Few birthday cards are as cheerful, or as cleverly built, as Pope's twenty lines for Thomas Southern. The poem congratulates an old playwright on reaching eighty-one, and it does so by turning his birthday dinner into a catalogue of his virtues. Every dish on the table stands for a quality of the man. Under the joking, the poem says something sincere: a long life spent writing, and ended with a clear conscience, is worth celebrating.
The opening couplet sets the tone. "Resign'd to live, prepared to die" reverses the expected phrase. Normally we are resigned to death, but here the harder task is to go on living, and Tom has accepted it calmly. Then comes the joke: he has "not one sin, but poetry." Poetry is treated as a charming vice, the only stain on an otherwise spotless record. The next lines extend the idea through bookkeeping. His "fair account has run / (Without a blot) to eighty-one." A ledger and a page of verse both suffer from blots of ink, and a life can be blotted morally too, so one image does three jobs.
The middle section is the most inventive. Pope reads the menu like a series of compliments. The "wild goose and the larks" mark Tom's "towering genius," a pun that works because larks really do tower in flight, while "wild goose" gently hints at a harmless eccentricity. Mushrooms, which spring up overnight, show "his wit was sudden." Judgment gets "a pudden," a solid, plain, unshowy dish, and the comedy is sharpened because "pudden" is a slightly rustic spelling that forces a rhyme with "sudden." "Roast beef, though old, proclaims him stout" lets the dish describe the old man. The "cloth of bays" is a tablecloth made of laurel, the traditional crown of poets, and "Ireland, mother of sweet singers" hands over her harp. Judging by the poem, Pope links Southern with Ireland and with a patron called Boyle, and he treats both as honouring him.
The form suits all this silliness. Pope is best known for the longer, stately heroic couplet, but here he uses short four-beat lines in rhyming pairs, which move briskly and bounce like a nursery rhyme. Because every couplet closes neatly, each joke lands at the line's end, where the rhyme sits like a punchline. Pope loves the comic double rhyme: "singers/fingers," "sudden/pudden," "winner/dinner." These feminine rhymes are slightly absurd by nature, and the poem plays on that, in the way a speaker might deliberately pull a funny face while proposing a toast.
The last ten lines turn from the table to the future. Pope says Heaven sent Tom "to raise / The price of prologues and of plays," a wry nod to the money side of writing, since poets also have to eat. He wishes him "every birthday more a winner," a gambler's phrase, and hopes he will "Digest his thirty-thousandth dinner." The figure is almost exact. Eighty-one years of days comes to roughly twenty-nine and a half thousand, so Pope has quietly done the arithmetic. It is a delightful way to measure a life, in meals instead of years, and it keeps the poem warm and domestic.
The ending is sharper. Tom should "Walk to his grave without reproach, / And scorn a rascal and a coach." The line is open to interpretation, but the pairing suggests a contrast between modest independence and the showy comforts that might be gained by flattering the wrong people. Walking implies dignity and self-reliance, while the coach and the rascal imply compromise. Having teased him for twenty lines, Pope closes with a wish for his integrity, and the humour turns into respect.
That blend is what makes the poem worth reading. It shows a lighter, more affectionate side of a poet often remembered for formal polish. It also shows how compliment can be disguised as mockery, with each joke carrying praise inside it. And it makes an unusual argument for the good life: contentment, honest work, a full table, and a conscience clear enough to digest it.