Analysis of The Rape of the Lock :: Rape Of The Lock Essays

Analysis of The ravishment of the Lock           The destruction of the grand way of purport of the epic is just what pope was after in his mock epic, The Rape of the Lock.  pope had no such universal goal, or moral pronouncements to mystify as did Milton.  His purpose was merely to expose the life of the nobility of his time.  epoch Milton chose blank verse to express the immensity of the landscape of his epic, Pope chose to hire the heroic couplet to tinyize this grandeur. Popes quick wit bounces the reader along his detailed description of his parlor-room epic.  His content is purposefully trivial, his scope purposefully thin, his dash purposefully light-hearted, and therefore his choice of form purposefully geared toward the smooth, instinctive rhythm of the heroic couplet.  The caesura, the end-stopped lines, and the perfect rhymes lend the exact amount of manners and gaiety to his work.            Writing for a society that values appearances and social frivolities, he uses these various modes of behavior to call attention to the behavior itself.  Pope compares and contrasts.  He places significant life factors (i.e., survival, death, etc.) side by side with the trivial (although not to Belinda and her friends love letters, accessories). Although Pope is definitely pointing to the lightness of the social life of the privileged, he also recognizes their sincerity in attempting to be polite and cultivated and pretend to recognize where the true values lie.           Pope satirizes female vanity.  He wrote the verse at the  request of his friend, John Caryll, in an effort to collide with peace between real-life lovers.  The incident of the lock of hair was factual Popes innovation was to dilute with humor the ill feelings aroused by the affair.  He was, in fact, putting a minor incident into perspective, and to this end, chose a mock-heroic form, composing the poem as a take-off epic poetry, particularly the work of Milton.  He is inviting the individuals manifold to laugh at themselves, to see how emotion had inflated their response to what was genuinely an event of no consequence. For the reader, the incident becomes a statement about human race folly, a lesson on female vanity, and a satire of the rituals of courtship. Perhaps Pope also intended to comment on the meaningless lives of the upper classes.