Great Regulars: The poem challenges my contemporary American tastes

and expectations in ways I like.

I like, for example, the way Pope makes simple monosyllables funny in the droll plainness of "She sighed not that They stayed, but that She went." I like the way nature, the "purling brooks" and so forth, is made to seem just as attractive as "prayers three hours a day." He makes the word tho' funny by having it mean little or nothing: "Whose laughs are hearty, tho' his jests are coarse."

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Same-Old, Same-Old

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