pope understood that,
All seems Infected that th' Infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the Jaundic'd Eye.
It is through infecting us with the jaundice of fear and threat that an entire nation sees wrongly, and our leaders lead us into future destruction:
Then Unbelieving Priests reform'd the Nation,
And taught more Pleasant Methods of Salvation;
There is a present inclination to believe that in some way emotion, the deep wellspring of individualism, can save us as we confront what I uneasily recognize is a descent into fascism. Pope suggests something else. We can think, and think again, before we speak. The dullness of refusing to think critically, the resort to thinking what those around us think rather than pursuing truth in laborious and rigorous efforts, may doom us. I am aware that trusting in the past, as Pope so often does, may lead to replicating the oppressive policies that have shaped a society that does not mete out justice as much as it perpetuates injustice. And I am aware that the world cannot be reduced to two-line summaries of what it is, and what should be done as we confront it.
Yet there is something salutary about Pope. Dullness, a willingness to believe too quickly (and often, what so many others believe), an inability to pursue the difficult path of truth: All these things are called out by Pope. While he may not, unlike the Heinrich Heine whom I wrote about in my last letter, leap to the defense of working men and women, yet his counsel might serve us well in the present moment.
[For those who want a bit more of the “Essay on Criticism,” here are some extended excerpts. The whole poem, all twenty pages of it, is readily available on the web.]
Alexander Pope
“An Essay on Criticism”
1685 saw the birth of three great composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps the greatest artist who ever lived; George Frederick Handel, almost his peer; and Domenico Scrlatti, who composed hundreds of keyboard sonatas. Scarlatti was the least of the three, but he merits our attention.
I thought this as I listened to a recent piano performance which began with some Scarlatti sonatas. I have always loved Scarlatti: His clarity, his sense of balance on the most immediate levels (each musical phrase poised against the one which follows), his concision (none of his sonatas is very long). The performance of his music brought into my mind the poetry of Alexander Pope, who was born in 1688, just three years after Bach, Handel and Scarlatti. Pope too was a master of clarity, balance and concision.
Pope wrote in couplets. Couplets may either be closed, with two lines, each rhyming with the other, with a full stop or lengthy pause at the end of the second line; or open, with the lines spilling forward so that the rhyme is over-run by what comes next. The closed form is itself quite formal, easy to try (it is so short) and very, very hard to master – most people who try to write a poem tend towards a series of closed couplets, because the rhymes come quickly and are emphasized: This is poetry! Yet any longer formal construction is hard to manage. We tend to consign closed couplets to amateurism and very bad poetry.
We have before us Alexander Pope, who wrote in closed couplets. His mastery of this seemingly ‘simple’ form was so complete that there has never been his like. Others preceded him in the use of couplets – Chaucer, in part of the Canterbury Tales; the couplet which closes each of Shakespeare’s sonnets; John Donne; Andrew Marvell in his magnificent “To His Coy Mistress;” America’s first poet, Anne Bradstreet; John Dryden. Many of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were in couplets, particularly the former. Wordsworth used them.
We tend to think of couplets as ‘old fashioned.’ Yet much of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is in couplets (closed and open). The greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats, often wrote in couplets; so did Robert Frost and W.H. Auden. So did Wilfrid Owen with his peculiar rhyming. Robert Lowell uses them; so does Philip Larkin and Maxine Kumin. So it seems that couplets have not disappeared, although the twentieth century seems more oriented toward open couplets.
Yet today we are considering the closed couplet – two lines with a ‘stop’ at the end of the second line, usually a period. A small poem in itself, even within a longer poem. This form, often called a ‘heroic couplet,’ was the medium in which Alexander Pope wrote. Brevity, for sure; balance – one line against the next, rhyming lines as a polished pair. Clarity – well, Pope brought that. Consider this self-referential line, one of his most famous:
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,
Short, balanced, extraordinarily clear. The line, which prizes the excellence of the writing over the originality of the thought within it, is one with which we can disagree, but we do so at our peril. For is not the best writing that which says what cannot otherwise be said as well?
Pope sure said things well. He wrote this poem at twenty-three – twenty-three! – and some of what he wrote still endures in our speech and in our communal store of what we think of as wisdom. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” Wow. Twenty-three!
This concision, this ability to put succinctly in a few words what he took to be true, is one of Pope’s great virtues. I do not agree with much that he wrote, but I admire how concisely he expresses what he has to say. In Pope we encounter what is remarkably rare in poems: The expression, in the compass of just two lines, of a whole stance toward being. His poems, and especially this one, reveal ‘poem-making’ on the level of the sentence. That is not to say that there are not arguments, and complexities to his poems; but it is to insist that we pay attention to this poet’s capacity to express a great deal within a short compass. Two lines. A couplet.
