Page:Alexander Pope (Leslie).djvu/84

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of poetic phraseology, which has lost all sharpness of impression in its long circulation. Here, for example, is Pope's version of a simile in the fourth book:—

As when the winds, ascending by degreesFirst move the whitening surface of the seas,The billows float in order to the shore,The waves behind roll on the waves before,Till with the growing storm the deeps arise,Foam o'er the rocks, and thunder to the skies.

Each phrase is either wrong or escapes from error by vagueness, and one would swear that Pope had never seen the sea. Chapman says,—

And as when with the west wind flaws, the sea thrusts up her wavesOne after other, thick and high, upon the groaning shores,First in herself loud, but opposed with banks and rocks she roars,And all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam.

This is both clumsy and introduces the quaint and unauthorized image of a pig, but it is unmistakably vivid. Pope is equally troubled when he has to deal with Homer's down-right vernacular. He sometimes ventures apologetically to give the original word. He allows Achilles to speak pretty vigorously to Agamemnon in the first book:—

O monster! mix'd of insolence and fear,Thou dog in forehead, but in heart a deer!

Chapman translates the phrase more fully, but adds a characteristic quibble:—

Thou ever steep'd in wine,Dog's face, with heart but of a hart.

Tickell manages the imputation of drink, but has to slur over the dog and the deer:—

Valiant with wine and furious from the bowl,Thou fierce-look'd talker, with a coward soul.

Elsewhere Pope hesitates in the use of such plain speak-

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