London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal

The 263-line poem is written in the style of the satirical epic or mock-epic, using pairs of rhyming lines known as heroic couplets—a poetic form popularized by John Dryden (1631-1700) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). These couplets follow an AABBCC rhyme scheme as in:

Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel,

When injur’d Thales bids the town farewell,

Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend,

I praise the hermit, but regret the friend (Lines 1-4).

Ancient Greek and Roman poetry were often translated into English using heroic couplets; hence Neoclassical writers’ preference for the form. One of the features of the heroic couplet, as evident in “London,” is that the lines are written in iambic pentameter, with five sets of unstressed and stressed sounds in each line. For instance, the meter of Line 1 scans as follows: “Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel."

Heroic couplets in 18th-century poems rarely use enjambment—when a line doesn’t end with a punctuation mark implying a pause—and usually end on a finished clause. This is in keeping with Augustan-Age ideas about elegance, order, and wholeness in literary and aesthetic forms.