Praise is hard to write well, because the more a poet flatters, the less anyone believes him. Pope seems well aware of this, and his epistle to the Earl of Oxford is partly a poem about how to praise honestly. It addresses a man who, the poem makes clear, no longer stands at the centre of power, and it argues that true greatness shows itself only once the offices, crowds and favours have fallen away.
The opening reads like the end of something else: "Such were the notes thy once-loved Poet sung" suggests the reader has just finished a collection of songs, though the poem never says so. The dead poet is Parnell, whose "tuneful tongue" Death "untimely stopp'd". Around him Pope builds a small portrait of friendship. Oxford, here also called Harley, was "fond to forget the statesman in the friend" and spent evenings with Parnell and Swift. The great pleasure of those evenings was escaping "from Flattery to Wit", a phrase that works like a short journey. It also shows Pope's taste for neat paradox: the "sober follies of the wise and great" are the empty rituals of state, which look serious and are really foolish.
The third verse paragraph makes the boldest move. Parnell, now beyond "interest, fame, or fate", "perhaps forgets that Oxford e'er was great". The dead see differently, "deeming meanest what we greatest call", so Oxford appears "glorious only in thy fall". The line turns the usual meaning of "fall" upside down. Loss of office becomes the condition that lets virtue be seen. The following portrait of a soul "above all pain, all passion, and all pride" ends in a list of four temptations: "The rage of power, the blast of public breath, / The lust of lucre, and the dread of death." The alliteration and the closing rhyme of *breath* and *death* give the list a heavy, final weight, and the quiet pairing of "public breath" with "death" hints that popular favour is as fragile as life.
All of this is in heroic couplets, rhymed iambic pentameter in which the sense usually closes with the rhyme. Pope uses the form for balance. "Admired and mourn'd", "absent or dead", "a sigh the absent claims, the dead a tear": each pairing sets two things side by side and weighs them. The exclamations of the opening ("Oh just beheld and lost!") loosen the tone briefly into elegy, but the couplets keep tightening it again. The verse paragraphs grow from six lines to a final one of fourteen, so the poem seems to gather pace as it nears its subject.
That last section turns on the Muse, who follows the fallen man into his "silent shade" and is "no hireling she, no prostitute to praise". The claim is partly self-defence, since the poem is itself praise, and Pope insists that this praise is paid for by nothing. The Muse can "rejudge his acts, and dignify disgrace", a pair of words that sound alike while meaning opposites. When "all the obliged desert", when the last friend has said farewell, she keeps waiting, "to the scaffold, or the cell". Those words suggest real danger, though the poem gives no details. The light imagery gently consoles: bays shade an "evening-walk", the "parting ray" fades, and the "calm sunset of thy various day" turns a life's decline into something dignified. The closing couplet sets "Fortune's cloud" against the clear sight of "one truly great", and the poem ends on the name "Mortimer" and the plain word "he".
The poem matters for what it claims poetry can do. In Pope's view, a poet is a kind of independent judge, someone who can look past reputation and rank when everyone else is following the money. The poem also shows how much feeling the couplet can hold. Friendship, grief, loyalty and moral argument all fit inside its tidy pairs, and the neatness makes the loyalty feel earned rather than gushing.