...monster: While expletives their feeble aid do join, And ten low wards oft creep in one dull line." " A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.' " Soft is the strain, when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows, But...

...ademptum." While expletives their feeble aid do join, And ten low words oft creep in one dull line" " A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.' " Soft is the strain, when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows, But...

...famous passage from An Essay on Criticism quoted earlier, heaps his scorn on such concluding devices: "A needless Alexandrine ends the Song, / That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along," brilliantly slowing up his own line with the "slow length." It is interesting to observe that, less...

...streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep': The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with 'sleep.' (Fr. II) 43 ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown! (Fr. II) 44 True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd...

...alexandrine, and Pope vividly demonstrated the reasons for its relative unpopularity among English poets: 'A needless Alexandrine ends the song/ That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along'. The monometer (onefoot line) is rare, like the heptameter (seven-foot line), also called a 'fourteener'...

...crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,' The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep.' Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some...like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth, or languishing!}- slow; And...

...by Pope, in his "discussion" of writing style: The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep.' Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some...like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. ("An Essay on Criticism") Working with lines in lengths beyond the pentameter, except for the occasional...

...occasion. 15. Uncomplimentary lines borrowed from Pope's Essay on Criticism, Part 2, lines 356-57. "A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." Bonner repeats this allusion in Boston column 6. 1 6. Linked with the words "went under," possibly...

...respectively), few versions have followed the example. Pope's well-known comment continues to bite ('A needless Alexandrine ends the song,/ That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along'). The weight and ponderousness of the metre in EngUsh are a substantial disadvantage, evoking as they...

...Night a Traveler. Perhaps most famously, Pope's Essay on Criticism partially consists of lines such as "A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."2 Much self-reference of interest to critics is less transparent. The text has a "surface" reading...