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Epic Poetry
The Rape of the Lock derives much of its humor from using the format of an epic poem to describe a trivial event. Pope relies on the conventions established in famous epics, primarily Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem begins with an invocation of a muse and a list of big-picture questions the story will explore (“Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel / A well-bred lord t' assault a gentle belle?”). Belinda’s toilette is described with ritualistic detail similar to how Homer describes his heroes preparing for battle (“Here files of pins extend their shining rows / puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux / now awful Beauty puts on all its arms”). Throughout the action of the poem, gods, goddesses, and other supernatural creatures watch on and intervene on behalf of their favorite mortals. Belinda has her sylphs and gnomes. Jove is shown stopping the Baron’s ears to block out Belinda’s teary monologue. The entire card game has the same solemnity and gravity as a battle scene from the Iliad. Additionally, Umbriel’s journey to The Cave of Spleen mimics the journey to the underworld that often occurs in Classical Epic.
Supernatural Creatures (The Machinery)
Pope populates his epic space with supernatural creatures, which he calls his machinery. Based on the mythology of the Rosicrucians, the spirits include sylphs, like Ariel, and gnomes, like Umbriel, both tied to their own elements—air and earth respectively. According to the lore of the poem, sylphs are the spirits of women who were coquettes in life, able to present themselves as any gender and shape they choose. Gnomes, on the other hand, are the bitter spirits of women who were prudes. In addition to the hundreds of spirits that attend to Belinda, Pope fills out the pantheon of his world with deities, like the Goddess of Spleen, who bestows people, primarily women, with bad moods. Calling these creatures “machinery” refers to how these fantastical creatures are the mechanisms that control the characters’ behavior and decisions, particularly the women characters. Belinda’s sylphs, not her maidservant, are the true artists of her morning routine, and Umbriel is the one to goad her toward distress, not her own feelings. The use of fantastic machinery to shape Belinda’s behavior bolsters how Pope writes about femininity in the poem: irrational, incomprehensible, and strange.
Bathos
Bathos refers to the juxtaposition of the great or heroic with the small or trivial, resulting in a comedic anticlimax. Pope himself coined the term bathos in his essay Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry. He here deploys it in his satire of British nobility. The poem opens using traditional epic format, including an invocation of a muse, only to follow it up with a description of lap dogs shaking and lovers sleeping in late. The climactic cutting of the lock is immediately followed by a jarring reassurance that the cut sylph hasn’t died. Pope also employs zeugmas to bathetic effect. A zeugma is a type of pun that uses a word in two different senses to join two different words. For example, at Hampton Court, Queen Anne “Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea.” Taking counsel and taking tea are two slightly different uses of the word “take,” with counsel being the object of far more importance. The nymphs worry over whether Belinda might “stain her honour or her new brocade,” using stain both metaphorically in a serious situation and literally in a trivial one. In Pope’s use of zeugmas, he often juxtaposes the significant with the merely inconvenient to highlight the inherent foolishness of the social scene at Hampton Court.
