The Rape of the Lock

“The Rape of the Lock” is a mock-epic divided into five sections called cantos. Written in an Augustan neoclassic style, Pope uses the mock-epic format to both uphold and challenge classical conventions of the time. The epic was considered the highest form of poetic art and taken very seriously. The poems are long and sprawling, with heroes often overcoming significant challenges or enduring painstaking journeys. In contrast, “The Rape of the Lock” has a less serious subject and much shorter length, thus “mocking” the epic form. Yet Pope chose to elevate the poem to an epic scale in order to make a social comment about the concerns of the upper classes. The form enhances the dramatic implications of the poem and demands that “trivial things” (Line 2) still be taken seriously; this is meant to undermine the values of fashionable society and suggest a moralizing stance.

The poem’s meter is largely iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line, with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables), with variations throughout. Iambic pentameter is the meter that most closely captures the cadence of spoken English, and its effectiveness is echoed in the many speeches of the poem.