It may be true, as we noted last May, that we have entered an era when nobody much reads Alexander Pope (1688–1744). And it may be true that the highly structured verse for which Pope argues in his “Sound and Sense,” our Poem of the Day this past March 14, holds little appeal in an age that prizes deconstruction as a new kind of making, and values authenticity (whatever that means, exactly) over art.

If we don’t read Pope, whose three hundred thirty-fifth birthday came this month on May 21, what are we actually missing? Of course, we no sooner ask the question than we think of three hundred thirty-five depressing postmodern ways to answer it. But no matter how we might try to justify not reading Pope, no matter how we might insist on the irrelevance of everything he represents, still it would be a shame to have missed today’s Poem of the Day.  

“On a Certain Lady at Court” presents us with an admirable woman, a subject which in the hands of any subsequent generation — in Wordsworth’s hands, say — would have resulted in a poem of intolerable sincerity. But here, the brittle archness that so marks the Augustan age betrays a rare, if fleeting, vulnerability, a subtle admixture of wit and wryness.

The three tetrameter abab quatrains enact the kind of clever rhymes, such as “woman/uncommon” and “folly/melancholy,” that resonate with an image larger and more whole than the words alone suggest. Well might “Envy” listen in silence to this catalog of the lady’s virtues. The only thing about her that’s not to envy is her selective deafness. The speaker praises her, but — ah, well! — she turns her head away and fails to hear. 

On a Certain Lady at Court 
by Alexander Pope 

I know the thing that’s most uncommon; 
(Envy be silent, and attend!) 
I know a reasonable woman, 
Handsome and witty, yet a friend. 
 
Not warp’d by passion, awed by rumour, 
Not grave through pride, or gay through folly, 
An equal mixture of good humour, 
And sensible soft melancholy. 
 
‘Has she no faults, then (Envy says), sir?’ 
Yes, she has one, I must aver: 
When all the world conspires to praise her,
The woman’s deaf, and does not hear.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.