The Poetics of Proscription: Ideology, Form, and Political Identity in Pope's 'Windsor Forest' and 'The Rape of the Lock'

 

The Poetics of Proscription: Ideology, Form, and Political Identity in Pope's Windsor Forest and The Rape of the Lock

Academic Details

• Name: Sagar Chavda

• Roll No.: 26

• Enrollment No.: 5108250008

• Sem.: 01

• Batch: 2025-2027

• E mail: sagarchavda.v@gmail.com

Assignment Details

• Paper Name: Literature of the Neo-classical Period

• Paper No.: 102

• Topic: The Poetics of Proscription: Ideology, Form, and Political Identity in Pope's Windsor Forest and The Rape of the Lock

• Submitted To: Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, 

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

• Submitted Date: November 10, 2025

• Words : 3146

• Characters : 20805

This blog is written to digitally present and document my semester-end assignments.

Table of Content

Research Question

Hypothesis

Abstract

Introduction

The Ideology of the Couplet Form

Windsor Forest: Balancing Patriotism and Critique

The Rape of the Lock: Social Satire as Political Allegory

Conclusion

Works Cited

Research Question

How does Alexander Pope, as a Roman Catholic and suspected Jacobite sympathizer in post-1688 England, strategically utilize the formal properties of the heroic couplet in Windsor Forest and The Rape of the Lock to articulate a proscribed political identity and embed covert critiques of the Whig establishment?

Hypothesis

Alexander Pope employs the heroic couplet's inherent structural characteristics—its balance, antithesis, qualification, and capacity for creative tension and paragraphic development—as an ideological tool to subtly express his proscribed political identity and critique the Whig establishment in Windsor Forest and The Rape of the Lock. Specifically, the couplet allows him to juxtapose overt patriotic celebration with covert historical lament in Windsor Forest, and to frame social satire as political allegory in The Rape of the Lock by equating seemingly disparate elements to expose moral and political corruption.

Abstract

This paper examines the intricate relationship between poetic form and political expression in the early works of Alexander Pope. It argues that Pope, navigating the precarious identity of a Roman Catholic and suspected Jacobite sympathizer in post-1688 England, strategically employs the heroic couplet as an ideological tool (Erskine-Hill). Drawing on J. Paul Hunter's analysis of the couplet form as a structure of creative tension and qualification rather than rigid closure (Hunter), and Howard Erskine-Hill's historical contextualization of Pope as a "political poet" for the "suff'ring Party" (Erskine-Hill), this study analyzes Windsor Forest and The Rape of the Lock. It contends that Pope uses the couplet's inherent properties—its balance, antithesis, and paragraphic development—to manage the profound contradictions of his position. The form allows him to embed a covert political critique of the Whig establishment while engaging in overt social satire. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that for Pope, the couplet was not mere "correctness" but a vital "form as meaning" (Hunter), enabling him to articulate a complex, proscribed political identity.

Introduction

Alexander Pope, as he himself stated, began his life under challenging political and religious circumstances. In his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he famously recalls his father, "Convict a Papist," and, "For Right Hereditary tax'd and fin'd" (Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 64). This status as a member of a proscribed religious and political minority in the wake of the 1688 Glorious Revolution is, as Howard Erskine-Hill argues, central to understanding his entire career (Erskine-Hill). Pope was not a poet of "pure Description" idly detached from the "Farce of State"; he was a "political poet in his time," deeply engaged with the Tory and potential Jacobite circles that comprised the "suff'ring Party" (Erskine-Hill). This precarious identity—barred from "Posts of Profit or of Trust" and viewed with suspicion by the ruling Whig establishment—poses a fundamental critical question: how does a proscribed poet articulate a complex, often oppositional, political vision while avoiding charges of treason or sedition (Erskine-Hill)?

This paper argues that Pope finds the answer in his chosen form: the heroic couplet. Far from being a rigid, conservative, or "monolithic" structure, as it is often misread (Hunter), the couplet in Pope's hands becomes a sophisticated vehicle for ideological expression. Drawing upon J. Paul Hunter's analysis, "FORM AS MEANING," this paper contends that Pope utilizes the inherent "ideology of the couplet"—its structural reliance on balance, antithesis, qualification, and creative tension—to navigate and express his complex political identity (Hunter). The couplet's form, which "refuse[s] to allow the antinomies first implied" and develops through qualification in verse paragraphs rather than simple binary statements (Hunter), was perfectly suited for a poet whose loyalties were divided: a patriot who distrusted the current regime, a Catholic who admired English liberty, and a moralist fascinated by the very corruption he satirized.

