Exactly how steamy is this poem?
PG-13
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.
With young men and women thrown together in social situations, how could there not be? But as we discuss in the "Symbols, Imagery, and Wordplay" section, the sex is so completely under wraps (literally: remember Belinda's seven-fold petticoat?), so smooshed beneath the conventions of polite behavior and language, that it gets warped and comes out as a questionable obsession with things like locks of hair, or snuff-boxes, or fine gloves and hairpins. You could call this an entire poem about the Baron's hair fetish, and you wouldn't be too far off.