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Here stood Ill Nature like an ancient maid, Her wrinkled form in black and white arrayed; With store of prayers, for mornings, nights, and noons, Her hand is filled; her bosom with lampoons. Meaning. This description occurs in Canto IV when Umbriel descends to the subterranean Cave of Spleen, ruled over by the Queen of Spleen, in a parody of the epic trope of the hero’s journey to the underworld. In this cave, Umbriel passes by a number of strange creatures, their bodies warped by spleen—a force that was, in Pope’s day, believed to be the cause of female bodily disfunction. Although the Cave of Spleen episode is one of the poem’s more fantastical sections and should be read rather lightheartedly, it also reveals much about the gender politics of the world Pope has created. Many critics have chosen to interpret the Cave of Spleen as a kind of “darker mirror” of the surface world’s courtly life. While the court is obsessed with female beauty to the point of absurdity, the Cave of Spleen’s inhabitants represent a kind of ghoulish version society’s female outcasts. The personified “Ill Nature,” like Belinda, is supposed to be virginal, but she is not young (and thus “fair and chaste”), but is instead a spinster, “an ancient maid” with a “wrinkled form.” This emphasizes the paradoxical standards set for women in Pope’s world—Belinda is praised by the sylphs and society as a whole for her youth and her spotless reputation for chastity, but “Ill Nature” is condemned for her chastity in her old age. Apparently then, women are expected at some point to sacrifice what society considers their greatest virtue to avoid being considered undesirable by men and condemned to a grotesque underworld.