This analysis will synthesize Hunter's formalist insights with Erskine-Hill's deep historical contextualization. By examining Pope's early masterpieces, Windsor Forest and The Rape of the Lock, this paper will demonstrate how Pope embeds his political critique within the very structure of his verse. Windsor Forest, as Erskine-Hill suggests, is a covertly anti-Williamite and pro-Stuart poem (Erskine-Hill); its formal structure, balancing patriotic celebration with sharp critiques of conquest and "wrongs yet legal" (Erskine-Hill), exemplifies the couplet's capacity for managing contradiction (Hunter). Similarly, The Rape of the Lock, while ostensibly a social satire, contains political allusions that resonate with the Jacobite-leaning critiques of the "divided country" (Erskine-Hill). The poem's famous "list" ("Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux" [Pope, Rape I.138]) and its jarring juxtapositions ("wretches [who] hang that jurymen may dine" [Pope, Rape III.22]) are not just features of mock-heroic but are the couplet's ideology in practice, using formal equation to question a society's flattened values (Hunter). For Pope, the couplet was not a cage but a key, allowing him to navigate his proscription and encode his politics in a form that was itself a statement on order, balance, and the complexity of truth.

The Ideology of the Couplet Form

To understand Pope’s political expression, one must first understand the primary tool of that expression: the heroic couplet. It is a form often misinterpreted by modern readers as inherently rigid, conservative, and predictable, a vehicle for "ordered absolutes" (Hunter). J. Paul Hunter, in "FORM AS MEANING," directly challenges this assumption, arguing instead that the couplet, as practiced in the eighteenth century and especially by Pope, is a structure of profound complexity designed to manage, rather than erase, contradiction (Hunter). Its "ideology" is not one of simple resolution but of sustained creative tension (Hunter). This formal property proved essential for a poet like Pope, whose political and religious loyalties were, by necessity, divided and complex (Erskine-Hill).

Hunter identifies three core features of the couplet that move it beyond simple epigrams. First, the couplet involves a "careful pairing of oppositions or balances but no formal resolution" (Hunter). Unlike a dialectic, it does not seek a third, synthetic term. Instead, it "privilege[s] the balancing itself—the preservation and acceptance of difference" (Hunter). This tension is signaled by the rhyme, which yokes two often conflicting ideas together by sound, inviting a comparison or contrast, as in The Rape of the Lock’s "reveal'd / conceal'd" or "sign / dine" (Hunter; Pope, Rape I.97-98, III.21-22). Second, Hunter argues that each couplet contains a "structure of four fundamental units" (Hunter). The two lines, and the two halves of each line divided by a caesura, create four key terms "questing for relationship" (Hunter). This complex internal architecture destabilizes simple, linear syntax, forcing terms to align and realign, thus complicating the initial statement (Hunter).

Third, and perhaps most crucially, Hunter asserts that the couplet's true stanzaic unit is not the pair of lines but the verse paragraph (Hunter). Pope’s thinking is "never complete in a single couplet" (Hunter). Memorable lines like "A little learning is a dangerous thing" are not isolated maxims but "opening gambit[s]" that the subsequent paragraph exists to "refine and complicate" (Hunter; Pope, Essay on Criticism 215). This paragraphic development moves the argument "not toward compromise or resolution but rather deeper into human examples and distinctions, farther and farther into the uncertain and the unknown" (Hunter). This analysis reveals a form perfectly suited to Pope's predicament. As a "convict a Papist" in a "divided country" (Erskine-Hill), he could not afford to be simple. The couplet, as described by Hunter, allowed him to "worry about the fact that his values are in genuine conflict" and to explore his "divided public and personal loyalties" (Hunter). It was a form that permitted him to embed nuance, express sympathy for opposing sides, and advance critiques through implication rather than dangerous, overt declaration.

Windsor Forest: Balancing Patriotism and Critique

Pope's Windsor Forest (1713) serves as a powerful early example of this "poetics of proscription," where the formal ideology of the couplet is deployed to navigate a complex political landscape. The poem, as its footnote indicates, was published to celebrate the Treaty of Utrecht, a major achievement for the Tory government, and was dedicated to George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, a Tory statesman and, as Howard Erskine-Hill notes, a known Jacobite (Erskine-Hill; Pope, "Footnotes"). The poem's surface layer is one of patriotic celebration, fulfilling its public role. Yet, as Erskine-Hill argues, beneath this surface lies a "covertly anti-Williamite poem" that subtly critiques the 1688 Revolution and asserts a pro-Stuart, "Right Hereditary" worldview (Erskine-Hill). Pope uses the balancing and qualifying nature of the couplet form, as described by Hunter, to manage these two conflicting narratives: one of overt national triumph, the other of covert political lament.

