Canto 3
Summary
The boat arrives at Hampton Court
Palace, and the ladies and gentlemen disembark to their courtly amusements.
After a pleasant round of chatting and gossip, Belinda sits down with two of
the men to a game of cards. They play ombre, a three-handed game of tricks and
trumps, somewhat like bridge, and it is described in terms of a heroic battle:
the cards are troops combating on the “velvet plain” of the card-table.
Belinda, under the watchful care of the Sylphs, begins favorably. She declares
spades as trumps and leads with her highest cards, sure of success. Soon,
however, the hand takes a turn for the worse when “to the Baron fate inclines
the field”: he catches her king of clubs with his queen and then leads back
with his high diamonds. Belinda is in danger of being beaten, but recovers in
the last trick so as to just barely win back the amount she bid.
The next ritual amusement is the
serving of coffee. The curling vapors of the steaming coffee remind the Baron
of his intention to attempt Belinda’s lock. Clarissa draws out her scissors for
his use, as a lady would arm a knight in a romance. Taking up the scissors, he
tries three times to clip the lock from behind without Belinda seeing. The
Sylphs endeavor furiously to intervene, blowing the hair out of harm’s way and
tweaking her diamond earring to make her turn around. Ariel, in a last-minute
effort, gains access to her brain, where he is surprised to find “an earthly
lover lurking at her heart.” He gives up protecting her then; the implication
is that she secretly wants to be violated. Finally, the shears close on the
curl. A daring sylph jumps in between the blades and is cut in two; but being a
supernatural creature, he is quickly restored. The deed is done, and the Baron
exults while Belinda’s screams fill the air.
Commentary
This canto is full of classic
examples of Pope’s masterful use of the heroic couplet. In introducing Hampton
Court Palace, he describes it as the place where Queen Anne “dost sometimes
counsel take—and sometimes tea.” This line employs a zeugma, a rhetorical
device in which a word or phrase modifies two other words or phrases in a
parallel construction, but modifies each in a different way or according to a
different sense. Here, the modifying word is “take”; it applies to the paralleled
terms “counsel” and “tea.” But one does not “take” tea in the same way one
takes counsel, and the effect of the zeugma is to show the royal residence as a
place that houses both serious matters of state and frivolous social occasions.
The reader is asked to contemplate that paradox and to reflect on the relative
value and importance of these two different registers of activity. (For another
example of this rhetorical technique, see lines 157–8: “Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast, / when
husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last.”) A similar point is made, in a
less compact phrasing, in the second and third verse-paragraphs of this canto.
Here, against the gossip and chatter of the young lords and ladies, Pope opens
a window onto more serious matters that are occurring “meanwhile” and
elsewhere, including criminal trials and executions, and economic exchange.
The rendering of the card game as a
battle constitutes an amusing and deft narrative feat. By parodying the battle
scenes of the great epic poems, Pope is suggesting that the energy and passion
once applied to brave and serious purposes is now expended on such
insignificant trials as games and gambling, which often become a mere front for
flirtation. The structure of “the three attempts” by which the lock is cut is a
convention of heroic challenges, particularly in the romance genre. The romance
is further invoked in the image of Clarissa arming the Baron—not with a real
weapon, however, but with a pair of sewing scissors. Belinda is not a real
adversary, or course, and Pope makes it plain that her resistance—and, by
implication, her subsequent distress—is to some degree an affectation. The
melodrama of her screams is complemented by the ironic comparison of the
Baron’s feat to the conquest of nations.
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