19. Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

Chapter 19. The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot is Pope’s tribute to one of his closest friends, whose medical ‘art and care’ have preserved him through ‘this long disease, my life’. On Arbuthnot’s telling him that his own illness was now terminal, Pope writes what he called ‘the best memorial I can leave, both of my friendship to you, and of my character’. The antithesis in line 32 of ‘foes’ and ‘friends’ defines the old structure of Pope’s apologia for his ‘idle songs’, as he self-depreciatingly calls his poems. His defence of his career is set against devastating expressions of disgust at human malignity. Integrity is found only in private life: the friendship of Arbuthnot, whose character and presence are the poem’s unifying factor, and his own mother and father, the latter characterised by ‘the language of the heart’.