Analysis Pope's Eloisa to Abelard

Following The Rape of the Lock, pontiff?s efforts were directed toward a flair of composition with which he is non usually identified: the elegiac verses ? lament to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady? and the romantic psychodrama, Eloisa to Abelard. The ?Elegy? is, perhaps, only partially successful; its chief interest lies in the poet?s vacillation between a Christian and a Stoic understanding of the lady?s death. Eloisa to Abelard is another librate altogether. G. Wilson Knight claims that it ?is certainly Pope?s greatest human beings poesy and probably the greatest short complete poem in our language??a judgment from which few critics be likely to dissociate themselves.

In the form of an epistle to her beloved and banished Abelard, Pope?s Eloisa dramatically expresses the psychological tensions which threaten her reason and set out her soul. Confined to a monastery (ironically founded by Abelard), she receives, at length, a earn from her former lover that reawakens her suppressed passion. (Retrieved from http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1630.html)The recrudescence of these feelings not only threatens her stability, but also, in her own estimation, endangers her soul; and her point is rendered even more poignant by the fact that Abelard, having been unsexed by henchmen in the employ of her outraged uncle, can uncomplete respond to nor share in her struggles against the flesh. Here the couplet is use not only ironically to counterpose discordant images, as in The Rape of the Lock, but also to reflect, in fit antitheses, the very struggles of Eloisa?s soul. (Damrosch, p101)In the extravagance of her affliction, Eloisa takes on the attributes of a Shelleyan heroine, preferring damnation with Abelard to redemption without him: ?In seas of flame my plunging soul is drowned,/ While altars blaze, and angels flutter round.



? Even as she submits to the decrees of Heaven and composes herself to meet her maker, she erotically mingles her love for Abelard with her struggle for salvation: ?Thou Abelard! the last sad theatrical role pay,/ And smooth my passage to the realms of day,/ See my lips tremble, and my eyeballs roll,/ Suck my last breath, and get wind my flying soul!? Eloisa to Abelard belies the notion that Pope was incapable of composition in the pathetic mode. As Lord Byron observed, ?If you search for passion, where is it to be found stronger than in Eloisa to Abelard.? (Baines, p89)Between Eloisa to Abelard and An Essay on Man, Pope placid a preliminary version of The Dunciad (1728), but it was not until 1742 that the poem appeared in its final form.

Baines, Paul. The Complete Critical Guide to black lovage Pope. New York: Routledge, 2000, p89.

Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope. Berkeley: University of calcium Press, 1987, p101.

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