45 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PopeThe Dunciad
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1743A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 4 Summary
The fourth book begins with its own invocation to Chaos and Night, and then dives into the apocalypse. The prophecies of Book 3 have come to pass, and England has been plunged into chaos and darkness. Dulness takes her throne, with Cibber on her lap. Science has been chained; Wit has been exiled; Logic has been gagged; Rhetoric has been stripped. Mathematics has been left alone, considered too mad to be bound. The imprisoned Muses are watched over by Envy and Flattery.
The beautiful and the logical now sufficiently restrained, Dulness’s supplicants appear to praise her each in turn. The first is Opera, a foreigner in patchwork clothing. She tells Dulness how she will drive the Muses away and be triumphant in both the church and on the stage—unless she is thwarted by George Frideric Handel. The queen has him exiled to Ireland.
Fame blows her trumpet and all the Dunces of the world surround Dulness like bees buzzing around their queen. These followers include those who actively use her power to influence the world, as well as those who aid her through weakness or ignorance, those who support the dull work of other Dunces, and many others: “There marched the bard and blockhead, side by side, / who rhym’d for hire, and patroniz’d for pride” (4: 101-02).
Dulness orders the Dunces to revive the works of classic authors but add their own names and edit the works heavily to remove any sense or beauty they might have held. After this pronouncement, the Dunces push forward to address the queen, but the ghost of a famous schoolmaster appears. He shares all the good works the schools do in her name to prevent the youth from learning anything useful.
An assembly of university representatives appear next, all those who drown academia in dull scholastic lectures and are averse to logic or innovation. Richard Bentley appears from among their ranks and boasts of how his criticism makes even Horace and Milton boring. Lectures focus on minor details of translation and miss the sense and soul of the writing. He claims that it is in wisdom, not folly, that true devotion to Dulness lives. Only the learned are able to really talk a thing to death.
Bentley is followed by a nobleman, his servant, and his mistress. The servant recounts the lord’s history, a life devoted entirely to Dulness. After school and college days of learning little, he set off to Europe on the grand tour, learning even less. He returned with nothing to show for his trips to foreign countries other than having been there and, more importantly, having been seen there. The mistress beside him was formerly a nun, and the nobleman and servant are both in love with her. Dulness accepts them all.
The next supplicant is an idle lord, too lazy to approach the queen, or even speak. Following him is a forger of antiquities who cheats noblemen out of their money. He enables the practice the rich have of collecting ancient books and objects without knowing anything about them, wasting wealth on foolishness. Even more foolish are the next group, who grow flowers or chase butterflies for the sole purpose of naming or cataloguing them, ignoring their inherent natural beauty and the God who created them.
There follows a speech on the best ways not to discover God out in the world. These include focusing too much on the mechanical nature of the universe, obsessing over the “self” and ignoring its relationship with the world, and placing narrow definitions on things, especially God.
Dulness then proceeds to bestow her gifts upon her attendants. On some she grants impudence, on others self-conceit. To some she gifts interest only in politics or fashion. Having done this, she gives out titles and honors to those assembled, blesses them all, and sends them out into the world. To each she gives specific instructions. In the midst of her speech, she gives a mighty yawn that causes much of the world to yawn in return. The book ends with the narrator despairing at the state of the world: “Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All” (4: 655-56).
Book 4 Analysis
At 656 lines, the fourth book is the longest in the collection. It was originally published as a sequel, and it can be read either on its own or as the final of four books. Its inclusion with the others dramatically changes the tone of the whole, however. Whereas the first three books draw heavily from Virgil, the fourth takes its cues from Milton and the Book of Revelation. The lighthearted tone that characterizes Cibber’s crowning, Dulness’s games, and the vision of the underworld has been replaced by the doom of the end times.
Book 4 is also significantly more allegorical than the previous three. The physical world is presented more symbolically, and the symbolic world is more physically present. Whereas concepts like the Muses may have been mentioned in passing before, here they are physical entities who have been shackled alongside other personified concepts like Science and Logic.
This doesn’t mean that Pope has abandoned parody, sarcasm, and scatological humor. Almost immediately, the author pairs a rather symbolic image—“She mounts the Throne: her head a Cloud conceal’d”—with quite a crude one—“In broad Effulgence all below reveal’d” (4: 17-18). Lest the reader not quite grasp his meaning, Pope includes an explicit adage in the accompanying note: “The higher you climb, the more you show––Verified in no instance more than in Dulness aspiring. Emblematized also by an Ape climbing and exposing his posteriors” (4: R12).
Allegory meets obscenity soon after, when “now had Fame’s posterior Trumpet blown, / And all the Nations summon’d to the Throne” (4: 71-72). The author, of course, claims in the notes that he is not making a crude fart joke at all but instead alluding to Samuel Butler’s satirical poem Hudibras. This plausible deniability and play at innocence is one of the most common elements of The Dunciad’s notes.
The assembled Dunces are addressed in turn, and Pope takes the opportunity to present their offences in greater detail than before. The Decline of Literary and Intellectual Standards is the chief concern and common denominator among those who come before Dulness. When the schoolmaster appears, Pope alludes to a passage from earlier in the poem about Dulness reigning in the time before written language: “Since Man from beast by Words is known, / Words are Man’s province, Words we teach alone” (4: 149-50). Intellectual standards have fallen so much that the very tools that brought humanity out of the darkness are being used to thrust them back into it.
The author makes specific remarks about The Corruption of Mercenary Literature as well, holding the authors who accept payment and the patrons and publishers who pay them in equal contempt. Chief among these Dunces are the critics, paid not to create but to destroy.
Picking up the remaining threads from the original three books, the poem confronts The Intermarriage of Poetry and Politics in 18th-Century England in a much more direct way here. Every corner of English society is inspected and found wanting in Pope’s estimation: The schools, the universities, the courts, and the nobility each have their turn.
In these ways, Book 4 is an extension of Books 1-3, but things turn more sinister in the final hundred lines of the poem. Pope rapidly runs through the various roles that each member of society plays in returning Dulness to power. Dulness’s yawn then infects the land, and all is plunged in darkness:
In vain, in vain,–the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.
She comes! She comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires (4: 627-34).
In a passionate poetic finale, Pope unleashes his worst nightmares: “Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, / Art after Art goes out, and all is Night” (4: 639-40). Truth falls next, followed by Philosophy and Physics. Sense, Mystery, Mathematics, and Religion succumb, continuing the allegory. Morality is the last to fall, implying that without Religion, it is incapable of supporting itself. Everything is darkness; there is no hope for humanity.
It is difficult to reconcile the bleakness of the final book with the humor in most of the poem. There is no message of hope to be found in Book 4, and there is very little levity once the scene is set. The sarcasm and satire are sharp and cruel and target all of society, suggesting that the decline Pope warned about in the earlier books has proceeded unopposed in the years since the original editions were published.
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