The Rape of the Lock Analysis

Heroic couplets—sets of two lines of rhyming iambic pentameter each of which forms a distinct rhetorical as well as metrical unit—were hands-down the most popular poetic form in the later 17th...

It would be so tempting to say that Pope is the poem's speaker, and just be done with it. Especially after that lovely letter he writes in the very beginning, dedicating the poem to Arabella Fermor...

The Rape of the Lock is firmly set in the dressing-rooms and drawing rooms of early 18th-century London and Hampton Court, one of the residences of the Kings and Queens of Great Britain. Everything...

Heroic couplets are the ideal form to put a long, narrative poem in. We mention this in our "Form and Meter" section, too. The iambic pentameter marches us steadily forward at a pace that's not too...

The Rape of the Lock—did that title pull you up short before you began the poem? "Rape" is, after all, a serious word for a very serious crime: sexually violating a person, against their will, of...

Make no mistake about it, you can pretty much always tell if a poem was written by Alexander Pope. If it's in perfectly-crafted heroic couplets, if it's witty and satirical, and if it has a ton of...

As flowing as its formal structure is, The Rape of the Lock is full of archaic language (the 18th century was a while ago, yo) and references to Classical literature that most 21st-century students...

Pope never grew taller than four feet and six inches, thanks to a bout with tuberculosis of the spine that left him disabled after age seven. This isn't what you'd call a "fun fact," but it's a goo...

Well, we made sexual imagery a thematic category that runs throughout the whole poem (remember the section on all of Pope's double entendres?) so yes, there's some of it in The Rape of the Lock. Wi...

As you might have noticed, Pope has hundreds of indirect references, imagery, and allusions borrowed from classical epics like the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid—that's what makes this piece neoclass...