A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

Episode 89

From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope 







Mark McGuinness reads and discusses an excerpt from Epistle II of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope.











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Poet

Alexander Pope







Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness
































From An Essay on Man

Epistle II

By Alexander Pope

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;
As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,
And turn their heads to imitate the sun.
Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

 







Podcast Transcript

In the early 18th century, Alexander Pope’s poetry was known to every cultured person in England. He was a fashionable, successful, wealthy writer and the preeminent poet of his age. He was also a canny businessman who published his translations of Homer via subscription, an early form of crowdfunding, and they sold so well he built himself, an extravagantly large villa in Twickenham – and its famous subterranean grotto still exists today.

His political satires were so sharp and topical that he was rumoured to carry a pair of loaded pistols when going for a walk, in case one of his targets took violent exception.

Phrases from his poetry are still proverbial: ‘hope springs eternal’, ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’, ‘To err is human; to forgive divine’, ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’, and also the title of the movie, ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’.

But these days, Pope has really fallen out of fashion. He’s seen as archaic and artificial. In an age when formal poetry is out of fashion, for many people he represents the worst kind of formal poetry: his very regular metre and full rhymes sound clunky to our ears. His rhyming couplets are undoubtedly clever, but that’s part of the problem, because these days we associate poetry with emotions and self-expression, so cleverness is seen as a little suspect and somehow inauthentic.

And I’ll be honest, for a long time, I had that image of Pope. He represented everything the Romantics rebelled against at the end of the 18th century, and as a young poet I was on the side of the Romantics, so I had no interest in Pope. However, a few years ago, I challenged myself to have another look at his work, and what I discovered was a really sharp and thought-provoking and witty and formidably skilful poet, who in certain moods, is an absolute pleasure to read. And he doesn’t fit every mood, but then there aren’t many poets who do.

So turning to today’s poem, An Essay on Man is one of Pope’s major works, it’s about 1,300 lines long. As the title suggests it’s a meditation on the nature of what he called mankind, and we call humankind, we have to make allowance for the historic focus on the male as representative of the species.

It’s also a didactic poem, he’s not just reflecting on the subject, he is telling us what we should think about it. Which again, is a deeply unfashionable stance for poets these days, at least when they are on the side of a conservative or establishment position. And he does this in the form of a series of verse epistles, verse letters, which are addressed to Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. The epistle form also means that the poem addresses the reader in a very direct manner, as you would expect in a letter.

His basic stance, which we find in many of his poems, is of a reasonable man writing for a group of like-minded people, trying to establish some sort of common sense, shared ideas and principles, in a world where these need to be debated and defined and defended. This was the world of the coffee house and the salon, where people came together to debate, sometimes in very robust fashion. It came to be known as the Augustan age in English literature, by comparison with the satirical and political poetry of the age of Augustus Caesar.

OK looking more closely at the poem itself, the excerpt I just read is from the second Epistle, and one of the first things we notice is what Milton would have called the ‘jingling’ rhymes:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,

It’s pretty unmistakeable isn’t it? One pair of rhymes after another. And in case you’re wondering, yes, these rhyming couplets do go on all the way through the poem, and indeed all the way through most of Pope’s work. And not just in Pope: for over a century, from about 1650 to 1780, this was a hugely popular verse form.

They are known as heroic couplets because they are associated with epic narrative poems, such as John Dryden’s translations of Virgil and Pope’s translations of Homer. Each line is in iambic pentameter, the familiar ti TUM ti TUM ti TUm ti TUM ti TUM, with two lines next to each other forming couplets, and the poem proceeding with one couplet after another.

The form can be traced back to Chaucer, who used rhyming couplets for many of his narrative poems. But by the time of Dryden and Pope it had evolved into a tighter couplet form, described as closed couplets, meaning that they were typically self contained, with a sentence, or a discrete part of a sentence, beginning and ending inside the couplet. For instance:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

That stands on its own as a single thought, a unit of sense, ending with a full stop. And the full rhyme of ‘scan’ and ‘man’ means the couplet snaps shut at the end – this is the closed couplet effect we associate with heroic couplets.

In the next couplet he introduces the idea of man as a creature of ‘middle state’:

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

And then another couplet elaborates on the sense of being pulled in different directions:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,

So the poem proceeds one unit of sense at a time. The couplets are like Lego bricks, and Pope used them to build just about anything he wanted: literary and philosophical discourse here in the Essay on Man and in his Essay on Criticism; mock-heroic social comedy in The Rape of the Lock; actual epic in his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and satire in The Dunciad.

