Note 393 — RAPE OF THE LOCK.
Reading edition
A comparison pressed too far loses its beauty in departing from truth. When Pope makes Belinda equal, in the glory of her appearance, to the sun,—"the rival of his beams" who was "of this great world both eye and soul," he falls into an insipid hyperbole. When Chaucer, in his Knight's Tale, says,
Up rose the sun, and up rose Emily,
everyone feels the matchless charm of the allusion.