The Rape of the lock

 

Hello everyone, this blog is response to Vaidehi Ma'am's task. Here I will discuss some question of one poem "Rape of The Lock"written by Alexander Pope.

Question:-1 According to you who is the protagonist of the poem Clarissa or Belinda ?Why? Give your answer with logical reasons.

Here is some basic information of two character.

Clarissa

            Clarissa is one of the women in attendance at the Hampton Court party. She is complicit in the severing of Belinda’s hair, lending her sewing scissors to the Baron. She later delivers a moralizing sermon on the ephemeral nature of beauty and the importance of good sense once a woman’s looks have faded.

Belinda

          The character of Belinda is the heroine of The Rape of the Lock. Pope bases her character on the historical Arabella Fermor, the daughter of an aristocratic Catholic family. Robert, Lord Petre, a family friend, snipped a lock of her hair without permission, thereby causing a rift between their two families. Pope depicts this incident in the poem.

         According to me Belinda is a protagonist of this poem. Because she is a main character of this poem 

Question:-2-What is beauty?write your  views on it

           According to me Beauty is not Permanent means everything is not Permanent. Beauty is just only for few years in a life span of person. nothing is permanent so what is permanent ?

          If youth is just 5 or Ten years in a life span of 80 years of human life and if you think Youth is just a fraction out of whole life or it is Temporary means, the whole life of a Person life is just a fraction in Whole History! Your life of 100 years is just a fraction in 3000 years of History. Your whole life is Temporary only exactly speaking in time!

           This is not the solution. Instead of developing Aversion towards Beauty, make yourself Beautiful. And Beauty is not confined to certain age. Every age has got it’s beauty. Even at this Age, Rajinikanth is coming out with Bald head and it is a beauty for his age.

Question:-3  Find out a research paper on "The Rape of the Lock". Give the details of the paper and write down in brief what it says about the Poem by Alexander Pope.

          Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is a satirical epic poem, first published in 1712, and then revised and expanded in 1714. Alexander Pope is one of the foremost English poets of the 18th century, having translated Homer and moving in the same literary circles as Jonathan Swift. The Rape of the LockPope, however, suffered from Pott’s disease, which left him stunted and hunchback. Despite this disability, works such as The Rape of the Lock have made him second only to Shakespeare in the annals of English poets.

           The Rape of the Lock is supposedly based on a real incident which Pope compares to the world inhabited by the gods. In the poem, the Baron seeks a lock of Belinda’s hair, hoping to place it on an altar of trophies he collects. In using classical structure and form, Pope satirizes what was essentially a minor disagreement, comparing the abduction of Helen of Troy to a suitor cutting off a lock of hair. Called high burlesque, the literary legacy of the poem is such that three of Uranus’ moons—Belinda, Umbriel, and Ariel—are named after characters in The Rape of the Lock.

           The poem was originally published anonymously in May 1712, but after extensive revision appeared under Pope’s name two years later. Pope himself claimed that the work sold over three thousand copies in just the first four days. Pope also published A Key to the Lock in 1714 under the penname Esdras Barnivelt, a humorous piece that warns against anyone taking The Rape of the Lock seriously.

Question:-4- Write your views about the significance of hair. Is it symbolic?

          The hair symbolizes both vanity and chastity. At certain moments in the poem, Belinda's obsession with her hair seems like the foolish preoccupation of a young woman who is rather silly and unserious. However, at other times, it represents her virtue. In that sense, the hair could also be said to represent the experience of womanhood more generally.

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