An Essay On Man

I have trouble reconciling the man I envision as the author of An Essay on Man and the person I read about in Alexander Pope’s biography.  Pope was an ostracized Catholic, a man of short stature, physically deformed and so skilled at maintaining his friendships that his “work earned him so many enemies that he refused to leave his house without a pair of loaded pistols” (Norton 87).  But his poems…they are epics, beatific and honorable odes to a world that has to wonder if it deserves to hear such verse.  Pope’s An Essay on Man is not his most famous work (That would be The Rape of the Lock) but it is his most ambitious.  Essay is an attempt to map out the workings of the world “a might maze! But not without a plan” and spell out- in heroic couplets none the less- the workings of that plan.  Pope seems to come to the conclusion that it is only foolish ambition that would ever lead humankind to believe that anyone is capable of understanding the order of the universe. 

Only “Presumptuous Man” would dare to question what he perceives as wrong or unrighteous in this world.  Pope explains “respecting man, whatever wrong we call, may, must be right, as relative to all” (91).  Our view of the world is so narrow, so lacking in wider perspective that there is no conceivable way to for us to wholly understand what is needed to balance the scales of the world.  But man is prideful, and we still “ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine/ Earth for whose use? Pride answers, “Tis for mine: For me kind Nature wakes her genial Power” (93).  Pope argues that innocence and ignorance are the “bliss of Man (Could Pride that blessing find)/ is not to act or think beyond mankind” (94).  Pope sees the true order of the universe as unknowable to a species as flawed as ourselves. 

Pope raises interesting questions.  I don’t know that it is possible for a person to understand the universe.  But I know I don’t think we should stop trying.  All the amazing things that Pope lists to show the wonder of the universe “this air, this ocean, and this earth, all matter quick, and bursting into birth”, it all makes me want to know more.   Even as he claims that we can never know the full extent of Truth and Knowledge Pope still revels in the beauty and wonder of the universe.  He is in awe that anything so magnificent has been given to us to enjoy.  So maybe he doesn’t want to jinx it by looking too close. 

Works Cited

Pope Alexander. An Essay on Man. The Norton Anthology of World Literature: New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013.  86-97. Print.