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.
