...True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. / Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, / The sound must seem an Echo to the sense. Alexander Pope, 1711, 'An Essay on Criticism', 362 21:70 Many writers profess great exactness in punctuation,...

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...occasion. 15. Uncomplimentary lines borrowed from Pope's Essay on Criticism, Part 2, lines 356-57. "A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." Bonner repeats this allusion in Boston column 6. 1 6. Linked with the words "went under," possibly...

...respectively), few versions have followed the example. Pope's well-known comment continues to bite ('A needless Alexandrine ends the song,/ That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along'). The weight and ponderousness of the metre in EngUsh are a substantial disadvantage, evoking as they...

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...Night a Traveler. Perhaps most famously, Pope's Essay on Criticism partially consists of lines such as "A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."2 Much self-reference of interest to critics is less transparent. The text has a "surface" reading...

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...354-357): Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the Song, That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along. The above sequence of iambic pentameters ends in the long (hexametric) alexandrine "That like a wounded...