The fact is, that the exquisite beauty of their [Pope’s and Dryden’s] versification has withdrawn the public attention from their other excellences, as the vulgar eye will rest more upon the splendour of the uniform than the quality of the troops. It is this very harmony, particularly in Pope, which has raised the vulgar and atrocious cant against him: – because his versification is perfect, it is assumed that it is his only perfection; because his truths are so clear, it is asserted that he has no invention; and because he is always intelligible, it is taken for granted that he has no genius. We are sneeringly told that he is the ‘Poet of Reason,’ as if this was a reason for his being no poet. Taking passage for passage, I will undertake to cite more lines teeming with imagination from Pope than from any two living poets, be they who they may. To take an instance at random from a species of composition not very favourable to imagination – Satire: set down the character of Sporus [An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, lines 305–33], with all the wonderful play of fancy which is scattered over it, and place by its side an equal number of verses, from any two existing poets, of the same power and the same variety – where will you find them?
LORD BYRON: from ‘Some Observations upon an article in Blackwood’s magazine’ (1820)
In the An Epistle To Dr. Arbuthnot mentioned by Byron above, Pope described how he became a poet (lines 125–132):
Why did I write? what sin to me unknown
Dipt me in Ink, my Parents’, or my own?
As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame,
I lisp’d in Numbers, for the Numbers came.
I left no Calling for this idle trade,
No Duty broke, no Father dis-obey’d.
The Muse but serv’d to ease some Friend, not Wife,
To help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life […]
Pope, at the age of twelve (when he was already a published poet), fell ill with a tubercular infection of the spine, which crippled his growth. As Thackeray wrote in The English Humourists: ‘His body was crooked: he was so short that it was necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other people at table [Adolph von Menzel suffered the same ignominy]: he was sewed up in a buckram suit every morning and required a nurse like a child.’ Prevented from attending university by his Roman Catholic faith, he lived with his parents at Binfield in Windsor, was largely self-taught and gained financial independence by translating Homer’s Iliad into heroic couplets (1715–20), followed by the Odyssey (1725–6). He first made his mark in the literary world with his Pastorals, written according to his own testimony (not always to be believed) when he was sixteen. Edith Sitwell writes in Alexander Pope (1930) that the Pastorals are ‘of an astonishing perfection, with their lovely and skilful use of liquids, and their complete absence of overweighting’. It is little surprise that Handel quotes from them, either verbatim or tangentially, in Semele and Acis and Galatea.
The connection between Handel and Pope is a fascinating one. The composer was introduced to both Gay and Pope during his Burlington and Chandos years, and Pope’s amused admiration of Handel’s stirring music is evident from these lines from The Dunciad, Book IV, lines 65–70:
‘Strong in new Arms, lo! Giant Handel stands,
Like bold Briareus, with a hundred hands;
To stir, to rouze, to shake the Soul he comes,
And Jove’s own Thunders follow Mars’s Drums.
Arrest him, Empress; or you sleep no more’ –
She heard, and drove him to th’ Hibernian shore.
(Contrast Gay’s description of Handel’s music in his Trivia: or The Art of Walking the Streets of London:
There Hendel strikes the Strings, the melting Strain
Transports the Soul, and thrills through ev’ry Vein;
There oft I enter (but with cleaner Shoes)
For Burlington’s belov’d by every Muse.)!
The admiration was mutual, for Handel used Pope’s words in a number of his operas and oratorios: the trio from Acis and Galatea is adapted from the Pastorals; ‘Autumn’, 40–46, and the chorus ‘Wretched lovers’ from the same work lean heavily on Pope’s translation of the Iliad (XIII, 27–33). That the libretto to Esther was written by Pope is suggested not only by the advertisements of the Villiers Street performance on 20 April 1732, but also this entry by Viscount Percival (later Earl of Egmont) in his diary: ‘From dinner I went to the Music Club, where the King’s Chapel boys acted the History of Hester, writ by Pope, and composed by Hendel.’ Whatever the truth – and there is still controversy – there are distinct verbal parallels between the libretto and the Rape of the Lock in particular. And one of Pope’s most famous lines, ‘Whatever Is, is RIGHT’, occurs in the chorus, beginning ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees!’ that ends Part II of Jephtha. It was on reaching the words ‘All hid from mortal sight’ that Handel noticed the first signs of blindness in his left eye; he scribbled in a mixture of English and German at the foot of the page that his eye was too ‘relax’d’ to continue – it was only ten days later that he was able to resume. Jephtha was premiered in February 1752.
Pope’s best-known works are satirical: The Rape of the Lock (1712 and 1714) and The Dunciad (1728 and 1743) – a scathing attack against ‘Dulness’ in general and Lewis Theobald’s criticism of Pope’s incapacity as an editor of Shakespeare in particular. In the final edition of 1743 it is Colley Cibber who bears the brunt of Pope’s satirical barbs. Though Pope excelled in satire, he was also capable of writing tender love poetry: Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard (1717); but, in general, lyrical verse – despite the success of the lovely Pastorals – was not his forte, as we see from his Ode for Musick, on St Cecilia’s Day (1713). ‘The Dying Christian to his soul’ is the second of two Adaptations of the Emperor Hadrian (1712). Pope had originally written a poem with the title ‘Adriani morientis ad animam’, or ‘Hadrian to his Departing Soul’, after which Richard Steele, editor of The Spectator, urged the poet to pen a Christian equivalent. Herder’s translation of ‘The dying Christian to his soul’, the text used by Schubert for ‘Verklärung’, first appeared in an essay called ‘How the Ancients looked at Death’ (1786).
Jupiter
Where-e’er you walk, cool Gales shall fan the Glade,1
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a Shade,
Where-e’er you tread, the blushing Flow’rs shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your Eyes.
[How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees!
All hid from mortal sight!
All our joys to sorrow turning,
And our triumphs into mourning,
As the night succeeds the day;
No certain bliss,
No solid peace,
We mortals know
On earth below.
Yet on this maxim still obey:]
Whatever Is, is RIGHT.
Vital spark of heav’nly flame!
Quit, oh quit this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,
Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.
Hark! they whisper; Angels say,
Sister Spirit, come away.
What is this absorbs me quite?
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?
Tell me, my Soul, can this be Death?
The world recedes; it disappears!
Heav’n opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy Victory?
O Death! where is thy Sting?