It’s easy to see how this could become monotonous, and in the work of most poets of the time, it did. But Pope’s great achievement was to take this established form and perfect it, sticking very strictly to the formal pattern, while varying the syntax, the grammatical patterns, with great subtlety and complexity, to keep the reader on their toes.

Let’s take another look at the first couplet. Notice the little pause in the middle of the first line, after ‘thyself’:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

This divides the line into two parts, conveying the dramatic tension in Pope’s argument: he’s saying that humans are ambitious for knowledge, they want to ‘scan’ God, to examine him, but they should really focus on self-knowledge. This tension between opposites is known as antithesis, it’s a rhetorical pattern we looked at back in episode 58 about one of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets, and it’s very common in Pope. And the tension is resolved in the next line, which is all one phrase, with no pause:

The proper study of mankind is man.

Have another listen to the couplet, to hear how the tension is established and then released:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

So when all of this comes together, the tension and release, the regular rhythm of the metre and the full rhymes clinching the couplet, it has the effect of making the words sound truer than true.

The following couplet picks up on the antithesis, and extends it into paradox:

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

An isthmus is a narrow strip of land between two bodies of water, so standing on it, you could easily feel precarious and threatened. ‘Darkly wise’ means ‘dimly wise’, possessing a little knowledge, but not enough for full understanding. And ‘rudely great’ means ‘powerful but coarse and unfinished’.

And I think we can recognise what Pope is saying from our own experience – that sense of knowing enough to know how little we really know; of having great potential, but struggling to fulfil it. And isn’t it delightful how Pope compresses all those feelings into these neat little paradoxes: ‘darkly wise and rudely great’. In another famous line, he describes true eloquence as ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’, which is exactly what he achieves here.

We can also note that ‘darkly wise’ and ‘rudely great’ are not only antitheses expressed as paradoxes, they are also an example of another rhetorical pattern: parallelism, where similar structures are repeated with variation. In this case ‘darkly’ and ‘rudely’ are both adverbs and ‘wise’ and ‘great’ are both adjectives, so grammatically they are identical, which suggests both similarity and difference in mankind’s relationship to knowledge and power.

The next couplet uses a more elaborate parallelism:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,

So both lines say ‘With too much something for the something else’. It’s hard to miss the pattern, isn’t it? And notice how the couplet form is perfect for laying out two ideas that seem to counterbalance each other perfectly.

So we’re only six lines in and Pope has put his finger on a central conundrum in human existence, and conveyed it with at least three rhetorical patterns nested inside each other – antithesis, paradox and parallelism. Not only that, he’s handled the metre and rhyme with great skill, wrapping each thought up in the neat little bow of a rhyming couplet. And if your mind is starting to boggle, welcome to the world of Pope’s verse: elegant, authoritative and very, very clever.

When we look closely, there’s a lot going on inside every single couplet. He’s like a watchmaker, working at a tiny scale, making an instrument with great precision and balance, that keeps perfect time, and chimes beautifully.

And Pope’s contemporaries would have found it easier to follow the sense than we do, because they were used to reading this kind of stuff. But I’m sure the poetry would often have given them pause, even if only for a moment, as they read. And my guess is that they would have enjoyed this slight difficulty, and the pleasure of making out the sense, with the little dopamine hit of understanding. Like unwrapping a sweet before you can pop it in your mouth and taste it.

So I hope we’re starting to see why Pope is the undisputed master of the heroic couplet. Even T. S. Eliot had to admit defeat, when he wrote a passage in this style for The Waste Land, only for Ezra Pound to point out tactfully that he couldn’t compete with Pope, and draw the red pencil through it.

But the form is more than simply one couplet after another. When he stacks them together, they create verse paragraphs, longer units of thought, that function very like paragraphs in prose. So having established the idea of man caught between opposing forces, he goes on to elaborate on the theme to dazzling effect:

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little, or too much:

The couplets are individually brilliant, and cumulatively overwhelming, both in terms of the mental effort required to tease out their meanings, and the tension between action and inaction, divine and bestial impulses, mind and body, birth and death, reason and error. And I think that’s why I find this line so funny:

Whether he thinks too little, or too much:

It feels like he’s throwing his arms up and laughing and admitting that he’s overthinking it all.

