Rape of The Whaaaat

I am extremely confused. I’m sitting here reading and re-reading The Rape of The Lock and wondering what in the heck is going on in this poem. I understand certain parts of it and I get the satire, but there are certain elements that completely and utterly confuse me to the point where I want to scream and throw this book across the room, but it is way too heavy and I’m not very physically fit. I understand how Pope is mocking the society he lived in and how people made large battles out of unimportant issues yet remained idle about the pressing issues. What I don’t really understand is how or why all of these extra characters are necessary and pertinent to the story.

I even resorted to something I don’t, spark notes. I’m usually too proud to look at spark notes, but I was unable to come to any conclusions by myself and was really frustrated. The spark notes didn’t really help though, they actually just confused me more and got me more off track than I originally was. Now I’m sitting here blogging about it rather than try and understand it anymore because I just don’t have the patience at this point.

Hamlet was tough, but this is for me at least, very very different from Hamlet and way more difficult to understand. This language seems a little simpler, but in my opinion it’s much harder to understand than Shakespearean text.