Eloisa to Abelard: Alexander Pope the Romantic

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In 1707, the young Alexander Pope wrote a verse epistle on the theme of unhappy love, and written in the Latin vein. The female speaker of the poem is a real-life figure who lived and died centuries before Pope. In the poem, she addresses her male lover, expressing her grief and sadness over their separation from each other.

The title of the poem? ‘Sappho to Phaon’, based loosely on one of Ovid’s Heroides. Ten years later, Pope would write a far more famous heroic epistle which wasn’t a translation from the Latin, but an original composition. That poem was the far more famous ‘Eloisa to Abelard’.

Eloisa to Abelard is not a typical Alexander Pope poem. There’s none of the mock-heroic satire we find in The Rape of the Lock or The Dunciad, two of Pope’s best-known and most emblematic poems. It’s not a didactic piece like An Essay on Criticism (the work that had established Pope’s career when he was still in his early twenties) or An Essay on Man.

Instead, in Eloisa to Abelard we find a verse epistle written in heroic couplets: so far, so Augustan. But in other respects, Pope’s poem seems to prefigure later developments, including Romanticism (the doomed love affair, the stirring appeal to the emotions, the medieval setting) and even that nineteenth-century invention, the dramatic monologue.

The historical relationship which inspired the poem was a tragic tale of doomed love. In early twelfth-century France, Peter Abelard, a brilliant philosopher, became the tutor to a bright young woman named Héloïse. They fell in love and had a secret affair (Abelard was twenty years older than his young lover) and secretly married.

But when Héloïse’s uncle found out, he exacted brutal vengeance by having Abelard castrated. Abelard became a monk and forced Héloïse to become a nun. Some years later, Héloïse chanced upon an autobiographical letter Abelard had written to a friend detailing his misery (this letter survives: it’s usually known by the title Historia Calamitatum and might be regarded as an early work of autobiography or memoir). This discovery sparked an emotional exchange of letters between the two former lovers.

Few people read Eloisa to Abelard now outside of universities, because few people read Pope, even though they should. Oscar Wilde’s famous quip – ‘There are two ways to dislike poetry. One is to dislike it. The other is to read Pope’ – has met with murmurs of agreement amongst many students and reluctant readers. But Pope’s heroic couplets are not as stiff and dry and coldly rational as the label ‘Augustan’ may first suggest, and if anyone’s on the fence about Pope as a poet, they could do worse than read this poem.

The one line from the poem which everyone knows, but hardly anyone knows it’s even one of Pope’s, is found in the 209^th line of the poem (which runs to 366 lines in all):

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
‘Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;’
Desires composed, affections ever even,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heaven.

The third line quoted above provided that 2004 Jim Carrey film with its title, and these lines from Pope’s poem (well, the first four of them anyway) are recited in the film. Fittingly, the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is all about two people splitting up and trying their best to forget each other in the wake of their separation (resorting to rather extreme measures in order to do so).

The poem as a whole takes the form of a letter Eloisa is writing to her former lover, of course. But after the Victorian revolution in poetic thought which brought us the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning, it’s hard not to be drawn to the more dramatic moments in Pope’s ‘epistles’. They’re there in his other (justly) celebrated verse epistle, ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, which begins in the midst of a lively scene:

Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigued, I said,
Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.
The dog-star rages! nay ’tis past a doubt,
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:
Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

This sounds more like a dramatic scenario than someone sitting down and writing a letter. After all, Pope is addressing John Arbuthnot directly, while he’s in the same room as him, demanding he barricade the door against literary hangers-on and sycophants. In Pope’s poetry, there’s more than a little taster of the dramatic poetry to come, a century later.

True, Eloisa to Abelard is less self-consciously dramatic a work than that later epistle, but there is something in Eloisa’s emotionally charged, heartfelt expression of grief that suggests a dramatic situation, with the reader eavesdropping on her as she composes her letter to her former beloved.

As for the claim that, with Eloisa to Abelard, Pope anticipated the Romantics: that claim is easy enough to demonstrate by reading the poem. Pope may be regarded as the pre-eminent English poet of the Enlightenment or ‘Age of Reason’, but in this poem we find intense personal emotion rather than objective reason. Eloisa’s tormented psyche may reveal itself to us in closed rhyming couplets, but the spirit that would govern Romanticism less than a century later is already there, right from the opening lines:

In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heavenly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal’s veins?
Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?
Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
Yet, yet I love!—From Abelard it came,
And Eloisa yet must kiss the name.

Solitude, contemplation, melancholy, tumult, love: all watchwords of the Romantics, already there in a poem written by someone who became, in many ways, Romanticism’s bugbear. And with its ‘intermingled graves’ and gloomy, doom-laden atmosphere, Pope’s poem might also be regarded as a proto-Gothic work.