The poem opens by invoking "Peace and Plenty," culminating in the famously bold, unrhymed declaration: "And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns" (Pope, Windsor line 42). In 1713, with the childless Queen Anne in ill health and the Hanoverian succession looming, this line was, as Erskine-Hill observes, a potent and unambiguous signal of Tory, if not outright Jacobite, sympathies (Erskine-Hill). The poem then immediately pivots to a historical "other," contrasting this Stuart peace with the "Ages past" under the "haughty Norman," William the Conqueror (Pope, Windsor line 43, 61). Erskine-Hill argues this is a transparent critique of William III, the "foreign master" whose "conquest" and "rapine" replaced native rule (Erskine-Hill). Pope uses a series of couplets to describe this violent dispossession:

The Fields are ravish'd from th' industrious Swains,

From Men their Cities, and from Gods their Fanes:

The levell'd Towns with Weeds lie cover'd o'er,

The hollow Winds thro' naked Temples roar;

(Pope, Windsor lines 63-66)

This imagery of a ravished, desolate land directly echoes the "image of conquest" that Jacobites used to describe the 1688 Revolution (Erskine-Hill).

The poem's true formal genius, however, appears in its management of contradiction, as highlighted in Hunter's analysis of the hunting scene (Hunter). Pope begins with a seemingly straightforward celebration of the "vig'rous Swains" who "range the Hills" (Pope, Windsor line 93-94). But as the description of the hunt progresses, a profound shift in perspective occurs, facilitated by the couplet's structure. Hunter notes the "brilliant shifts in referent" as Pope moves from the hunter's view to the victim's (Hunter). This is exemplified in the description of the netted partridges:

Secure they trust th' unfaithful Field, beset,

Till hov'ring o'er 'em sweeps the swelling Net.

(Pope, Windsor lines 101-102)

The word "Secure" belongs to the partridges, while "beset" belongs to the hunters, creating a jarring juxtaposition within the balanced line. Pope then makes the political allegory explicit, comparing this "if small Things we may with great compare" to "When Albion sends her eager Sons to War," who "Sudden ... seize th' amazed, defenceless prize" (Pope, Windsor lines 103, 107-110). As Hunter observes, this leaves the reader "uncertain of where we stand—with hunter? prey? victor? vanquished?" (Hunter). Pope then deepens this sympathy for the victim by lamenting the "whirring Pheasant" who "feels the fiery Wound" and the "mounting Larks" who "fall, and leave their little Lives in Air" (Pope, Windsor lines 113-114, 133-134).

In these passages, Pope utilizes the couplet's ability to hold opposites in creative tension (Hunter). He presents an image of a powerful, commercially expansive Britain ("Earth's distant Ends our Glory shall behold" [Pope, Windsor line 401]) while simultaneously forcing the reader to confront the human and natural cost of that "conquest" (Hunter). This complexity reflects his own divided loyalties as a "suff'ring" Catholic (Erskine-Hill) who is also a proud Englishman. The poem's final vision of a peaceful, divinely sanctioned commerce under Queen Anne, "Exil'd by Thee from Earth to deepest Hell, / In Brazen Bonds shall barb'rous Discord dwell" (Pope, Windsor lines 405-406), is thus both a celebration of a specific political treaty and a poignant, qualified hope for a true national "Peace" that would end the internal "Intestine Wars" (Pope, Windsor line 325) that had defined his era.

The Rape of the Lock: Social Satire as Political Allegory

If Windsor Forest uses the couplet to balance overt patriotism with covert historical critique, The Rape of the Lock (1714) employs the same formal properties to frame a seemingly trivial social squabble as a microcosm of a larger political and moral disorder (Erskine-Hill). The poem, written for Pope's fellow Catholic, John Caryll, appears on its surface to be a "purely" social satire (Erskine-Hill; Pope, "Footnotes"). However, as both Erskine-Hill and Hunter suggest, Pope embeds within the poem a potent critique of the post-Revolutionary Whig world, a world he saw as defined by triviality, corrupted values, and a break from legitimate order. The heroic couplet, with its capacity for jarring juxtapositions and complex hierarchies, becomes the perfect instrument for this critique (Hunter).

Erskine-Hill notes that the poem is "contrived to remind us of historical and political matters," suggesting the "rape" of Belinda's lock serves as an allegory for the "rape of a kingdom" (Erskine-Hill). The central Game of Ombre (Pope, Rape III.27-100), as Erskine-Hill points out, was a "well-understood mode for witty comment on political affairs" at the time (Erskine-Hill). The poem's social world, set at the royal Hampton Court, is dominated by "Nymphs at home" and concerns itself with gossip where "At ev'ry Word a Reputation dies" (Pope, Rape III.6, 16). Yet, this triviality is pointedly contrasted with the "Foreign Tyrants" (Pope, Rape III.6) being discussed by statesmen in the same building, linking the moral emptiness of the court with the larger affairs of state.

