universe, seemingly destroyed, does with Belinda's lock 'upward rise', Though mark'd by none but quick, poetic eyes: (So Rome's great founder to the heav'ns withdrew, A sudden Star, it shot through liquid air, survey, Then cease, bright Nymph! to mourn thy ravish'd hair, Which adds new glory to the shining sphere! Not all the tresses that fair head can boast, As in The Dunciad, Pope acknowledges the death of the artworld he has already immortalized in The Rape of the Lock, so here he finally can afford to acknowledge Clarissa's truth about the death of the physical Belinda, but only because he is granting a resurrection to that metonymic lock which has been appropriately hailed by the 'Beau monde' that it symbolizes. For, after all the murders of your eye, When, after millions slain, yourself shall die; And midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name. The poem, too, is inscribed there! And with it that illusory universe, like the 'Beau monde' constructed as a work of art, whose very artificiality testifies to the persistence, the indomitable humanity of its creator's classic vision and to his awareness that the insubstantial nature of this universe could allow it to transcend all that chaos ground into 'glitt'ring dust'. Powerless against chaos that disintegrating force of historical reality whose 'uncreating word' extinguished 'Art after Art' – the frail universe could win immortality with the very evanescent quality that doomed it: for 'quick, poetic eyes' it glows, gem-like, a sphere beyond the reach of the 'universal Darkness' that buried all. NOTES 1. I am using the term 'zeugma' in a broader sense than its strict grammatical meaning would permit. For example, in the two couplets I quote in what follows, only the line: 'Or stain her honour, or her new brocade' is an actual instance of it. Obviously it is only a triangular affair, so that the two objects must be yoked by the single, doublevisioned verb. In this sense, the other lines are merely antitheses of four distinct parts, with each object controlled by its own verb. My point is, however, that in a rhetorical if not a grammatical sense, there is a similar yoking of two disparate worlds in all these instances. In rare cases this yoking is reflected in the short-circuited perfection of the grammatical device; the other cases are effective, but less complete, and thus less brilliant examples yielding the same rhetorical effect. 2. Although Pope in this note speaks of her as a new character, he must mean, as Mr Tillotson supposes, that she is new as a speaking character. THE 'FALL' OF CHINA (1962) In his Lectures on the English Poets, near the beginning of his discussion of The Rape of the Lock, William Hazlitt cites a passage from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, opposes it to the kind of poetry written by Pope, and remarks that, for the Shakespearean 'earthquakes and tempests', Pope typically gives us the 'breaking of a flower-pot or the fall of a china jar'.1 Hazlitt's observation is, in its own way, remarkably just – and apt, for Pope does deal, on occasion, in an extravagant amount of crockery in his poems. Yet if we are to compare great things with small, it may be only fair to note that Pope is now and again capable of raising his own kind of tempests, even in his teapots. In The Rape of the Lock a most important pattern of imagery is established by pervasive reference to a wide variety of vessels: vases, bottles, pipkins, pots and China jars are signal and memorable articles of the poem's furniture. There is the array of jars on Belinda's dressing-table, the display of cups and silver pots on the sumptuous buffet, the collection of containers in the lunar limbo, where Heroes' Wits are kept in pondrous Vases, In the recesses of Belinda's own psyche, where they exist in almost perfect pre-Freudian propriety, Pope reveals to us those 'Unnumber'd Throngs' of 'Bodies chang'd to various Forms by Spleen': Here living Teapots stand, one Arm held out, Men prove So much crockery in the poem can scarcely be ignored, and neither should the variety of special effects Pope obtains by its use. More particularly, awareness of the range of this vessel imagery serves to underscore its peculiar importance on three occasions when it relates most directly to the poem's central event. These three occasions, often remarked by critics, are, first, in Canto II, where, in a mood of gloomy anticipation, the sylph Ariel wonders Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law, Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw; second, in Canto III, where, after the lock has been cut, these lines occur: Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast, When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last, In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie; and, finally, in Canto Iv, where Belinda recalls the morning omens: Thrice from my trembling hand the Patch-box fell; Mr Cleanth Brooks apparently first singled out these three special instances of the poem's vessel imagery, and he observed that at least one of them made a comment on chastity: 'Pope does not say, but he suggests, that chastity is, like the fine porcelain, something brittle, precious, useless, and easily broken.' Shrewd as the observation is, there yet seems to be occasion for amplification of Mr Brooks' insight. For Pope's vessel imagery has a particularly rich background, and the association of ‘lasses and glasses' in his poem evidently had precise and subtle significances which must have been widely appreciated in the poet's own time. I For a number of years in the early seventeenth century the young James Howell travelled on the continent as agent for a London glass factory. In his Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645-55), one of his letters, written from Venice on 1 June 1621, contains this passage: When I saw so many sorts of curious glasses made here I thought upon the compliment which a gentleman put upon a lady in England, who having five or six comely daughters, said he never saw in his life such a dainty cupboard of crystal glasses; the compliment proceeds, it seems, from a saying they have here, "That the first handsome woman that ever was made, was made of Venice glass,' (which implies beauty, but brittleness withal.... Howell's letter reveals a traditional use of 'glass' imagery to suggest the lamentable fragility of feminine beauty. He may or may not be correct in assigning the origin of his particular saying to Venice, but certainly the general terms of the comparison itself were part of the poetic and proverbial life of England much before his time. In The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), poem vII, Shakespeare (if indeed he is the author) has these lines: Fair is my love, but not so fair as fickle; Brighter than glass, and yet as glass is brittle . . . and George Herbert, in his collection of Outlandish Proverbs (1640), includes this saying (no. 244): ‘A woman and a glasse are ever in danger.' In such passages the implications of 'brittleness' are uncomplimentary ones of weakness and inconstancy. As John Hall uses the image in his Paradoxes (1650), however, the very fragility of porcelain and feminine beauty serves only to heighten their value: And are not I pray you the best things ever in the greatest danger, Purselain and Venice Glasses are the most apt to be broke, the richest flowers are the soonest pulled, the goodliest Stag, wil be soonest shot, the best Faces doe the soonest decay.... (p. 97) |