Alexander Pope
Study Questions on Pope
"The Rape of The Lock"
1.) Pope reviesed this poem several times. Clarissa's speech (lines 9-34 Canto 5) was added in 1717. What, in your view, is the effect of this addition? Significant or not? An improvement or not? Explain.
The Rape of the Lock's underlying subject is disintegration and flux. Matter constantly changes shape. Nothing remains stable for very long. The sylphs were themselves once human beings: as Ariel tells Belinda in the first Canto, "by a soft transition we repair / from earthly Vehicles to these of Air". Pope continually confronts the reader with the transience of human life and the mutability of female beauty. He does so most explicitly in Clarissa's speech in Canto V, warning that "frail beauty must decay" and that "painted or not painted, all shall fade", but the implication of such transience is present in much of the poem's imagery. As Pope says in describing Belinda's epic lamentation after the "rape":
The final canto......
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