And the couplets are, like the phrases in Scarlatti’s sonatas, balanced, one sentence against another. The first half of the couplet against the second. Later, Pope would develop as a great satirist like his contemporary and friend, Jonathan Swift. “The Rape of the Lock” and The Dunciad ridiculed literary genres (especially the epic) at the same time as they made fun of the seemingly dominant intellectual figures of his age. They too are written in couplets, but it is not to them we are looking. It is that early poem, “An Essay on Criticism.”
Consider its opening:
'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
The first couplet announces the theme of the entire poem, posed as a question, though the poem, like the next couplet, makes the question spurious. We know already by that second couplet that Pope will conclude that faulty judgement a far greater ill than faulty writing. For Pope, judging wrongly is far more egregious (and easier) than writing badly. Here is the second couplet, and then the third, which reinforces his point:
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
They’re not hard, are they? Couplet two tells us that bad writing wastes our time, but bad criticism leads us to think wrongly – and of the two, the misleading of sense is the graver result. So many, so many, find that their carping is a lot easier than writing, even if the writing is done badly.
The wit is remarkable in the fourth couplet:
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
Once, probably long ago, a writer might reveal his ignorance, but none were implicated but himself: His own foolishness stood forth for all to see. Now, Pope claims, when a bad writer writes (or a good writer!), dozens of people opine with judgments, so often based in foolishness. The amount of bad thinking that passes for criticism far outweighs the bad writing that occasioned it. Let’s reconsider that couplet:
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
In two lines, Pope makes a complete argument: Witty, clear, self-contained – and devastating. Long ago, he says in that first line, a poet could expose his deficiencies in his writing. His own deficiency. But nowadays, so ubiquitous are critics, that faulty judgments run endemic, and for every error in verse there are many more in judging that verse. We can marvel at that concision, at Pope’s ability to render his own judgement, his own view of things-as-they-are, in two matched lines.
After a stanza break, the following couplet is based on a slant rhyme (none/own).
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
There is a homely simile (using ‘as’) in which judgements are compared to watches. (This was prior to the age of automation, and the more recent age of computerized measurement of time.) As each man or woman’s watch, telling the time as the dial indicates, so with judgements: Like watches, they differ; like watches, we each believe in our own measurement. Self-regard triumphs over any need for accuracy or facticity. The larger point, true even in our time of calibrated temporal measurement, is that we believe in our ‘take’ on things, even if that perspective is wrong. Self-belief triumphs over any other measure. If I can, let me ask you to reread those two lines: the homely metaphor reveals, with great clarity, how we will not be moved from our trust in our own instrument of measurement. Our “want of skill,” as the opening line of the poem proposes, infects our judgements. That’s it: the whole poem, in miniature. And that miniature is repeated every two lines, in every couplet.
I suggest we look at a section in the middle of the poem to see Pope at work, at his most remarkable.
A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit
With the same Spirit that its Author writ,
Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find,
Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind;
Nor lose, for that malignant dull Delight,
The gen'rous Pleasure to be charm'd with Wit….
Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
It begins with that famous phrase, “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” but qualifies it in a way that we encounter less often. Either learn deeply, as in taking a deep draught of the fount of knowledge, or don’t drink at all. For, as the second couplet tells us, we become drunk with sparse knowledge, thinking we know everything, while attaining greater knowledge shows us how little we actually know. The young think that their little knowledge – their first glimpse of “what the Muse imparts” – empowers them to attempt to put into verse the knowledge they think they have. But this knowledge is “bounded” by the little they know. Here, the metaphor is not depth but length. Still, the passage tells us that those with greater knowledge (science, scientia in Latin) know the pursuit of knowledge goes on and on…and on.
So the young attempt to scale the heights of knowing (remember, this is the 23 year-old poet writing!), those “towring Alps.” Marching through valleys, seeming to climb as high as the sky, the young poet reaches the snowy peak, and advances. But having reached that first height, instead of seeing valleys beyond, the poet will surprisingly to him “tremble to survey” what still lies ahead: More peaks, more peaks, a very lengthy hike. What has been surmounted is only a hill, compared to the mighty range of mountains that constitute knowledge. The couplet that concludes the stanzas is, I believe, among the finest ever written:
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
The imagery is of a traveler who climbs, and having risen to the top of a mountain, sees a whole range of mountains – the Alps – spread before him, peak upon peak.
