The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem Discuss
Ans. The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem Discuss, The Rape of the Lock is the masterpiece of a mock-heroic because in 1714 form it mocks the maximum amount of the epic. The mockery takes different forms and employs different devices. Apart from the general mockery of the epic form and substance.
The epic manner with its invocation it’s similar, the use of supernatural machinery, its battle, its journey on water, and down to the underworld, its harangues. apart from all this, there is a particular mucky of a scene or a detail or a certain speech or a comment in the person of the poet.
And the scale of the mimicry is always varying. We find Belinda flashing lightning in her eyes. But against the bulk of Hector, she is mere slip of a girl, a mere fashionable lady like any figure in the unheroic pages of the Spectator.
Mock-heroic examples
We find an altar at which ardent prayers are fatefully half granted and a Goddess who is worshipped, but the altar is built of French romances and the goddess is the image of vain Belinda in the mirror of her dressing table.
We find a battle drawn forth to combat like the Greeks, on a velvet plain; but it is only a game of cards on a fashionable card table. We find a supernatural being threatening his inferiors with torture; but a sylph, not love, and the tortures are neither thunderbolts nor pains of Hades; but cruelty devised ingeniously from the requisites of the toilet table.
The scale of the imitation is always shifting. But on the whole, it is one of the diminutions. The epic is a long poem. The Rape of the Lock’ is short. The story of the epic covers years; that of the epic are stupendous creatures; Pope’s sylphs are tiny.
Thus we find that the ‘s method of using, his materials in The Rape of the Lock’ was mock-heroic. He deliberately made use of the heroic epic form.
Pope presents the sacred and admirable on seeming equality with the trifling or the absurd. The ludicrous in the form of a lofty and declamatory style give us a sort of shock-but it finally proves to be a very shock….a shock that provokes laughter. We are amused since all ordinary standards are charged.
Discuss Mock Heroic Poem
The Rape of the lock, undoubtedly, is one of the finest specimens of mock-heroic poetry in the English language. It travesties the serious epic, in beginning all the leading features of the epic machinery, lofty incident, character, and style to the exaltation of a trivial subject like the theft of a curl from the head of the fair Belinda.
The theme of course neither epic dignity nor the occasion for epic action. But the jest lies in treating it as if she had particular is given to the introduction of as many epic devices as possible The opening is in the initiation of the great epics:
‘What dire offense from amorous causes springs
what mighty contest rises from trivial things,
I sing.’
The sylphs, spirits of the air, borrowed by the Pope from the doctrines of Rosicrucians, furnish the chief supernatural machinery. Besides, there are dreams and portents and grisly visits to the cave of the spleen also.
The poem also contains conventionally formal speeches inserted in the much-expanded action; a game of cards supplies a muster of the troops, and there is rilling heroic combat in which metaphors and ladies ‘frowns are the most fatal weapons.
Mock-heroic Poem
The arming of the epic hero is parodied, by Belinda’s toilet, described pompously and at length, ending with:
“Now awful beauty puts on all its arms’
In the poem the supporter of Belinda’s issue Greeks, of Lord Petre is the Trogons:
“So When bold Homer makes the Gods engage, And Heavenly BBreastswith human passions rages
Gainst Pallas, Mars, Latona, Hermes arms.
And all Olympus rings with loud alarms. “
The use of epigram and anticlimax and the delightful way are a few features that make this poem a parody. The death of lapdogs is kept at the same level as the death of husbands.
The breaking of the vow of chastity is placed on the same level as the breaking of a favouriteehinaJar. Above all, the description of the battle reminds one of Troy:
See fierce Belinda on the Baron flies,
with more than usual lightning in her eyes,
Now meet thy fate incensed Belinda cried
And drew a deadly bodkin from her side.
The triviality of petty things is further mocked alluding them to the well-known episodes of Literature. Belinda’s shrieks are compared with those of Othello;
No fierce Othello, in so loud a strain
Roared for the handkerchief that caused him pain.
The conclusions are judged from both viewpoints of subject matter and style, structure, and theme, the poem is a mock epic.
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