Pope begins the third section of his mock epic by describing the Hampton (the coffeehouse or teahouse), where Belinda will play cards and drink coffee. Once again the reader should note the use of juxtaposition as Pope humorously describes the events that occur inside the coffeehouse:
The coffeehouse is a gathering place for fashionable (and usually wealthy) members of society. In the coffeehouse Belinda plays a card game called Ombre against the Baron and one other man. As Belinda plays, the Sylphs fly around her to protect her.
But they are also interested in watching the game.
The reader does not really need to know how Ombre is played to follow the game. Belinda has many spades (as opposed to clubs, diamonds, or hearts) in her hand. Since she is the first to play, she gets to declare which suit of the four suits of cards will be trumps. That is, she gets to declare which suit will be the strongest. Of course, she chooses spades (line 46). Each player holds nine cards. The player then presents a card from his or her hand. The player with the best card gets to take the other two cards. This action continues until all nine cards are played.
The game proceeds as follows:
Belinda wins the first four hands, but now the Baron starts to win a few hands:
The ninth and last hand will decide the winner of the game:
The reader should make a special note about two aspects of this game. First, Pope uses military imagery throughout his description of the game. The military words are quite numerous: band, troops, combat, war, leaders, unconquerable, captive, yield, victor, saber, rebel, engage, armies, warlike, host, powers, conquest, and battalions. The card game in Pope's mock epic thus becomes the equivalent of a mighty battle between the Greeks and the Trojans in Homer's great epic. Once again, Pope takes something trivial (a card game) and makes it seem grand or epic in scale.
The second point the reader should note is the symbolism suggested in the last two hands of the game. Belinda loses the queen of hearts. The symbolism suggests that she loses her heart to the Baron. That is, Belinda falls in love with the Baron. So,
Belinda blushes: "the blood the virgin's cheek forsook" (line 89). She blushes because of her emotions, not because she has lost a card.
As soon as Belinda wins the game, she shouts in excitement and triumph (lines 99-100). But then the poet interrupts his story to comment on the action (authorial intrusion). The poet notes that Belinda should not be so quick to celebrate because fate often has a way of turning good luck into bad. The student may recall how fate is also referred to as a strong but usually negative force in Anglo-Saxon poetry and especially in Beowulf.
As Belinda is drinking her coffee, the Baron begins to make his move. Another woman named Clarissa loans the Baron a pair of scissors (line 127). She does this because she apparently likes the Baron very much. As the Baron moves closer to Belinda, hundreds of Sylphs try to blow the curl away from the Baron. Other Sylphs unite to make Belinda's earring twitch or move slightly. When Belinda feels the twitch, she turns around. So, the Baron has to stop. He cannot get close enough to Belinda to cut her hair.
But then Ariel reads Belinda's mind (lines 13946) and discovers that Belinda is in love with the Baron: "an earthly lover lurking at her heart." This is bad news for Ariel. He can only protect Belinda as long as she is innocent and pure and not thinking sexually about any man. So, he must leave her. Once again the reader should note the use of symbolism here. Ariel's abandoning Belinda symbolizes her sexual interest in the Baron.
With her guardian Sylph now gone, the Baron is able to approach Belinda and cut one of her two locks of hair. One of the other Sylphs tries to stop the scissors, but he instead gets cut in half himself. Fortunately, this is not too serious for the Sylph. Since he is made of air, he can easily put himself back together again. Belinda, on the other hand, is not so fortunate. She will never be able to put her lock of hair back on her head.
Belinda shouts "screams of horror" to the skies (line 156). She becomes hurt and angry that the Baron could have ever done such an act to her.
The Baron, on the other hand, is quite pleased with himself. He feels that his act has brought honor to himself and that people will praise his act for all eternity -- as if it were an act of defeating a monster or fierce enemy in an epic.
In the final lines of the canto (lines 161-78), the Baron presents a short speech on his glorious deed. The reader should especially note the use of metonymy in the second stanza of this speech. In these lines the Baron glorifies the power of "steel," which, he claims, is stronger than time, stronger than the works of the gods, and stronger than the gates and towers of Troy. Of course, the humor here is that the word steel is usually a metonymy (a kind of metaphor) for a sword. But the Baron is actually referring to the pair of scissors, which is also made of steel. Thus, the scissors becomes the Baron's special weapon. And his act of cutting the hair is like striking a monster dead with his sword.
In Pope's mock epic the poet has both good
supernatural creatures and bad supernatural creatures. The bad supernatural creature is Umbriel. Umbriel is a Gnome. He is made of earth. Naturally, he is kind of dark and dirty. Therefore, he has dark and dirty thoughts. Umbriel is not exactly evil. But he is a mischievous sprite, a kind of troublemaker. In a way, he is not too unlike the fairy Puck (also called Robin Goodfellow) who appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. When Ariel leaves Belinda, Umbriel soon appears and recognizes that the time is right to cause trouble.
In several great epics of the past, the hero descends into the underworld, the realm of the dead. Such an event occurs in both The Odyssey and The Aeneid. In fact, when Beowulf descends into the pond or lake to fight against Grendel's mother, that journey too is like a descent into the underworld.
Pope decides to mock this underworld scene by having Umbriel take a journey to the Cave of Spleen. The spleen is an organ in the body located on the left side below the diaphragm. Today people know that the spleen filters and stores blood in the body. But in earlier ages many people believed that human passions (especially negative passions like depression or anger) came from the spleen. Pope does not clearly state whether this Cave of Spleen is inside Belinda or somewhere else.
But the poet does describe the interior of the Cave in specific detail. The Queen of Spleen -- a goddess who is equivalent to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld -- lies on a bed in a melancholy or depressed state. Many allegorical figures (abstract qualities that are personified) attend the Queen. Pain stands by her side, while Megrim (or Headache) stands by her head. Two other allegorical attendants who are standing near the Queen are Ill-Nature (having a bad or nasty temper) and Affectation (having a phony or artificial manner of behavior).
The Cave is filled with heavy vapors or mists, and ghosts are floating everywhere. The most unusual and most humorous passage contains a description (imagery) of the odd spirits who dwell there:
Here living teapots stand, one arm held out,
One bent; the handle this, and that the spout.
(lines 49-50)
Pope is thus describing one spirit who looks exactly like a teapot. One of his arms is bent to form a handle. The other arm is held straight out to form a spout. Other spirits take the shapes of flowerpots, jars, or bottles. In this strange and crazy underworld, men can even become pregnant (line 53).
A short speech also appears in this underworld scene (in lines 57-78). Umbriel addresses the Queen of Spleen to request that she may use her magic to cause Belinda to feel "chagrin" (ill humor, anger, or a bad and nasty temper: line 77). In making his request, Umbriel may remind the reader of Beowulf when Beowulf first speaks to the king of the Danes. In order to prove that he is worthy to face the monster named Grendel, Beowulf lists his accomplishments, such as slaying seamonsters and giants.