Pope’s openers and the almost four-beat Dunciad

“A little learning is a dangerous thing”. Though that line is amongst Pope’s best known, and though it is a model example of iambic pentameter, it is also remarkable that, as a line, it only appears to have four strong stresses. We can choose to thump out five strong beats, but in practice we are unlikely to do so. Such lines have been variously theorised—as “balanced pentameters”, as “heroic tetrameters”—but however they are labelled, their effects within the context of verse tend to be under-appreciated. Where they are usually subsumed into the workings of iambic rhythm, such lines, when strategically deployed in large enough numbers, can conspire to throw of the rhythm of whole verses, and even entire poems; a case in point, I argue, is Pope’s four-book Dunciad, which can be heard as carrying a quasi four-beat rhythm. This essay is an attempt to account for that rhythm, and to attend to the relation between line and verse that is implied by the conspiring presence of almost four-beat lines alongside more traditional pentameters.