The Rape of the Lock

Prof. Joes picket to Reading The shame of the curl\n\n\nPopes Mock Epic \n\nThe Rape of the Lock is most usu al stary described as a mock grand.  It isnt in reality an desperate meter, hardly it makes use of all the conventions and techniques of grand poetry, so it reads and sounds the bids of an epic poem. The style is statuesque and lofty. Heroes are expandly described. A great cause is undertaken. marvellous battles are fought. Supernatural forces intervene. The gun for hire triumphs and lives forever in the remembrance of the people.\n\nThe joke is that despite the epic style and form, the subject question is silly and trivial. The protagonist  of the epic is a wealthy boyish woman whose chief concerns in life appear to be getting dressed and going away to parties. The calamity at the core of the poem occurs when someone cuts clear up a coil of her hair. The painful battles  include a lame of cards and an argument among the guests at a tea party. The unreal forces  that seem to steer the effect are not gods but little fairy spirit up who flit about, alternately serving the heroes and stirring up scuffle for them. The great cause  for which e veryone labors flop is the return of the lost lock of hair.\n\nLike all epics, the poem idealizes its subjects in this case, the idle enough  of 17th century England. And, like all epics, it raises questions about the very same ideals it celebrates. On the one hand, Pope lavishes his subjects with such elaborate praise and admiration that you cannot aboveboard call the poem a satire. He isnt making play of these people in put in to tear them down; he clearly admires these people and their world. On the other hand, Pope is ostensibly aware that their lives and affairs arent really the stuff of great epics, and by making their story into an epic he obviously factor to suggest that these people arent as grand and noble as they believe themselves to be. Like Beowulf and Si r Gawain, the hero of the poem embodies the vir...