CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
Joseph Severn, Scene from Pope's 'Eloisa to Abelard' (19th c)
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Overview:
In this lesson, we study a single (longer) poem by Alexander Pope. It is, most obviously, a love
poem: Eloisa expresses her passionate desire for her beloved Abelard, a longing that is deepened by
their separation. However, the poem also addresses a more complex dilemma: the tension between
human love and devout (chaste) love for God. For Eloisa, the former gets in the way of the latter.
As readers, we perhaps readily identify with Eloisa’s desire for real human love and companionship
and sympathize with her rejection of the austerity of convent life. However, we perhaps also see, as
Eloisa does not—in the heat of her desire—the greater, more transcendent love that God provides,
which will fill human “needs” more profoundly than human pleasures.
Objectives:
 To study the work of Catholic poet Alexander Pope
 To examine the tension that the poem sets up between passionate human love and devout
(chaste) love for God
 To evaluate Eloisa’s choice: does she pursue the right desire?
Readings:
Reading: “Eloisa to Abelard”
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1630.html
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
1
CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)
7.1.1. Biography
Born in London in the late 17th century,
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) dealt with two major
difficulties in his life: his religion and his physical
deformity. His father was a Roman Catholic, which
meant that (in a Protestant country) Pope, like John
Donne, was excluded from the public schools and
never received a proper, public education.
Nevertheless, he excelled intellectually, through his
own disciplined approach to learning and his private
study with various learned schoolmasters and priests.
Before he was twelve he had obtained a smattering of
Latin and Greek; he later added French and Italian to
his command of foreign language, became an avid
reader, and excelled in writing poetry. There were,
among Roman Catholic families, men capable of giving
direction to his eager ambition—men of literary
tastes who had connections with the literary world.
Portrait of Alexander Pope
As members of a persecuted community, they held
Jonathan Richardson (c. 1736)
together, intellectually, and were often connected
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
with one another by the family priests.
Between his twelfth and his seventeenth years, however, Pope’s self-disciplined and
excessive application to study undermined his health, and he developed the personal deformity
which, in so many ways, subsequently distorted his view of life. He developed tuberculosis of the
spine, which left him with a hunched, crooked frame; his height, as an adult, was only four-and-ahalf feet. He felt that he was dying, but the advice of a famous physician, who prescribed diet and
exercise, enabled Pope to recover his strength and spirits.
He continued his studies arduously, grateful that he could approach his education in an
original way, not conforming to prescribed patterns of learning. Preparing himself to excel as a
poet, he spent almost a decade enthusiastically and tirelessly reading, studying, experimenting,
taking the advice of some and laughing at the guidance of others, single-mindedly claiming that
poetry was “his only business." With a distinctive and sharp social wit, Pope established himself as
a satirist, critiquing especially the frivolities of fashionable life with mock-heroic candour. His
poems build up the pompous-minded, with inflated grandeur, precisely so that he can triumphantly
deflate their behavior and presumptions. As well, he spent twelve years translating Homer’s works
from Latin into English. The poem that we are studying, “Eloisa to Abelard,” differs from both of
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
2
CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)
these poetic endeavours. In this work, published in 1717, Pope pursues a distinctly Catholic
subject, depicting it with honesty and integrity of feeling, rather than his cutting, sprightly wit.
7.1.2. “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717)
The poem concerns the love that was ignited between distinguished scholastic theologian
Peter Abélard (1079-1142) and his pupil Héloïse, niece of Canon Fulbert of Paris. He was hired as
her private tutor. Secretly, they had a child and were married, but Héloïse’s uncle, in fury, castrated
Abélard and sent Héloïse to a convent. The two rarely saw one another for the remainder of their
lives, but they exchanged passionate letters. Héloïse became an abbess and Abelard continued to
write and stir up theological controversy. During the last two years of his life, he became a monk at
the Abbey of Cluny. The letters that they wrote to each other, in Latin, were translated into English
in 1713, by John Hughes. However, Hughes worked from a French version of the letters, which
differed considerably from the Latin original. Pope’s poem “Eloisa to Abelard” is based on Hughes’
translation.
Reading: “Eloisa to Avelard” ”
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1630.html
Literary Analysis and Study Questions
Form: Pope writes with rhyming couplets: every pair of
lines must rhyme. This form gives the poem a certain
rigidness, and demands skillful discipline from the poet:
the rhymes must be constant but not strained, musically
repetitive but natural. As well, Pope achieves a fascinating
tension between the form and the content. The form
restrains the language, putting bounds on the words (like
the convent walls), for they must conform to the overall
pattern; however, the content of the poem (Eloisa’s
feelings) pushes outward, seeking unrestrained expression
of emotion that knows no bounds. Does Pope combine
formal order and human emotion convincingly and
effectively?
Speaker: The voice is that of Eloisa only. We experience
the nature of her relationship with Abelard solely through
her perspective. Her voice is strong, emotional, and
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
Eloise and Abelard
3
CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)
troubled. Why has Pope chosen her voice? Why hers only?
Content: Think about the poem as informally structured in four parts. What is the principal idea in
each?
Part 1: lines 1 – 28 (Complaint)

