Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

The peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide, To enclose the lock; now joins it, to divide. Even then, before the fatal engine closed, A wretched Sylph too fondly interposed; Fate urged the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain (But airy substance soon unites again), The meeting points the sacred hair dissever From the fair head, for ever and for ever! Meaning. This passage towards the end of Canto III describes the moment in which the baron actually snips off Belinda’s lock, and the way Pope goes about describing the action once again suggests the ultimate silliness of the whole affair. Referring to the scissors as a “fatal engine” immediately strikes the reader as ridiculous, as they are not being used to threaten Belinda’s life, emphasizing the absurd degree of solemnity the characters are attaching to what amounts to a bad haircut. Additionally, though, in this passage Pope echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost, once again drawing attention to the shadiness of the supposedly good sylphs. The lines “Fate urged the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain / (But airy substance soon unites again)” recalls the moment in Book VI of Milton’s Christian epic in which Satan is stabbed with a sword in a battle against the angels. That passage reads: “The griding sword with discontinuous wound/ Passd through him, but th' Ethereal substance clos'd / Not long divisible” (VI.329-31). This links the sylph with the character of Satan, which is similar to when Ariel is linked to Satan in Canto I, as Pope describes him having “Seem'd to her [Belinda’s] Ear his winning Lips to lay” (much like Milton’s Satan who is “Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve;/ Assaying by his Devilish art to reach/ The Organs of her Fancy”). This repeated link between the sylphs and Satan then suggests that the sylphs are not as innocuous as they claim to be and are perhaps a more sinister moral force at work in the poem.