BOOK THE FIRST
In clouded majesty here Dulness shone;
Four guardian virtues, round, support her throne:
Fierce champion Fortitude, that knows no fears
Of hisses, blows, or want, or loss of ears:
Calm Temperance, whose blessings those partake
Who hunger, and who thirst for scribbling sake:
Prudence, whose glass presents th’ approaching goal.
Poetic justice, with her lifted scale,
Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
And solid pudding against empty praise.
Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep,
Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep,
Till genial Jacob, or a warm third day,
Call forth each mass, a poem, or a play:
How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,
How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry.
Maggots half-formed in rhyme exactly meet,
And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.
Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes,
And ductile dullness new meanders takes;
There motley images her fancy strike,
Figures ill paired, and similes unlike.
She sees a mob of metaphors advance,
Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance:
How tragedy and comedy embrace;
How farce and epic get a jumbled race;
How time himself stands still at her command,
Realms shift their place, and ocean turns to land.
Here gay description Egypt glads with showers,
Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers;
Glittering with ice here hoary hills are seen,
There painted valleys of eternal green,
In cold December fragrant chaplets blow,
And heavy harvests nod beneath the snow.
All these, and more, the cloud-compelling Queen
Beholds through fogs, that magnify the scene.
She, tinselled o’er in robes of varying hues,
With self-applause her wild creation views;
Sees momentary monsters rise and fall,
And with her own fools-colours gilds them all.
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III. The Creative Form of Dullness
Pope coined the term bathos in his essay Peri Bathos: Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry to describe the mixing of high and low in a chaotic way. The chaos dimly expressed in the opening stanzas of the poem here finds full expression.
The entire poem it should be said is mock-heroic. Because the mock-heroic works on so many levels, inviting us to be caught up in the heroic music of the poetry while being struck with the ridiculous uses the heroic is put to. What is amazing is that Pope in mastering such a mode is in part imitating the confusion that he is so critical of the dunces for. One of pioneering scholars on the poem, Aubrey Williams, has this to say of how these Pope is able to hold the poem together:
"These realms, however divergent, are yoked in the poem by Pope's use of parody, and the result is a highly exciting process of action and reaction, assertion and counter-assertion. At one moment, so strong are they in their Pope-given attributes of dulness, the dunces appear about to overwhelm, to sully indelibly, the classical material; in the next, the sublimity of the past functions to devalue completely the activities of the present. This constant alternation is possible because parody can be made to include its model with itself (49)."
The "warm third day" Pope is alluded to is the third day of a theatrical production when the writers get paid. A continual aspect of satire Pope expresses in the poem is how many of the hack writers only write for money and are therefore only concerned with writing mindless drivel that will last little more than a day. Samuel Johnson, himself a Grub Street hack, cheefully rejected Pope's scorn saying that only a fool doesn't write for money. Interestingly enough this is an issue that has always attracted writers to both camps. Byron, a deep admirer of Pope, actually rejected to be paid for his poetic works. While Pope only acted the aristocrat.
The third day also alludes to the Genesis creation, particularly in Milton's version in Paradise Lost.
The entire poem it should be said is mock-heroic. Because the mock-heroic works on so many levels, inviting us to be caught up in the heroic music of the poetry while being struck with the ridiculous uses the heroic is put to. What is amazing is that Pope in mastering such a mode is in part imitating the confusion that he is so critical of the dunces for. One of pioneering scholars on the poem, Aubrey Williams, has this to say of how these Pope is able to hold the poem together:
"These realms, however divergent, are yoked in the poem by Pope's use of parody, and the result is a highly exciting process of action and reaction, assertion and counter-assertion. At one moment, so strong are they in their Pope-given attributes of dulness, the dunces appear about to overwhelm, to sully indelibly, the classical material; in the next, the sublimity of the past functions to devalue completely the activities of the present. This constant alternation is possible because parody can be made to include its model with itself (49)."
The "warm third day" Pope is alluded to is the third day of a theatrical production when the writers get paid. A continual aspect of satire Pope expresses in the poem is how many of the hack writers only write for money and are therefore only concerned with writing mindless drivel that will last little more than a day. Samuel Johnson, himself a Grub Street hack, cheefully rejected Pope's scorn saying that only a fool doesn't write for money. Interestingly enough this is an issue that has always attracted writers to both camps. Byron, a deep admirer of Pope, actually rejected to be paid for his poetic works. While Pope only acted the aristocrat.
The third day also alludes to the Genesis creation, particularly in Milton's version in Paradise Lost.