The verse paragraph ends with three more couplets, where he sums up the nature of man:

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;

Still by himself abused, or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Although Pope is describing a ‘chaos of thought’, his own thinking is always sharp, however convoluted his argument becomes. So he sticks to the themes of power and knowledge, undercutting man’s pretension by saying he is ‘Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all’, and ‘Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled’. And he ends this paragraph with another rhetorical device, the tricolon, which uses three parallel elements to build to a conclusion:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

We’re familiar with this pattern in famous quotes from Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’, the US Declaration of Independence, ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and Shakespeare: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen!’ Here, Pope uses it with typical precision, since if someone is both the ‘glory… of the world’ and it’s ‘jest’, i.e. the butt of its jokes, then that makes that person a ‘riddle’:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

So this sums up the nature of man, and sets up the jesting irony of the next verse paragraph:

Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,

Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;

Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,

Correct old time, and regulate the sun;

If this were the start of the poem, we might be forgiven for taking Pope’s words at face value, but in the light of what has gone before, it’s pretty clear that ‘wondrous creature’ is a mocking criticism.

He was writing this in an age where Newtonian physics was in the ascendancy and people were full of enthusiasm about the new discoveries in science and the possibility of understanding and mastering the physical world. And given that we are still living in a so-called age of reason, I think his criticisms of scientific overreach are still relevant, and the joke is still funny, when he talks about instructing the planets in what orbits to follow, correcting time and regulating the sun. As if measuring were full understanding, let alone complete power.

But Pope doesn’t confine his criticism to scientists. He also has philosophers in his sight:

Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,

To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;

Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,

And quitting sense call imitating God;

He clearly doesn’t have a lot of time for Plato’s first principles. Neither is he impressed by the contemporary vogue for what we would call Orientalism:

As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,

And turn their heads to imitate the sun.

It’s possible that he had in mind the whirling dervishes of Persia, or maybe this is just a caricature of his idea of ‘Eastern priests’. So obviously this is a joke that hasn’t aged so well.

OK he ends this verse paragraph with a final jab, which restates the idea from the opening couplet in bluntly comic fashion:

Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –

Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

It’s hard to imagine a more apt image of intellectual presumption than trying to teach Eternal Wisdom a thing or two, but just in case we miss the point, Pope rams it home with relish:

Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

And this is another characteristic aspect of Augustan poetry, particularly the satirical kind, that it can be very crude and direct, with a passage of sophisticated argument followed by a line or two where the mask drops and the insult is laid bare. And no, it’s not big or clever, but let’s face it, sometimes it can be deeply satisfying.

One more little detail, which I can’t help wondering about: notice how both of these couplets, conveying the same basic idea in very different tones, both hinge on the word ‘thyself’:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –

Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

So that word ‘thyself’ could be used to refer to various individuals, and knowing Pope, I wouldn’t be surprised if he intended all of them at once. Firstly, the phrasing sounds proverbial, in which case each couplet is an injunction to mankind at large. Secondly, it could refer to the reader, any reader, of the poem, whether Viscount Bolingbroke, an 18th-century wit, or you and me, reading the poem together on this podcast. It could also refer to the specific targets of Pope’s criticism, such as the overreaching scientists or philosophers.

I think Pope may also have had in mind a target nearer to home: himself. W. B. Yeats wrote in one of his essays, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’. And it’s entirely possible that Pope is doing both at once: we’ve seen the brilliance of his rhetoric, in puncturing the pretensions of his fellow men and women. Yet by making poetry as well as rhetoric, he is arguably arguing with himself as well.

It was of course be entirely right and proper and expected for a Christian such as Pope to admonish himself as well as others, for the many and various sins he describes in An Essay on Man. So from a moral viewpoint, I think I’m on pretty safe ground in suggesting that ‘thyself’ includes Pope. But I would go further, and say that the idea of a brilliant mind that is not quite brilliant enough to fully understand itself may have been a deeply personal subject for Pope.

Because what we have here is an extremely clever warning about taking cleverness to extremes. Maybe the irony was not lost on Pope. As he wrote in another poem, An Essay on Criticism, ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’. So perhaps as we hear this passage again, and enjoy the sparkling wit and scurrilous attacks on others, we can also detect a note of self-reflection, and self-accusation, that makes it a little more poignant than it first appears.







From An Essay on Man

Epistle II

By Alexander Pope

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;
As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,
And turn their heads to imitate the sun.
Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

 







Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an English poet and translator who was born in 1688 and died in 1744. As a Catholic he was barred from university and public office, so he educated himself and forged a brilliant literary career, becoming the leading poet of Augustan England, celebrated for his razor-sharp satire and polished heroic couplets. Early success came with An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock, followed by monumental translations of Homer that made him financially independent. His later works, including The Dunciad, attacked dullness and corruption. In An Essay on Man, he explored human nature, providence, and moral order with epigrammatic clarity. He lived at Twickenham, where he created a famous garden and grotto.

 







A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.
































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