It was the
rage of a king against the incoming and inexorable tide.
Nothing is more singular to contemplate than the variations in form
of what the public calls melody, both in notation and in language.
What delights the ears of one generation distresses or wearies the
ears of another. Elizabethan audiences listened with rapture to long
harangues in bombastic blank verse: a modern audience can not endure
this. The senses of Queen Anne Englishmen were charmed by what they
called the melody of Pope's verse--by its even regularity and steady
flow. To us Pope's verse is full of wit and cerebration, but we find
the measure intolerably monotonous. Indeed, by a curious irony of
fate, Pope, who regarded himself as a supreme poet, has since
frequently been declared to be no poet at all. Keats wrote _Endymion_
in the heroic couplet--the very measure employed by Pope. But his
use of it was so different that this poem would have seemed utterly
lacking in melody to Augustan ears--Pope would have attempted to
"versify" it.
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