As the poem opens, Eloisa is lamenting her present situation: her life in a convent. What
is wrong?
o Notice the negative words that she uses to describe her life in a convent: she calls it a
place of “deep solitudes,” “awful cells,” “melancholy,” “last retreat,” “relentless walls,”
darkness, voluntary pain (kneeling to pray on hard rock), overgrown “thorns,” cold
lifeless statutes of saints, and pale-eyed virgins.
o In contrast to her depiction of the convent as a place of deprivation, she describes
herself as exuberantly alive with love. Notice the words that she uses to describe
herself, each of which counters the walled, stony, dark, cold and solitary atmosphere
of the convent: she feels her own “tumult,” impulse to “rove,” her pulsing “veins,”
“heat,”
o The problem, it seems, is twofold. Her distress is doubly felt: her emotions
contravene a nun’s vow of chastity, poverty and obedience to God; yet she cannot
attain the man whom she loves.

First, she cannot love God as she should. As a nun, she would have taken the vows
of chastity, poverty and obedience to God; but she cannot bring herself to this
austerity. Her professed love for God is “mixed” with her devotion to Abelard.
Her deepest feelings, for a human being, must remain “hidden” in her heart,
“within that close disguise” and in “holy silence sealed.” She cannot live up to the
expectations for a nun; she must disguise her true devotion. The problem, it
seems, is not convent life in itself but that she, while “yet I love,” feels her heart
longing deeply not solely for God but more forcefully for her dear Abelard.

Second, she cannot love Abelard as she desires. They are separated. Their only
connection is through letters: “Eloisa yet must kiss the name.” He exists in words
only, and she is fearful to utter the name, or to write it. Nevertheless, she does, as
her heart “dictates” her hand. Still, he is not present to her, and her “tears . . . flow
in vain.”

Look at lines 25-26: this couplet beautifully expresses her dividedness:
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
4
CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)
All is not Heav’ns while Abelard has part
Still rebel nature holds out half my heart;


Do you think that she wants to love God fully, and not devote half of her heart to
Abelard? Conversely, would she be content to desire Abelard only, without God? Or, is
she striving to reconcile the two halves of her love, hoping that, together, she can attain
happiness?
At the moment, she feels only “tumult.” What does the rest of the poem reveal: does she
find reconciliation?
Part 2: 29 – 58 (Letters)



In this section, Eloisa recounts the significance of the letters that she receives from
Abelard
Here, too, her emotions are divided:
o The letters bring her sadness, “sighs,” and “tears,” because they are just letters, not
Abelard: “To read and weep” is all her eyes can do.
o Yet they are all that she has, and she conceives of them as living entities, the only
“warm” expression of Abelard’s love: “They live, they speak, they breathe what love
inspires / Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires.” The letters are personified as
Abelard, and she desires more: “write, oh write me all.”
o Notice, too, how she thinks the letters are affirming their doubleness: their griefs are
“joined” and their sighs are “echoed”; their pains are “shared,” even “given” to each
other. While just words on paper, they letters create a kind of mirror, in which they
see each other, and see themselves in the other. They are matched in their sameness:
“Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul.”
What occasion has prompted the poem, or do we know: has she received a new letter,
which ignites her emotions afresh; or is she perhaps “unclosing” the many “letters” that
she has saved, to reread them?
Part 3: 60 – 170 (Recollection of the past)

Follow the narrative of their past closely. Abelard was Eloisa’ professor, emanating the
“all-beauteous mind” (God), as he taught her philosophy and divinity. Initially, she
understood his teaching as an angelic, heavenly influence, but gradually she learned of
love of a man and its power to eclipse her former love for angels and saints. She
dismisses all earthly ambitions—fame, wealth, honour, empire—as offering far less
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
5
CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)
happiness than love. Notice how she conceives of their love as arising from friendship
and uniting two “souls.” It offers fullness, therefore, with “no craving void.” Surely, this
kind of secular love is holy: an ideal that few attain.

What follows this elevated love, however, is violence: we know, historically, that Abelard
was castrated, following the secret marriage of the two and the birth of their child: “a
naked lover bound and bleeding lies!” Paradoxically, Eloisa now calls their “crime” (love)
“common,” deserving, therefore, only “common” “pain” (punishment). Earlier in the
poem, she referred to their love as “natural” and “free,” an attraction that requires no
constraint or punitive response.