Pope insists that pursuing knowledge is work. We, perhaps rightly, shirk that work, knowing that much labor is certain to “tire” us out. As we contemplate that labor, we “tremble” what it entails, the relentless struggle to mount each successive peak in the journey toward knowing.
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
No sooner do we gain a modicum of knowledge, than we realize that there is much more knowledge to be gained. The alliteration – “labours/lengthen’d” – indicates that going onward will, indeed, be a labor, much work, and we will be tired as we “wander” the “way” before us. Hills follow on hills and, miraculously, are transformed into mighty peaks. The repetition of “Hills” and then of “Alps” drives home the endless panorama of searching for “learning,” [for it is with “a little learning” that this section began], which he calls “Th’ increasing prospect.” We thought to take a little hike, and find ourselves confronted with a grand, overwhelming, range of mountains before us.
As T. S. Eliot was later to write in his Four Quartets, “for us, there is only the trying.” Here is Eliot’s line, in fuller context:
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure….
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying.
Pope, centuries before Eliot, understood that there is no victory to be won: The search for knowledge is as good as endless, like those mountains, rising one beyond another in a grand chain of unscalable peaks. The following stanza concludes,
Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
It uses alliteration in the first line of the couplet, first on “s” (including the “c” in piece), and then in the second on Ne’er/nor/nor using both the n’s and the r’s,; as well, that final line plays on the major tenses of the verb ‘to be’: was/is/shall be. This is bravura writing, as self-referential and contained, within the compass of two rhyming lines, as poetry can be. (We note as well the relation suggested by the rhyming, which makes an equivalence of seeing and being, in lines which refer both to the mountains before us as well as to reading.)
As I wrote earlier, there is a lapidary concision one finds time and again in Pope, a recognition that order and signifying must exist even on the smallest scale.
We might learn from Pope, and his careful scrupulousness. In a time of excess, of excess in falsehood as well as other things, a careful consideration of what we say has relevance. I find it hard in reading him not to think of our present moment of Trumpian excess, which may crush us yet. Pope, after all, was Catholic in a Protestant England biased against Catholics, a hunchback (as a result of tuberculosis) who was only four and a half feet tall: An outsider if there ever was one, though he was not what we would call today a liberal or a progressive. Nonetheless, I find warning in his verses:
Nay, fly to Altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread[HG1] .
He offered advice the opponents of Trump might do well to consider, that “blunt truths” are not always beneficial, and Tt political teaching is slow, arduous, audience-attentive.
'Tis not enough your Counsel still be true,
Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice Falsehood do;
Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And Things unknown propos'd as Things forgot…
Pope understood that,
All seems Infected that th' Infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the Jaundic'd Eye.
It is through infecting us with the jaundice of fear and threat that an entire nation sees wrongly, and our leaders lead us into future destruction:
Then Unbelieving Priests reform'd the Nation,
And taught more Pleasant Methods of Salvation;
There is a present inclination to believe that in some way emotion, the deep wellspring of individualism, can save us as we confront what I uneasily recognize is a descent into fascism. Pope suggests something else. We can think, and think again, before we speak. The dullness of refusing to think critically, the resort to thinking what those around us think rather than pursuing truth in laborious and rigorous efforts, may doom us. I am aware that trusting in the past, as Pope so often does, may lead to replicating the oppressive policies that have shaped a society that does not mete out justice as much as it perpetuates injustice. And I am aware that the world cannot be reduced to two-line summaries of what it is, and what should be done as we confront it.
Yet there is something salutary about Pope. Dullness, a willingness to believe too quickly (and often, what so many others believe), an inability to pursue the difficult path of truth: All these things are called out by Pope. While he may not, unlike the Heinrich Heine whom I wrote about in my last letter, leap to the defense of working men and women, yet his counsel might serve us well in the present moment.
[For those who want a bit more of the “Essay on Criticism,” here are some extended excerpts. The whole poem, all twenty pages of it, is readily available on the web.]
An Essay on Criticism
Alexander Pope
'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
****Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd;
Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd
By the same Laws which first herself ordain'd. ***The gen'rous Critick fann'd the Poet's Fire,
And taught the World, with Reason to Admire.
Then Criticism the Muse's Handmaid prov'd,
To dress her Charms, and make her more belov'd;
But following Wits from that Intention stray'd;
Who cou'd not win the Mistress, woo'd the Maid;
Against the Poets their own Arms they turn'd,
Sure to hate most the Men from whom they learn'd
So modern Pothecaries, taught the Art
By Doctor's Bills to play the Doctor's Part,
Bold in the Practice of mistaken Rules,
Prescribe, apply, and call their Masters Fools.
