What do you think Alexander Pope means when he says...?

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien


As to be hated needs but to be seen;


Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,


We first endure, then pity, then embrace





I'm not looking for you to paraphrase, but more your opinion or analysis of the point he makes. Most interesting response gets 10 points.

What do you think Alexander Pope means when he says...?
Let's take a vice, say.......smoking. *winks*





heheh.





Pope says that when we see a vice, we consider it so hateful as to hate it. Kind of like your smoking issue mentioned recently, and the way you feel people treat you.





But, he goes on, if we see it often enough that it becomes familiar, the norm, or a fad even, we become familiar with it and endure it. Later we begin to pity those who are possessed by the vice, then we accept them.





This could also be said of things like attitudes toward homosexuality, drinking, even taking birth control pills. I even would consider tattoos, body piercings, etc to fall into this camp.





But we should also remember that Pope, when using the word vice, would probably include a much broader spectrum than mere human behavior. Although vice today would be more or less constrained by human actions marked by frailty, in Pope's time, vice might also be considered to include illness, disease, and other "undesirable" human conditions, such as infestation with lice, for example, or mental illness, or some horrible disease.





A simple summary of Pope's thesis would be: That which we hate, we learn to endure, even to embrace, when we become familiar with it.





(Thanks for the props on the previous smoking matter, btw.)
Reply:He uses the traditional figure of "Vice" (a character of morality plays until the 16th century) but distorts it, especially by turning Vice into a female figure ("her face"). It is a moral remark that if you talk too much about vice (as moralizing people do), you encourage it instead of stopping it. So, it is better not to talk too much about it.
Reply:He's speaking about human nature...how we despise or look down upon things of vice...until we experience them, and the more we experience them, the more we desire them...the more we see them, the more normal they appear, until we finally desire them more than ourselves.
Reply:He was a poet, so let's agree that the vice he is describing has nothing to do with carpentry. Let's say, hypothetically, that you have a personality weakness regarding kitten juggling.





The first time you see it, probably by accident, you are abhored with it and call the RSPCA. However your feet were rooted to the ground, and you feel a disgraceful curiousity, where you just couldn't tear your eyes away. You might justify it to yourself that it is your duty to all the poor little kittens out there south of the Boarder to overcome your disgust aand steel youself to full horror of what is happening, so you can know the situation and can do something about it.





Then, because this is your personality weakness, you can't get the little moggies being flung this way and that, three and sometimes even four at a time, out of your mind. It makes your heart beat faster, and you begin to seek it out more than could be explained by mear crusading zeal to bring the Devilish practice to an end.





My these little steps, you will awaken one morning on the wrong side of this dreadful crime as a user. You'll find yourself in a pub carpark at midnight, paying top rate for specialist "kitten juggling" DVDs from a very shady guy called "Stig" with bad teeth, and alot of incorrectly spelt tattoos.





It is a deeply perceptive description of the slow gradual descent by degrees into the depravity of an addictive personality. It sneaks up on you from disgust, to tollerance, to need. You will say and believe that you can handle it, even as your ability to do so crumbles.





I would guess that Alexander Pope had seen it from the inside.

dental jobs