For Credit: The Pleasures of the Poem (last chance to post for Week 5)

"His fall was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left the name, at which the world grew pale,
To paint a moral, or adorn a tale."
(Vanity of Human Wishes, l. 219 - 222)

T. S. Eliot thought that those lines constitute one of the best passages in all of restoration and eighteenth-century verse. I particularly like the way that the reader gets to participate in the fall that Johnson describes: we are reading the "tale" that Charles XII "adorns" and gleaning the moral that Johnson extracts from his biography.

My question in class earlier this week about the poetic qualities of this poem fell pretty flat, but now that we've spent more time working through Johnson's verse, I'd like to pose it again, in a slightly different way.

What are the pleasures of this text? Johnson is one of the eighteenth-century masters of the heroic couplet, although his use of the form differs from Dryden's. Identify a couplet or two that seem to you particularly effective or powerful, and describe what it is about them that impresses you.

Deadline: Saturday (9/26), midnight.