...this line has never made a serious mark. Pope rejects it as unacceptably long, padded out and tedious: A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.3 But a large part of Pushkin's purpose in this poem will be actually to depict tedium. How appropriate...

...was so trim a boy. 221.31 ages . . . along] From Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 356-57: A needless Alexandrine ends the song That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. 225.5-6 "butchered . . . holyday."] From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, Stanza 141. 225.12-13...

...famous passage from An Essay on Criticism quoted earlier, heaps his scorn on such concluding devices: "A needless Alexandrine ends the Song, / That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along," brilliantly slowing up his own line with the "slow length." It is interesting to observe that, less...

...streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep': The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with 'sleep.' (Fr. II) 43 ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown! (Fr. II) 44 True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd...

...alexandrine, and Pope vividly demonstrated the reasons for its relative unpopularity among English poets: 'A needless Alexandrine ends the song/ That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along'. The monometer (onefoot line) is rare, like the heptameter (seven-foot line), also called a 'fourteener'...

...'sleep.' Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And...

...'sleep.' Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth, or languishing!}- slow; And...

...respectively), few versions have followed the example. Pope's well-known comment continues to bite ('A needless Alexandrine ends the song,/ That, like...wounded snake, drags its slow length along'). The weight and ponderousness of the metre in EngUsh are a substantial disadvantage, evoking as they do...

...occasion. 15. Uncomplimentary lines borrowed from Pope's Essay on Criticism, Part 2, lines 356-57. "A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." Bonner repeats this allusion in Boston column 6. 1 6. Linked with the words "went under," possibly...

...Night a Traveler. Perhaps most famously, Pope's Essay on Criticism partially consists of lines such as "A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."2 Much self-reference of interest to critics is less transparent. The text has a "surface" reading...