The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 2 (of 10): Poetry - Volume 2Pope, Alexander
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The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 2 (of 10): Poetry - Volume 2
Pope, Alexander
English poetry -- 18th century
It sufficiently appears from Pope's letter that she was of a wild and
romantic disposition. She left her friends and country, and commenced a
sentimental pursuit after the object in which her ambition and
enthusiastic caprice had centered. Having alienated her relations by
her wayward conduct, and being disappointed in the hopes she had formed,
she retired voluntarily to a convent. Warton asserts that she was
"forced" into a nunnery. This is expressly contrary to what Pope himself
says in a letter to her: "If you are resolved in revenge to rob the
world of so much example as you may afford it, I believe your design to
be in vain; for, in a monastery, your devotions cannot carry you so far
towards the next world, as to make this lose sight of you." It is most
probable that incipient lunacy was the cause of her perverted feelings,
and untimely end. Johnson says, "poetry has been seldom worse employed
than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl." This seems
severe, contemptuous, and unfeeling. Johnson, however, chiefly adverted,
I imagine, to the false reasoning and absurd attempt in the lines "Is
there no bright," &c., to make suicide the natural consequence of more
elevated feelings. Johnson spoke as a severe moralist, and a rigid
philosopher, against such contemptible reasoning as Pope employs upon
this subject from the fifth to the twenty-second verse. Having been, as
might naturally be expected from his superior understanding, disgusted
with the reasoning part of the poem, the gentler touches of fancy and
tenderness were lost, if I may say so, on him. He would turn with
disdain from such images as--
There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow;
or perhaps exclaim, as upon another occasion, _Incredulus odi_.
Notwithstanding, however, his severity, the animated passages of this
poem, "But thou, false guardian," &c., and the lines of tenderness and
poetic fancy interspersed, cannot be read without sympathy. The verses
"Yet shall thy grave," &c., are possibly too common-place, but they are
surely beautiful. If any expression might be objected to, perhaps it
would be "silver" for "white" wings of an angel.--BOWLES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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