At home with Alexander Pope

On shutting out the world

JMW Turner: Pope’s Villa At Twickenham (1808).

When I think of poets retiring from the world, my thoughts turn to Andrew Marvell slinking into his garden to enjoy his “green thought in a green shade” after the turmoil of the English Civil War.

There’s an attractiveness to this way of leaving it all behind.

Or, less happily, I think of Ovid, who lived the latter part of his life away from the fray, but this was while languishing in hated exile from the city that was the centre of his universe.

I have been thinking recently, though, about another famous poet who shut the door on the world: Alexander Pope. In his Epistle to John Arbuthnot, he wrote:

P[ope]: Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd, I said,

Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead.

The Dog-star rages! nay't is past a doubt,

All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out.

And then continued:

What walls can guard me, or what shade can hide?

They pierce my thickets, thro' my Grot they glide;

Just as in Pope’s poem, the dog days now rage in the northern hemisphere as I write this, and it’s unclear to me whether Bedlam (madness) or Parnassus (poetry) has the upper hand.

I can certainly feel the desire to hide in the shade. The sun is oppressive here. And in the wider world, there are plenty of other things I want to shield myself from.

Probably Pope didn’t need to shelter from the sun in his elaborate grotto (“Grot”), as Samuel Johnson observed (see below).

But it was, along with his residence, a haven for him. And in the current summer heat, ¹ it would be an attractive place for me right now, out of the fierce sun, and all the more so as it used “ores, spars, mundic, stalactites, crystals, Bristol and Cornish diamonds”—giving it some flavour of the West Country, my own part of England.

An illustration of Pope’s grotto. Taken from the book “London and its Environs” by Rev. Daniel Lysons, Rector of Rodmarton (1811 edition).

However, Pope’s grotto did not find favour with all contemporaries.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague, after she and Pope had a falling out, mocked it:

Here chose the goddess her belov’d retreat,
Which Phoebus tries in vain to penetrate

[…]
Perpetual fogs enclose the sacred Cave;
The neighbouring sinks their fragrant odours gave.

And Samuel Johnson weighed in as alluded to above (and apparently inaccurately as to Pope’s motives):

“A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit rather than exclude the sun, but Pope’s excavation was requisite as an entrance to his garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.”

Pope was often embroiled in polemics, many of his own making, as he attacked other writers in print and was attacked in return. In that sense, he needed a haven more than most.

As a person, he left a rather mixed reputation.² But his physical disabilities, caused by Pott's disease, led him to be cruelly subjected to personal abuse in a world that was inclined to mockery (something he was, of course, a master of himself).

WB Yeats’ beautiful, enigmatic poem Long-Legged Fly contains these lines:

Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,

Keep those children out.

Of course, Yeats was writing about the Pope, not Alexander. ³

But Alexander Pope, as a Catholic, was not only keeping other people out as he asked his friend to close the door; he found himself permanently shut out of the seats of power too.

He wasn’t even allowed to live within ten miles of the centre of London.

Only following the Catholic Relief Act of 1791, long after Pope’s death, were Catholics given freedom to worship and live in London.

Pope created his haven, his grotto, his place where he could shut the door on the world while in a state of internal exile. ⁴

His doors served to keep the world at bay; others excluded him. Pope was on both sides of a closed door.

Many people, of course, find themselves on only one side of an entrance – the outside. I think of the migrants who find doors shut on them everywhere they turn.

I think of the play Thomas More and its famous Strangers’ speech, which may have been written by Shakespeare.

In this scene where the speech is delivered, the mob is demanding “the removing of the strangers”. More plays along with them, and what follows is his thought experiment assuming they get what they want:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England;

He then goes on to spell out the likely consequences:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding to the ports and costs for transportation.

And then More ends by describing the mob’s likely future in such a world:

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

In other words, the doors that we shut on others could easily be shut on us.

And this was just what happened to the historical Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor. In 1534 he found himself on the wrong side of the gates of the Tower of London when he refused to sign the 1534 Oath of Succession on the grounds that it repudiated the authority of the Pope. He was executed in 1535.

William Frederick Yeames, The meeting of Sir Thomas More with his daughter after his sentence of death (1872).

The riots described in the play Thomas More find an echo centuries later in the Gordon Riots of 1780 so vividly described by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge (1841). The riots lasted for days in London and were motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment. The protesters wanted to keep the doors of civic participation closed to Catholics.

They’d begun with a peaceful protest against the Papists Act 1778, aimed at reducing the legal discrimination against British Catholics. Then the looting and the rioting began. The doors of churches, embassies, and houses were broken or burnt down. The protestors marched on Parliament, and members of the House of Lords were attacked outside its gates.

The Gordon Riots by John Seymour Lucas (1879).

The authorities hesitated to take firm action at first. But then the government turned to the army to quell the disturbances, and this resulted in perhaps as many as 700 or 800 deaths. The marauding rioters became victims of violence.

The temptation to shut the door and let the world rage in the dog days remains a strong one, whether we live in Marvell’s garden, Pope’s grotto, or a tiny flat in a big city.

But More’s warning and his own experience and Pope’s situation—the internal exile of the outsider—suggest that when we close a door, we can also open up—or at least ignore—other dangerous worlds in which Bedlam, rioting mobs, and the “ravenous fishes” may be let loose.

Though the context is different, the words with which Pope ended his darkly satirical mock epic The Dunciad could also describe a world in which everyone of sense or understanding has retreated to their home and bolted their door. It’s an ending we would all want to avoid:

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;

Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine !

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And universal Darkness buries All.

1. As I write, it’s another record-breaking summer in Tokyo, with the temperature reaching 40 desgreees celsius recently.

2. For a bizarre and cruel (but not wholly untypical) verdict from one 19th-century biographer, George Gilfillan, a man of the church celebrated in his time for his literary activities, see this: "In Pope, both bodily and mentally, there lay a crooked, waspish, and petty nature. His form too faithfully reflected his character. He was never, from the beginning to the close of his life, a great, broad, genial being. There was an unhealthy taint which partly enfeebled and partly corrupted him. His self-will, his ambition, his Pariah position, as belonging to the Roman Catholic faith, the feebleness of his constitution, the uncertainty of his real creed, and one or two other circumstances we do not choose to name, combined to create a life-long ulcer in his heart and temper, against which the vigour of his mind, the enthusiasm of his literary tastes, and the warmth of his heart, struggled with much difficulty. He had not, in short, the basis of a truly great poet, either in imagination or in nature. Nor, with all his incredible industry, tact, and talent, did he ever rise into the "seventh heaven of invention." A splendid sylph let us call him—a "giant angel" he was not."

3. Curiously, while researching, I came across mention of “La villa del Papa en Twickenham" ("The Pope's Villa in Twickenham" on a page translated into Spanish found while looking for paintings of Alexander Pope's villa). Of course, the Pope had no residence in London.

As for the children mentioned by Yeats – were they being protected, controlled or excluded?

4. His house in Twickenham was over ten miles by road from Westminster, the centre of London, but fewer than ten miles as the crow flies. There was perhaps a degree of latitude in enforcement, or maybe just some grey areas.