Pope's Sermo Polysemus : the Virgilian Tradition in The Rape of the lock

Following the exegetist Servius who had called the Aeneid opening a sermo polysemus , Pope uses the device of “a phrase capable of carrying many connotations” throughout The Rape of the Lock : by alluding simultaneously to many different contexts, he makes the poem elusively polysemous. Under this polysemous cover, Pope is able to make audaciously naughty hints without, however, saying everything, and thus parody Servius who thought he had detected in Virgil the poetic strategy of “not saying everything.” With the parody‐orgasm scene being allusively analogous to the cave episode in which Dido and Aeneas consummate their union, Pope parodies yet another pedestrian mention of a poet's rudiments: since according to the exegetist Donatus Virgil wanted the reader to infer but did not wish to state what happens in the cave scene, Pope merely hints at that which cannot be stated. the comments made by Virgil's exegetists, then, are part of the poem's mode of existence. Consequently, when Pope transmogrifies Virgil's epic into something even less dignified than mock‐epic he has Servius' authority, according to whom the Fourth Aeneid is “almostcomical” ‐ because it deals with the subject of love.