30 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PopeAn Essay on Man
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1734A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Epistle 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary Epistle 2: “On the Nature and State of Man with Respect to Himself, as an Individual”
In Section 1 (Lines 1-52), the speaker argues that humanity should try to understand itself before trying to understand God. They describe people as stuck between many contradictory impulses: The ability to reason and the ability to feel, the desire to act and the desire to contemplate. The “chaos of thought and passion” (Line 13) empowers humans to be masters over nature, but people are still weak compared to nature’s power. People can understand the movements of the comets but cannot control their own passions: “What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone” (Line 42). Because human reason is fallible, it is important to regard the products of rationality with a healthy skepticism and do away with reason that has been corrupted by pride, vanity, or “curious pleasure” (Line 48).
Section 2 (Lines 53-92) explores the speaker’s idea of self-love and reason as two opposing forces that coexist in the psyche of every person. Reason “restrains” (Line 54) self-love. The speaker argues that self-love motivates people to act, and reason provides necessary balance: “Attention, habit, and experience” (Line 79) strengthen the ability to reason. The speaker says that many “subtle schoolmen” (Line 81) teach that reason and self-love are divided against each other. The speaker sees this as a false understanding; they believe that reason and self-love ideally work together to achieve one purpose, the avoidance of pain and the achievement of pleasure. The desire for pleasure is complex, however; if it becomes too strong it can lead to evil.
In section 3 (Line 93-202), the speaker argues that passion, a type of self-love, can be healthy if guarded by reason (Line 98). The passions should be embraced because they give purpose to life, while reason is a necessary tool to control them. “The balance of the mind” (Line 122) is maintained by following “nature’s road” (Line 117). If a person is ruled by a single passion their mind becomes “disease[d]” (Line 140). This is Nature’s way of inflicting harm for a passion that has overwhelmed reason. The inferior passions are removed from individuals, much like a doctor removing excess “humours” to cure “gout” (Lines 158-160).
The overruling passion is not meant to be completely removed. It should be curtailed by reason; then it becomes “more as friend than foe” (Line 164). The speaker says that people are driven by wealth, power, fame, and knowledge, but they are usually motivated most strongly by convenience. People become more virtuous as they learn how to discern “good from ill” (Line 175) and understand how passion is a component of human virtue. The speaker argues that human flaws are the seeds of virtue. Truth and humor can arise from stubbornness or fear, valor from rage, lust can give way to love, and jealousy can inspire one to imitate admirable traits in others.
In Section 4 (Lines 203-216), the speaker uses the contrast between light and dark to represent vice and virtue. They say that every individual has both in equal parts.
Section 5 (Lines 217-230) discusses vice. Vice is as an ugly monster that people try to avoid seeing, but they must examine it to understand it. However, people should not see vice too often, because then they will gravitate toward it. Humans see vices in others, but typically refuse to see it in themselves. They claim that those with the worst vices are people who live far away from them.
In Section 6 (Lines 231-294), the speaker explores how vice and virtue are aspects of every individual nature. Most people are in between these qualities: Even the worst people exhibit virtue, and even the best are “by fits, what they despise” (Line 234). From the individual differences between people, God constructs a unity that serves the “joy, the peace, the glory of mankind” (Line 248). People depend on each other to serve a large purpose. Once their death becomes near, they accept it because they believe that they will achieve the state that they desired during life. Though people are foolish, “God is wise” (Line 294).
Analysis: Epistle 2
This epistle focuses on the individual nature of human beings and their psychology. The speaker uses imagery, anaphora, allusions, and amplification to explore the relationship between reason and passion and how they function to guide individual people.
The speaker uses the image of an isthmus, or a small strip of land bridging continents, to capture the middling condition of humans. According to the speaker, humans are gifted with more reason than animals but also have less reason than God; thus humans are stuck “between [...] god, or beast” (Lines 7- 8). Human pride can lead to the presumptuous view that humanity can access God’s perspective. The speaker illustrates the gap in understanding between humans and God in the first line: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan” (Line 1). Humans cannot completely understand God and should turn their attention toward understanding themselves: This is within their abilities. Line 1 inverts the conventional order of words: Instead of writing the more expected “Presume not to scan God,” Pope inverts word order to emphasize God’s perspective as superior to that of humans and to write a perfectly rhymed couplet.
We see anaphora, or repetition of a phrase, in lines 5-6: “With too much knowledge for the sceptic side/with too much weakness for the stoic’s pride.” “With too much” emphasizes the excessive reason and emotionalism of humanity. In addition, the repetition of “first good, first perfect, and first fair” (Line 24) highlights the human belief of being the most important being in the universe. Humans make fools of themselves by believing this; there are limitations to what they can achieve.
The speaker uses circles to highlight humanity’s pointless pride. They describe the “mazy round” (Line 25), or the circles that Plato’s followers walked in as they contemplated philosophy, the priests from Eastern religions who in “giddy circles run” (27), mimicking the sun. The speaker is putting up a mirror to the absurdity of humans believing that they can understand the world like God.
The speaker uses astronomical imagery to evoke the idea of the heavens and create a mood of wonder. They believe that humans study astronomy to understand the universe, that understanding the solar system is different from creating or controlling it. The speaker repeats commands that increasingly point out humanity’s lack of power: “Go, measure the earth, weigh air, and state the tides/Instruct the planets [...] Correct old time, and regulate the sun” (Lines 20-22). The speaker uses amplification, where see an increasing intensity of statements: Each clause escalates the speaker’s instructions and ends on the most drastic one. This underscores the sardonic tone: It is not possible for a human to “regulate the sun.”
The speaker alludes to “Aaron’s serpent” (Line 132) to convey the idea of a single overruling passion consuming all else. “Aaron’s serpent” refers to the biblical story of Aaron, Moses’s brother from Exodus. The Pharoah asked for a miracle to prove God’s existence. Aaron threw a rod before the Pharoah of Egypt under God’s direction, and the rod became a serpent. The Pharoah then brought his magicians to study the event, and they were able to turn rods into serpents as well. The Pharoah declared that this meant that God did not exist. However, Aaron’s serpent ate all the serpents that the magicians had.
The speaker alludes to the serpent as dominating all the other serpents; this suggests how one passion can swallow up others if imbalanced. The speaker argues that passion unconstrained by reason acts similarly. They name historical rulers such as Nero, Titus, Catiline, Decius, and Curtius to show how ambition can be a vice or a virtue, depending on whether a person can control it.
The speaker contrasts light and dark to show that each human has both good and bad qualities. Humans should not seek to remove all their vices, as virtue and vice exist in equal parts. To eradicate one’s vices is to take white and black and “blend, soften, and unite” (Line 213) them so much that there is no longer any black or white left. In other words, there are no longer any virtues either.
To extend their religious theme, the speaker uses “beads and pray’r books” (Line 280) to show the comfort and delight that faith in an afterlife brings people. They compare this comfort to the “playthings” (Line 277) that entertain children. The speaker lists the “the learned [...] the fool [...] the rich [...] the poor” (Lines 263-266) to express the universality of their claims. They believe that every single person on earth, regardless of their differences, welcomes the comforting idea that after death, there is happiness still possible for humans.
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