Subsequently, they chose to part, leaving the world for religious life. Eloisa took her
vows and put on her sacred veil.
o Notice that she does this reluctantly: “then, to those dread altars as I drew, / Not on
the cross my eyes were fixed, but you.”
She desires, even, a more sensuous
reconnection with his “breast,” “eye,” “lip,” and “heart.”
o Yet, she desires, too, to “make my soul quit Abelard for God.”

Can we understand Eloisa’s turmoil? Surely, God wants humans to love passionately (He
created Eve as a mate for Adam, asking them to “be fruitful and multiply). However, God
also calls His people to religious life. How can one do both, with absolute integrity and
fulfillment?
o Eloisa, it seems, has neither in its completeness. The convent walls are “lone” and
“dim” and “solemn”; she is unable, even, to pray, or to recognize a “face divine.”
o Might we say, however, that she perhaps has more than she recognizes? Could
Eloisa’s thoughts turn, at this point, towards redemption: could she find fullness and
companionship in her religious community, strive to pray, and direct some of her
love towards God? Could Pope have turned the poem towards a comic resolution
(human happiness and reconciliation with the world) rather than tragedy (aloneness
and death)? Why does he choose the latter?
Part 4: 171 – end (Return to the present circumstances: her resolution)

In this final, long section, Eloisa resigns herself to her present, unhappy existence,
deciding that “only death” can release her.
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
6
CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)

Her inner conflict remains deep. Externally she proclaims her vows to God but internally
she feels her enslavement to human love: “Ah wretch! believed the spouse of God in vain,
/ Confessed within the slave of love and man.” Instead of “lamenting the fault,” she
desires the “old pleasures” and wants to “solicit new” ones. The two halves of her are
irreconcilable, as she holds up before her the religious ideal and her inability to attain it:
How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,
And love th’offender, yet detest the offence?

The dividedness continues. In lines 205 – 222, she acknowledges the life of a nun as a
“blameless Vestal’s lot.” She imagines its happiness and temperance: equal periods of
rest and prayer, desires and disappointments that are modest not extreme, visitations
from angels and heavenly music, and marriage with God only. She knows the religious
ideal.
o In contrast, in lines 223-248, what does her “erring soul” pursue? What opposing
images and experiences does she present: what has happened to her sleeping and
waking life, for example?

Her decision, in the end, is to seek death. Here, only, will she, like sinners, “have rest.” In
death, she adds, their love will be “no crime,” and they will be united eternally: “May one
kind grave unite each hapless name.”
The Cimetière du Père-Lachaise
(Father Lachaise Cemetery) is the
most famous cemetery in Paris.
Many notable French and foreign
people are buried here, including
the lovers Héloïse and Abélard.
When Abélard died in 1142, he
was buried at Héloïse's convent, at
her request, and she was buried
next to him upon her death two
years later. The two were later
moved to Père-Lachaise, where
they lie next to each other in
elaborate tombs.
http://www.sacred-destinations.com
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
7
CATH 330.66 – Catholicism and the Arts
Module Seven – The Eighteenth Century (1770 – 1789)
7.1.3. Question for Blackboard discussion

Can we accept Eloisa’s decision to seek death?
o Does she lack strength and Christian fortitude: the call to endure suffering and to
hope for salvation? Do we see her choice as immoral? Is that what Pope encourages
us to conclude?
 The difficulty of choosing religious life—in a convent—is explored, as well, in
a short story we read later in the course: Edna O’Brien’s “Sister Imelda.” In
this work, too, we are asked to assess the young girl’s decision not to enter the
religious order,
o Alternatively, is Pope mocking Eloisa’s extravagant emotions? Is this poem a satire?
o Differently again, could we place the poem within the cultural context of the 18th
century? This was a time when enhanced sensitivity to emotions was being explored,
particularly lowness of spirits, like depression, often referred to, then, as melancholy
(a term that Eloisa uses). In fact, a state of melancholy in a poet was desired, even
fashionable, because it enabled a writer to more deeply understand the range and
subtlety of human emotions. In this respect, the poem is not making a moral Christian
statement but reflecting a cultural (poetic) era, in which emotions, particularly the
darker casts of the human mind, were deliberately cultivated and intellectually
explored precisely because they were interesting and complex. Perhaps, then, we
should look at Eloisa positively, for she nurtures her feeling, displays it honestly, and
struggles earnestly with its complexity.
 In our next lesson, we see how William Cowper, later in the 18th century,
elevated melancholy to an even higher, religious intensity; poets in the
Romantic period subsequently embraced that depth of feeling even more fully.
“Feeling gives importance to the action,” William Wordsworth claimed, not
action to the feeling.

What do you think? How should readers interpret the poem?
Lesson 7.1 – Love: Human and Divine: Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
©Continuing & Distance Education, St. Francis Xavier University - 2012
8