Essay: Analysis of Rape of the Lock

In the times gone by, there was a period when scholars and knowledgeable people on the whole, tended to assume of the primary half of the eighteenth century as the “Age of Pope.” But with the changing times, the period is now normally thought of and named as the Augustan Age or the Neoclassical period. Nevertheless with the previous value, regardless of its unsophisticated highlighting of the prosaic art of one man at the disbursement of immense accomplishments by others in prose literature, precisely replicates the information that Alexander Pope, equally in his wonderfully expertise poetry and in his evenly crafted unrestricted personality, were thought by a vast number of exceptional literary contemporaries but for everyone else, to be the head imaginative mastermind of his time (Alexander Pope Biography, p.1).

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic couplet presented by Alexander Pope, first put to print in 1712 in two cantos, and then published again in 1714 in a lengthened 5-canto version.

The poems presents to the readers an occurrence narrated by Pope’s friend, John Caryll. Arabella Fermor and her suitor, Lord Petre both belonged to upper-class Catholic families at an age, in England, when Catholicism was officially prohibited. Petre, deeply in lust with Arabella, had chopped off a lock of her hair devoid of acquiescence, and the consequential quarrel had fashioned a violation amid both of the families. The poem was written by Pope on his friends request so as to laughably join together the two. Pope makes use of the character Belinda to stand for Arabella and brings in an intact structure of “sylphs,” or protector spirits of virgins, an intervallic description of the gods and goddesses of predictable classic. Pope mocks a trivial wrangle by judging it against to the heroic world of the gods (The Rape of the Lock, p.1).