A schoolboy, a stolen duck and a very unfortunate pair of trousers: out of this slender material Pope makes a small comic gem, and most of the fun lies in how solemnly he dresses it up. He is best known for the polished heroic couplets of the eighteenth century, but here he sets that style aside and borrows Chaucer's voice. The heading tells us the poem belongs to a set of "Imitations of English Poets," and what we get is imitation as mischief.
The opening promises a moral about women: they are "full of ragerie" (roughly, wantonness) yet "swinken nat sans secresie," meaning they do not go about their business without secrecy. The "schoole-boy's tale" that follows is meant to prove it. The boy slips off to the fens to steal a grey duck, stuffs it into his "trowses," and then meets his aunt and her two daughters on the road. Greetings follow ("Ho! our nephew!"), and the boy bows "full low" and tries to talk smoothly, "glozeth with speeches soote." The duck, squeezed against him, tickles him "sore," his "fore-piece and buttons all to-brest," and out thrusts "a white neck, and red crest." The ladies giggle "Te-he," the boy says nothing, and the only one left to speak is the duck: "Quaake."
The humour depends on a clash of registers. Pope borrows the trappings of medieval English: extra e's on "schoole" and "ducke," plural verbs in -en ("passen," "stoppen," "callen"), and stock words like "eke," "tway," "thilke" and "quoth." "Soote" echoes the famous sweet showers at the start of the *Canterbury Tales*, so the boy's patter borrows a little borrowed poetry. The stately costume then wraps around the least stately events imaginable. "Ducke in his trowses hath he hent" sounds like a line from a legend, though what it describes is concealed poultry. Even "sely clerke" gives a truant boy the dignity of a scholar, while "sely" itself hints at his helplessness. When Pope drops in a blunt word like "erse," the effect is of a priest suddenly swearing.
The form keeps the pace brisk. The lines are short, roughly four beats each, and the rhymed couplets trot along like a told-aloud joke. Pope uses the rhyme for timing: "nought spake" sets up "Quaake," so the punchline lands exactly on the rhyme word. The stretched rhyme of "daughter" with "a'ter" is a joke too. The apostrophe splits "after" into an old-fashioned shape to make the sounds fit, a little wink at how archaic verse bends its words to rhyme.
The central idea is that the promised moral is a sham. The poem opens by saying women are wanton but secretive, yet the tale shows a man's secret exploding in public, and the one woman who speaks at the end sounds shocked rather than wanton. "O moder, moder!" she cries, asking whether this is the "thing maids longen a'ter." Her verdict is that it is "bette" to "pyne on coals and chalke," a bleak diet that suggests how much she wants to avoid the alternative, "then trust on mon, whose yerde can talke." "Yerde" means a rod, and the innuendo is plain. But the duck has literally just spoken, so the line is also a callback to "Quaake." The final couplet turns a crude gag into a neat piece of wordplay, and "secresie," the poem's first big word, ends up as the thing nobody manages to keep.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It shows imitation as a kind of criticism: to mimic Chaucer's manner so exactly that it can carry a farmyard indecency is to poke fun at the manner and enjoy it at once. It also shows how much control the joke needs. Every archaic spelling, every rhyme and every pause is placed so that the duck arrives at the right moment, and the reader's laughter feels earned.