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Patterns of Imagery in Pope's Arbuthnot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Elias F. Mengel Jr.
Elias F. Mengel Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, Hartford Branch
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Extract

In his “‘Wit and Poetry and Pope’: Some Observations on his Imagery” Maynard Mack speaks of Pope's wide variety of patterns “that help supply the kind of unity which he is popularly not supposed to have.” An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot offers striking illustration of this conception : analysis reveals patterns of images running throughout, each one discrete yet all so related as to give to the whole a metaphoric value which helps to tie the poem together. I do not mean to suggest that Arbuthnot has no other kind of unity apart from that given to it by these patterns of imagery, or that this imagery functions autonomously.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 1954 , pp. 189 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

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References

1 In Pope and His Contemporaries, Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (Oxford, 1949), p. 33.

2 For an analysis of the rhetorical (oratorical) unity of Arbuthnot the reader is referred to Elder Olson, “Rhetoric and the Appreciation of Pope,” MP, xxxvii (1939-40), 13-35.

3 The OED cites Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy ii.ii.iii.317, “As a long-winged Hawke when he is first whistled off the fist, mounts aloft.”

4 “The Vital Flame: An Essay on Pope,” in The Burning Oracle (Oxford, 1939), p. 188.

5 The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope: Vol. iv, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt (London, 1939), p. 96, n. 3.

6 Pope makes the same causal connection between persecution and satire later in the following couplet (where “guiltless” is hyperbolic and “smile” an understatement):

Poor guiltless I! and can I chuse but smile,
When ev'ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style? (281-282)

7 It is tempting to see a scatological suggestion in the “dirty work” of the spider, especially when one notes that in Swift's Battle of the Books the bee calls the proud spider's cobweb castle “excrement and venom.” And there is an obvious scatological metaphor later in Arbuthnot:

Just writes to make his barrenness appear,
And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a-year. (181-182)

8 I am indebted to Professor George Sherburn for pointing out that “the Itch of Verse” suggests Juvenal 7: 52, cacoethes scribendi, an incurable itch to write, a phrase often quoted jocosely by writers and critics of Pope's day.

9 Cf. 1. 170, “Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms.” Here, too, the local progression points to the general movement.