Routledge Revivals: The Poetry of Alexander Pope (1955)

Laureate of Peace

G. Wilson Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351391863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1955, this exegesis on the writings of Alexander Pope reveals the technical felicities of his poetry, and is the first to be devoted to the great meaning inherent in his work. One section, which has appeared before and did much to redirect the study of Pope, has been thoroughly revised. Of the other four chapters, one offers an original of The Temple of Fame, and, while discussing this neglected poem, makes several suggestions which may be said to constitute a significant advance in aesthetics. Another analyses Byron's support of Pope, regarding it as a landmark in the history of English literary criticism and as necessary to the understanding of Pope and Byron alike. The last chapter discusses the relation of Pope's thought to our own time. This book adds much to what is already known of Pope, and will go far in reviving an interest in the work and philosophy of the Laureate of Peace.

II. The Vital Flame¹

I

Pope's Pastorals² (published 1709) are strikingly assured, and Windsor Forest (completed 1713) is a poem of first importance. Deep submission to nature is felt expanding into communal and national prophecy. The forest is a universal symbol:

Not Chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But, as the world, harmoniously confus'd:
Where order in variety we see,
And where, though all things differ, all agree.

(13)

Those four lines, balancing man and nature with feeling for an enclosing and permeating whole, are the key to Pope's work.

Descriptive phrases are often somewhat general:

Bear me, O bear me to sequester'd scenes,
The bow'ry mazes, and surrounding greens . . .

(261)

Instead of the chiselled image of Milton we have a queer refusal of visual outline, 'bow'ry mazes' being only superficially Miltonic. A quality rather than an object or set of objects is transmitted. Nor is the result necessarily vague:

There, interspers'd in lawns and op'ning glades,
Thin trees arise that shun each other's shades.

(21)

General nouns balance a vivid feeling for natural life. Notice that the personification of the trees is not a weak artifice: rather their felt stillness, their living identities, are realized. Personification in Pope is never driven to any rigid extremes. When corn is seen 'in waving prospect' (39) we have movement and a whole, steady scene, together with an abstract¹ noun: and all, movement, wholeness, and the abstract well used in service to a physical impact, are characteristic. Notice that one word describes the object, one the unifying mind of the spectator: this union is often at the back of Pope's method, as in 'quivering shade' (135), where 'shade' touches human affections. There is precision without a materialized limitation. Even when Liberty leads 'the golden years' (92), though the phrase be ornate, the expressed quality is fairly exact. In Pope any humanizing of nature is really a partnership with nature: the condensation of feeling into a choice diction that already has classic impact assists, but the feeling is always there.

Moreover, phrases do not assert themselves in isolation; a 'predominating passion' renders every image soft, one inward life warming each unit of any single description. A vital context is ready for any striking impression, as in the generally admired lines on fishes:

Our plenteous streams a various race supply,
The bright-ey'd perch with fins of Tyrian dye,
The silver eel, in shining volumes roll'd,
The yellow carp, in scales bedropp'd with gold,
Swift trouts, diversified with crimson stains,
And pikes, the tyrants of the wat'ry plains.

(141)

Here 'bright-ey'd' grades into 'silver' and 'shining', and sets a context for 'yellow', 'bedropp'd with gold', and 'crimson',² There is nothing sudden or rigid; the whole movement being so organic, no complicated efforts at realization are needed; simple nouns and well-selected adjectives drop into place, and all, without strain, goes smoothly. The poet is well above his work, or rather, well inside it, or both. A lovely passage on reflections in water (212-18) pictures the miracle of'headlong mountains' and 'downward skies', trees that are 'absent', and 'floating forests' that paint the waves with green', while the water rolls 'slow' through the 'fair scene' which it holds. The description becomes a symbol of that repose mysteriously one with a vital yet undisturbing movement that characterizes Pope's major art-forms and tiniest phrases alike. The delineations, being inward, penetrate to the dynamic centres of life, and give, without effort, pictorial quality and action, as in the well-known:

See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings:
Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.
Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?

(111)

Rich as is the description, the phrases work in obedience to a whole drawn directly from the energies of nature. Each image is apt, but none superlative. There is a reserve of power and a poetic humility, power being felt in the conception, not just in the expression. The regularity of couplet-rhyme helps in checking all separate excellences, levelling and subduing them, with a corresponding release to the central experience, while poignant action informs a poetic tranquillity; as in our former phrase 'waving prospect', where the still and vast abstract conception checks the more lively movement which is somehow then enclosed in stillness. This is Keats' 'might half-slumbering on its own right arm'.

Pope's animal apprehension is one with animal sympathy. The destruction of bird-life is again vigorously imagined when a fowler is described roving with 'slaughterous gun' in winter:

He lifts the tube, and levels with his eye:
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky:
Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clam'rous lapwings feel the leaden death:
Oft, as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall, and leave their little lives in air.