The poem’s most devastating critique comes through the couplet's power of equation, which Hunter analyzes in Pope's use of poetic lists (Hunter). The famous line from Belinda’s toilet,

Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux

(Pope, Rape I.138)

uses the structure of the line to place sacred and profane objects on an equal footing, implying "inappropriate comparisons that blur distinctions" (Hunter). This, Hunter argues, is Pope's indictment of a "patriarchal" society that has flattened its own "hierarchies" (Hunter). The couplet form here perfectly enacts the very corruption it describes. This technique achieves its most biting political resonance in Canto III, where Pope yokes the triviality of the court with the brutal realities of the state:

The hungry Judges soon the Sentence sign,

And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine

(Pope, Rape III.21-22)

As Hunter points out, this is a shocking moment of symbolic "cannibalism" and "human sacrifice," where the balanced couplet forces the reader to equate the polite custom of dining with the violent act of execution (Hunter). This is a profound political statement about the callousness of the ruling class.

This critique of a broken social and political order culminates in the poem’s climax. The "rape" itself is described in militaristic terms, and the resulting chaos is linked to the fall of "Triumphal Arches" and "th' Imperial Tow'rs of Troy" (Pope, Rape III.173-176). The key couplet, as both critics implicitly note, is:

What Wonder then, fair Nymph! thy Hairs shou'd feel

The conqu'ring Force of unresisted Steel?

(Pope, Rape III.177-178)

As Erskine-Hill highlights, the phrase "conqu'ring Force of unresisted Steel" was a potent Jacobite image for the 1688 Revolution, explicitly linking the violation of Belinda to the "rape" of the Stuart kingdom by William III (Erskine-Hill). Pope's Key to the Lock, a satirical pamphlet he wrote to mock political interpretations, only served to reinforce their plausibility (Erskine-Hill). Thus, The Rape of the Lock demonstrates the "poetics of proscription" at its most subtle. By using the couplet's power to yoke disparate ideas, Pope, as Hunter suggests, "admires... that which he lashes"—the "gorgeously and intricately corrupt a culture"—while simultaneously lodging a deep, allegorical protest against the political and moral foundations of that very culture (Hunter).

Conclusion

In conclusion, Alexander Pope's poetics are inseparable from his political and personal reality as a "convict a Papist" (Erskine-Hill). His choice and mastery of the heroic couplet were not merely an aesthetic pursuit of "correctness" but a vital strategic decision. As J. Paul Hunter argues, the couplet’s "ideology" of creative tension, qualification, and the balancing of unresolved oppositions provided the perfect formal structure for a poet whose own loyalties were inherently divided and whose critiques had to be veiled (Hunter). This paper has synthesized Howard Erskine-Hill's historical contextualization of Pope's proscribed identity with Hunter's formal analysis to demonstrate how this "poetics of proscription" operates in Windsor Forest and The Rape of the Lock.

In Windsor Forest, Pope uses the couplet's balancing capacity to sustain a dual narrative: one of overt patriotism celebrating the Tory Peace of Utrecht, the other a covert, Jacobite-leaning lament for a lost Stuart order, critiquing the "conquest" of 1688 (Erskine-Hill). The form allows him to hold both the hunter and the prey, the patriot and the victim, in simultaneous view (Hunter; Pope, Windsor lines 93-134). In The Rape of the Lock, the couplet's power of juxtaposition is used to frame a social satire as a profound political allegory. By equating the trivial ("Patches") with the sacred ("Bibles") and the polite ("Dine") with the brutal ("hang"), Pope satirizes a Whig culture he viewed as having lost all moral proportion, implicitly linking its "rape" by a "conqu'ring Force" to the dynastic shift that marginalized him and his "suff'ring Party" (Hunter; Erskine-Hill; Pope, Rape I.138, III.21-22, III.178). For Pope, the couplet was the essential form that allowed him to manage these contradictions, embedding his most dangerous critiques within a structure of unimpeachable Augustan polish. His genius was in transforming a form often seen as rigid into a dynamic tool of intellectual, moral, and political liberation, allowing his independent voice to resonate powerfully from the margins.

Works Cited

Erskine-Hill, Howard. “Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in His Time.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1981, pp. 123–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2738239. Accessed 29 Oct. 2025.

Hunter, J. Paul. “FORM AS MEANING: POPE AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE COUPLET.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 37, no. 3, 1996, pp. 257–70. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41467812. Accessed 29 Oct. 2025.

Pope, Alexander. An Epistle From Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot. Creative Media Partners, LLC, 2018.

Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism: Edited with Introduction and Notes. Edited by Alfred S. West, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings. Edited by Leo Damrosch and Leopold Damrosch, Penguin Publishing Group, 2011.

Pope, Alexander. Windsor-Forest. To the Right Honourable George Lord Lansdown. By Mr. Pope. Creative Media Partners, LLC, 2018.