Eloisa to Abelard
[2] His own original exercise in this genre was inspired by the 12th-century story of Héloïse d'Argenteuil's illicit love for, and secret marriage to, her teacher Peter Abelard, a famous Parisian philosopher some twenty years her senior.
This was The Letters of Abelard and Heloise: with a particular account of their lives, amours, and misfortune by the poet John Hughes, which was first published in 1713 and was to go through many editions in the following century and more.
[5] As one example, where Heloise exclaims "Among those who are wedded to God I serve a man; among the heroic supporters of the cross I am a poor slave to a human passion; at the head of a religious community I am devoted to Abelard only",[6] Pope's Eloisa condenses this to the lines Ah, wretch!
[7] The final lines of Pope's poem almost seem to invite a response from others: Such if there be, who love so long, so well; Let him our sad, our tender story tell; The well-sung woes will soothe my pensive ghost; He best can paint 'em, who can feel 'em most.
Noting its excess of redundant verbiage as compared to Pope's concise style, however, the Monthly Review chided the author for his indiscreet comparison.
Where the parodies made fun of the passages they aped, the epistolary imitations echoed Pope's themes and language in order to demonstrate their kinship.
Melancholy is mentioned in its third line and recurs later, suitably inspired by a Gothic landscape of gloomy forest, overhanging crags, tottering aisles and ancient tombs.
[44] It is equally the sentiment emphasised in George Pinto's 'canzonet' near the start of the 19th century, which is a setting of the passage beginning "Soon as the letters trembling I unclose, That well-known name awakens all my woes" (lines 29–48), with its repeated references to tears and sighs.
[47] Though the poem is an epistle, it contains narrative memories and the passage portrayed in these cases is Canst thou forget what tears that moment fell, When, warm in youth, I bade the world farewell?
Yet then, to those dread altars as I drew, Not on the Cross my eyes were fix’d, but you;[48] John Opie’s "Eloisa, a nun", a print of which appeared in 1793, only connects with the poem at a tangent.
It features a nun rapt in contemplation, her face lit by the grated window above, who is sitting at a table on which are a bible, rosary, skull and hourglass.
[49] It was Mary Linwood who identified her embroidered version with the passage from Pope's poem beginning "How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot" when it was exhibited in London at the start of the 19th century.
[51] While the emotion portrayed in Charles Gleyre's Héloise is not so extreme, her seated position and upward glance have more in common with d’Agesci's than with Opie's figure.
Furthermore, a print of the painting was later used to illustrate the line "What means this tumult in a Vestal's veins" in an 1892 edition of the poem, carrying the same message of erotic rapture.
The languages into which "Eloisa to Abelard" was translated included French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Latin.
[54] A specimen translation of several of Pope's works, including this epistle, was put forward as a proposal in 1747;[55] then, having gained subscribers, Dr James Kirkpatrick published the whole two years later.
[59] In Italy, meanwhile, Vincenzo Forlani's Latin version in elegiac couplets had accompanied a very free imitation of Pope's poem by Antonio Schinella Conti (Lucca 1792).
[61] It served, for example, as groundwork for Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps’ three verse epistles exchanged between the former lovers in Les Lettres d’Héloise et d’Abailard mis en vers François (1714).
[64] More an adaptation in Alexandrins, it retained its popularity over the following decades "despite its high-flown language and impersonal tone, its languor, its elegant circumlocutions and conventional epithets".
[65] Its success, according to a later preface, "brought to birth a torrent of little poems under the title Heroides, Epistle, Letter, most of them forgotten by now";[66] indeed, Colardeau was to contribute to the flow with his own Armide à Renaud: Héroide (Paris 1759).
The succeeding Épitre d’Héloïse à son Époux, an imitation of Eloisa's response to the Historia Calamitatum, devised by Sébastien Marie Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigné (1720–84) but dependent on Pope for its occasion and Gothic setting, is followed by a reply by André-Charles Cailleau.
In Spain, at least, there was resistance from the ecclesiastical establishment, where treatment of the theme was condemned by the neo-classical Jesuit Juan Andrés for its wild, pre-romantic imagery and for its blasphemous exhibition of love between those in holy orders.
The first German-language Brief der Eloise an den Abelard, published anonymously in 1760, was in fact based on Colardeau’s translation, the French text of which appeared opposite the German alexandrines.
The work of Stefan Chomentowski and Tomasz Kajetan Węgierski (1756-1787), it consists of versions of Colardeau's reworking of Eloisa's epistle to Abelard and of his reply as imagined by Dorat.
[88] There was no Danish version until the start of the 19th century, when Steen Steensen Blicher published his Elegie til Abailard efter Pope in the journal Tilskuer in 1817.
[89] The more popular English treatments of the Eloisa and Abelard story, particularly the poems by Pope and Cawthorn, continued to be reprinted in the opening decades of the 19th century, bringing fresh imitations in their wake.
[92] The Hughes letters, along with Pope's poem and a selection of imitations, were now beginning to be reprinted in the United States too and also brought poetic responses in their train.
[94] John Witt Randall's "Abelard and Eloisa", published in 1856, is a sequence of six poems, written in various forms and fashioned more as poetical addresses than letters.
Christina Rossetti's "The Convent Threshold" (written in 1858) is, according to one source, "a thinly disguised retelling of Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard",[97] although others are more cautious in seeing an influence.
The poem is a surging monologue of enlaced rhymes in octosyllables, driving along its theme of leaving earthly passion behind and transmuting it to heavenly love.
