Pope begins by pretending to defend a bad poet. "Begone, ye critics, and restrain your spite," he orders, as if Codrus were the victim of an unfair mob. The next line gives the game away: "Codrus writes on, and will for ever write." What sounds like admiration for stamina is really a complaint about endlessness. From there the poem is a string of compliments that each turn out to be insults. Judging by the closing lines, its target is the author of a poem called *Successio*, which seems to have argued that dullness is handed down from one poet to the next. Pope's reply is that the author needs no argument, because he is the evidence.
The central image is lead, and Pope uses it in two senses. "The heaviest Muse the swiftest course has gone, / As clocks run fastest when most lead is on" turns a flaw into a paradox. Leaden verse is slow and heavy, yet the rival is supposedly quick because he is so weighed down. Later the metal returns as ammunition: "forced from engines, lead itself can fly, / And ponderous slugs move nimbly through the sky." A bullet rises only because something else propels it, so the lines suggest a poet who gets off the ground only through borrowed force. The pun on "slugs" also brings in sluggishness. Each time, the same word does two jobs at once, which is what makes the insult feel so tidy.
The middle of the poem moves from metal to bees. Poets were traditionally said to have honeyed tongues, and Pope plays on that: "no bees around your cradle flew, / Nor on your lips distill'd the golden dew." Instead there was "a swarm of drones that buzz'd about your head." Drones are useless bees, and the buzzing suggests noise without substance. A similar trick follows when the rival strikes the lyre "like Orpheus," the mythical musician who charmed even trees and stones. The audience here is "Attentive blocks," and the word works twice. They are stones, as in the myth, but they are also blockheads. Only a crowd that dim could admire him.
The sharpest passage is the one about wit and sense. "Wit pass'd through thee no longer is the same, / As meat digested takes a different name." Pope leaves the unpleasant word unsaid, but the comparison with digestion makes it obvious what a good idea becomes after passing through this poet. Next comes a joke about plagiarism: "sense must sure thy safest plunder be, / Since no reprisals can be made on thee." Stealing sense from others is safe, he says, because there is none in the victim to steal back. The logic is mock-legal and very neat, and the rhyme of "be" with "thee" snaps the point shut.
The form matches this tidiness. The poem is eleven rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, the heroic couplet that Pope handled so well. Almost every couplet is closed, meaning the sentence ends where the rhyme does, so each pair works like a small verdict. The rhymes also carry the sting. "Spite" is paired with "write," and "full" with "dull," which puts the key insult in the rhyme position. Pope also uses learned names for the tradition he is mocking. Bavius and Maevius, a classical pair of bad poets, and Chaerilus join Codrus in a chain of imitation: "Bavius copied Maevius to the full, / And Chaerilus taught Codrus to be dull." The names make the rival's dullness feel ancient and inherited, which is the poem's theme.
The last couplet is the cleverest. Pope advises his target to "give o'er / This needless labour" of trying "to prove a *dull succession* to be true, / Since 'tis enough we find it so in you." The final word, "you," arrives like a pointed finger. The rival's argument is turned into a joke at his own expense, since his own poem is the best proof of it.
The poem is worth reading for how it shows satire working through form. Pope never loses his temper. He keeps up a polite, helpful tone ("dear friend"), and the politeness makes the cruelty cut deeper. The preoccupation with dullness as something almost physical, heavy and inherited, is one he would later make the subject of *The Dunciad*. Here it fits into twenty-two lines, where every image weighs the target down a little further.