Some on the Leaves of ancient Authors prey,
Nor Time nor Moths e'er spoil'd so much as they:
Some dryly plain, without Invention's Aid,
Write dull Receits how Poems may be made:
These leave the Sense, their Learning to display,
And theme explain the Meaning quite away.
****In Praise so just, let ev'ry Voice be join'd,
And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind!
Hail Bards Triumphant! born in happier Days;
Immortal Heirs of Universal Praise!
Whose Honours with Increase of Ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow!
Nations unborn your mighty Names shall sound,
And Worlds applaud that must not yet be found!
Oh may some Spark of your Coelestial Fire
The last, the meanest of your Sons inspire,
(That on weak Wings, from far, pursues your Flights;
Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes)
To teach vain Wits a Science little known,
T' admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own!
****A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit
With the same Spirit that its Author writ,
Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find,
Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind;
Nor lose, for that malignant dull Delight,
The gen'rous Pleasure to be charm'd with Wit.
****Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
****Poets like Painters, thus, unskill'd to trace
The naked Nature and the living Grace,
With Gold and Jewels cover ev'ry Part,
And hide with Ornaments their Want of Art.
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind:
As Shades more sweetly recommend the Light,
So modest Plainness sets off sprightly Wit:
For Works may have more Wit than does 'em good,
As Bodies perish through Excess of Blood.
****
But true Expression, like th' unchanging Sun,
Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon,
It gilds all Objects, but it alters none.
Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still
Appears more decent as more suitable;
A vile Conceit in pompous Words exprest,
Is like a Clown in regal Purple drest;
****But most by Numbers judge a Poet's Song,
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;
****True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance,
'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
****Ah ne'er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast,
Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!
Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.
*****Then Unbelieving Priests reform'd the Nation,
And taught more Pleasant Methods of Salvation;
****
All seems Infected that th' Infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the Jaundic'd Eye.
****Be silent always when you doubt your Sense;
And speak, tho' sure, with seeming Diffidence:
Some positive persisting Fops we know,
Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so;
But you, with Pleasure own your Errors past,
An make each Day a Critick on the last.'Tis not enough your Counsel still be true,
Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice Falsehood do;
Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And Things unknown propos'd as Things forgot:
****Nay, fly to Altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.
Distrustful Sense with modest Caution speaks;
****
Thus long succeeding Criticks justly reign'd,
Licence repress'd, and useful Laws ordain'd;
Learning and Rome alike in Empire grew,
And Arts still follow'd where her Eagles flew;
From the same Foes, at last, both felt their Doom,
And the same Age saw Learning fall, and Rome.
With Tyranny, then Superstition join'd,
As that the Body, this enslav'd the Mind;
Much was Believ'd, but little understood,
And to be dull was constru'd to be good;
A second Deluge Learning thus o'er-run,
And the Monks finish'd what the Goths begun.Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
****Poets like Painters, thus, unskill'd to trace
The naked Nature and the living Grace,
With Gold and Jewels cover ev'ry Part,
And hide with Ornaments their Want of Art.
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind:
As Shades more sweetly recommend the Light,
So modest Plainness sets off sprightly Wit:
For Works may have more Wit than does 'em good,
As Bodies perish through Excess of Blood.
****
But true Expression, like th' unchanging Sun,
Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon,
It gilds all Objects, but it alters none.
Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still
Appears more decent as more suitable;
A vile Conceit in pompous Words exprest,
Is like a Clown in regal Purple drest;
****But most by Numbers judge a Poet's Song,
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;
****True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance,
'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
****Ah ne'er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast,
Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!
Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.
*****Then Unbelieving Priests reform'd the Nation,
And taught more Pleasant Methods of Salvation;
****
All seems Infected that th' Infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the Jaundic'd Eye.
****Be silent always when you doubt your Sense;
And speak, tho' sure, with seeming Diffidence:
Some positive persisting Fops we know,
Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so;
But you, with Pleasure own your Errors past,
An make each Day a Critick on the last.'Tis not enough your Counsel still be true,
Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice Falsehood do;
Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And Things unknown propos'd as Things forgot:
****Nay, fly to Altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.
Distrustful Sense with modest Caution speaks;
****
Thus long succeeding Criticks justly reign'd,
Licence repress'd, and useful Laws ordain'd;
Learning and Rome alike in Empire grew,
And Arts still follow'd where her Eagles flew;
From the same Foes, at last, both felt their Doom,
And the same Age saw Learning fall, and Rome.
With Tyranny, then Superstition join'd,
As that the Body, this enslav'd the Mind;
Much was Believ'd, but little understood,
And to be dull was constru'd to be good;
A second Deluge Learning thus o'er-run,
And the Monks finish'd what the Goths begun.