'The Green Myriads in the Peopled Grass'

To his friend William Fortescue, a lawyer and judge, Alexander Pope writes on September  17, 1720: 

“You are a superior genius to me in rambling: you, like a pigeon (to which I would sooner compare a lawyer than a hawk), can fly some hundred leagues at a pitch; I, like a poor squirrel, am continually in motion indeed, but it is a cage of about three foot; my little excursions are but like those of a shop-keeper, who walks every day a mile or two before his own door, but minds his business.”

 

Pope (1688-1744) was born a Roman Catholic at a time when Catholics were a legally and socially abused minority in England. Starting in early childhood, he was often sickly. Pott disease, or tuberculosis of the spine, left him deformed and undersized, he never grew taller than four feet, six inches, and he became one of the greatest poets in the language. His medicine was wit. In the Fortescue letter, he covertly alludes to his disabilities without self-pity. In his “Life of Pope,” Dr. Johnson writes:

 

“The person of Pope is well known not to have been formed by the nicest model. He has . . . compared himself to a spider, and by another is described as protuberant behind and before. He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy; but he was of a constitution originally feeble and weak, and as bodies of a tender frame are easily distorted his deformity was probably in part the effect of his application. . . . By natural deformity or accidental distortion his vital functions were so much disordered that his life was a ‘long disease.’”

 

Theodore Dalrymple in 2014 devoted an essay to Pope, “Warmth is Cool,” in which he writes: “There is no doubt that he was one of the wittiest persons who ever lived. His wit, if I may so put it, is deep: it infuses everything he does. It is not the wit of witticism alone; it is the wit of a world outlook.”

 

An important distinction. Style is never filigree, gingerbread hammered on after the house is standing. Pope, like his friend Jonathan Swift, looked at the world wittily. There is something of the verb about wit. The OED gives fourteen gradations of meaning for wit as a verb, none of them current. Dalrymple gives us the greater Pope, the one who was a colossal wit but never merely a wit:

 

“Pope was not just a satirist, a good deal deeper than many give him credit for having been; his descriptions of nature were precise, the fruit of close observation (and no one observes closely what he neither values nor thinks important). Anyone who has lain in grass will recognise the aptness of this line: 'The green myriads in the peopled grass . . . ’”

 

That lovely line is from the seventh section of “An Essay on Man: Epistle I”:

 

“Far as creation’s ample range extends,

The scale of sensual, mental pow’rs ascends:

Mark how it mounts, to man’s imperial race,

From the green myriads in the peopled grass:

What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,

The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam…”

 

Pope died on this date, May 30, in 1744 at age fifty-six.