Monday, May 22, 2006

Pope's c-cough of sorts

In honor of Alexander Pope's 274th birthday we post an excerpt from his Essay On Man that is reminiscent in form and spirit of Below Dunster's chiasthmatic coughs:

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king.
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.


We say "reminiscent" (as opposed to "similar," "evocative," etc.) because, of course, Dunster was replete with coughs wrought chiasthmatically from well before the days of Pope--regrettably, few have survived. O happy realm, whose people pray for coughs to linger centuries!
Well, we need say little more about this man or his pen. Suffice it to say we wish he had been a Dunsterian, but we console ourselves in his Dunsteriad-evoking work, The Dunciad (1728: The Dunciad: An Heroic Poem; 1729: The Dunciad Variorum; 1742: The New Dunciad; 1743: The Dunciad in Four Books), in which Pope makes clear his pinings for a hypothetical Below Dunster-like world, sadly ignorant that such a domain was in fact flourishing on his own island and surely would have honored an artist of his caliber with the magnificentest of sloes. It is not unlikely that, had the above quatrain been genuinely chiasthmatic, Dunsterians of the time may have heard from afar and transported the short man below Dunster directly.
Posthumously Below Dunster honors him with plums and a post.

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