D’ipp'd
me in ink, my parents', or my own?
As
yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I
lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.
I
left no calling for this idle trade,
No
duty broke, no father disobey'd.
The
Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife,
To
help me through this long disease, my life.”—Alexander Pope (1688-1744), “An Epistle to Arbuthnot” (1735)
Alexander Popewas born on this date 325 years ago today. Perhaps the greatest of English
public poets—unafraid to get into a controversy, no matter what the occasion—he
wrote this poem, containing some of his greatest comic lines, out of a spirit
of tragedy. His longtime friend, Dr. John Arbuthnot, had just written him to
inform him he was dying—and indeed, the physician died only two months after
this publication.
Perhaps
a man given to greater fellowship might have hesitated to write Pope’s wickedly
devastating rhyming heroic couplets. If he weren’t embarrassed to encounter
socially the target of his jibes, he might have gotten involved in something
far worse for someone of Pope’s short stature: fisticuffs.
Pope
began life with a significant strike against him: a Catholic from birth, he was
disqualified from attending university, teaching, voting, and holding office. Nor,
because of the faith, could his parents inherit or buy land, or even send him
abroad for school. He was, ideologically, an odd man out, as he confessed in
one of his “Imitations of Horace”:
My
Head and Heart thus flowing thro’ my Quill,
Verse-man or Prose-man, term me
what you will,
Papist or Protestant, or both
between,
Like good Erasmus in an honest
Mean,
In Moderation placing all my Glory,
While Tories call me Whig, and
Whigs a Tory.
But when he wrote of “this long disease, my life,” he was not being metaphorically melancholic—he suffered from a form of tuberculosis that left him a hunchback and stunted his growth at four feet six inches, while also enduring respiratory problems, high fevers, inflamed eyes, and abdominal pain. He never married.
Pope,
perhaps the greatest English poet of the 18th century, is also one
of my favorite poets. You only get the slightest sense of his mastery of the
heroic couplet in the passages quoted above. Over the course of his entire
work, they enabled him to round on his many peevish and carping enemies (who
only became immortal as targets of his satire). The couplets, miracles of compression,
end with some of the most quoted lines in the English language—including, in
the “Epistle to Arbuthnot,” “damn with faint praise” and "Who breaks a
butterfly upon a wheel?" (a barbed reference to one of his critics, John
Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey, a bisexual courtier).
Arbuthnot had sometimes pleaded with his friend to be careful about the powerful enemies he made. There was not a chance that would happen.
Arbuthnot had sometimes pleaded with his friend to be careful about the powerful enemies he made. There was not a chance that would happen.
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