(129)

You could complain of 'tube', though the word may also mark an isolated visual exactitude. Pope is no specialist at mechanical imagery, and avoids it consistently. But the first couplet so precisely integrates action with atmosphere, the metallic suddenness of sound across the wintry landscape, that you almost smell powder in the keen air: a whole experience is given, an authentic instant of actual existence, a piece of a living universe. The realization is stark, sudden, and unerring; as, too, in the phrase 'leaden death'. 'Clam'rous' and 'mounting' are careful epithets, and 'little' denotes the sympathy implicit throughout, with a clever silhouetting of life's mystery in the thought of its loss, the birds as tiny flamelets puffed out in song. Animals are inwardly felt, as in the 'ready spaniel' shown 'panting with hope' (99-100) or the 'impatient courser'—'courser' because he is felt as kinetic—seen as excited in 'every vein', pawing the ground and tingling for 'the distant plain' (151). The animal's power and swiftness are admirably caught in 'earth rolls back beneath the flying steed' (158), the phrase aiming to net the paradoxical quality of speed. Animals are usually created in their vital and peculiar movement from an inward sympathy comparable with Shakespeare's, and continuous with the apprehension of dynamic quality, as well as shape and colour, in nature generally. The stallion and hare of Venus and Adonis are both recalled by Windsor Forest:

To plains with well-breath'd beagles we repair,
And trace the mazes of the circling hare:
(Beasts, urg'd by us, their fellow beasts pursue,
And learn of men each other to undo).

(121)

The animal's characterizing behaviour is noticed and exactly, though unobtrusively, recorded.

Such recognition will naturally widen beyond nature and animal life to a vivid feeling for human vitality in action, such as we find in Pan's pursuit of Lodona (171-218). A tense realization of movement and fear is projected through numerous precisions involving bird-comparisons, the sound of steps, Pan's shadow lengthened by the sun, the feeling of his very breath: it is vivid without being visual, an inward experience expressing itself freely and variously; and it should help us to understanding of Shakespeare's own similar mastery. The little drama leads up to Lodona's transmutation to a rivulet and this exquisite couplet:

The silver stream her virgin coldness keeps,
For ever murmurs and for ever weeps.

(205)

The real stream is in every accent. That process of nature-feeling which created the Greek myths, and which Keats understood so well in his own fluid personifications, enjoys an equal perfection here. The fusion of the human and the natural is not ever, in itself, a weakness; rather it is the farthest aim of all nature-mysticism. It is implicit in Wordsworth's own message.

The poem expands further, Windsor Forest becoming a national symbol, one with 'Britannia's goddess', Liberty (91). Oaks are 'future navies' (222), with no straining of association. An Elizabethan royalism is recaptured, Windsor boasting in Queen Anne 'as bright a Goddess and as chaste a Queen' as Diana in 'old Arcadia'; at once protectress of the 'sylvan scene', 'earth's fair light', and 'empress of the main' (159-64). So the courtier ranks above the poet, whose 'chymic art', reading magic lore from nature and history and associated with god-like excursions beyond earth and mortality, is a brilliantly characterized second (235-56). The Thames recalls past nobilities, river-feelings forming organically among the paradisal, yet contemporary, impressions. Again, as in the days of Elizabeth, 'discord' has been quelled, only this time by 'great Anna' (327); while the 'sacred' blessings of a peaceful reign are expected, the building of'temples' replacing civil war and bloodshed (355-78). England is finally seen as supreme arbiter and 'great oracle' of the world (382). All evils are to be stilled on that day when

Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind.

(398)

The vision expands the Shakespearian prophecy in Henry VIII. Pope expects his country to oppose 'slavery' (408). He proclaims the end of conquest (408) and ambition (416), with the advent of universal peace.

The sense received of an organic continuity from nature, through animal-life, to human civilization, is most important. It is not a logical sequence; my quotations are drawn from various parts of what may well seem an untidy poem. The form is inherently, not studiously, organic. The generalizing tendency never loses contact with perceptual impressions. Feeling rather burrows into the underlying essence, catches the spirit and atmosphere, enjoys possession with freedom, and so moves on to the universal. The process is Shakespearian, and the final inclusion a natural result of any contact with an inner vitality. Windsor Forest is felt as a teeming world: there are no limits to its boundaries. We are pointed on, through thoughts of imperial expansion as creatively interlocking one's own country with a great human whole, to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• I. DICTION AND DOCTRINE
• II. THE VITAL FLAME: AN INTERPRETATIVE STUDY
• III. SYMBOLIC ETERNITIES: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE TEMPLE OF FAME
• IV. THE BOOK OF LIFE: ON BYRON'S ADULATION OF POPE
• V. AFTERTHOUGHTS
• INDEX