Flummoxed: "an Essay on Man"

Flummoxed: "An Essay on Man"

From the excerpt I read of "An Essay on Man", I have grasped the general concept of this epistle which is how man is put up in contrast to the universe. There were many paragraphs in which I had to read over quite a few times in order to grasp its true reasoning.

One quote I would like to analyze is from line 130 stating "Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause." If I had to interpret this without any background information it would be hard to grasp what Pope means by this. However, by going over the paragraph a few times and looking up words in this paragraph like abode which is the past tense of abide meaning to comply with, I came up with this reasonable explanation. Don't try and play God or try to be God because by messing with the order you are put in, you're messing with your eternal fate.

Section six in general troubled me a fair amount. In line 186 in section six of the poem it stated "Is Heaven unkind to man, and man alone?" The whole paragraph talked of the different traits that an assortment of animals possessed and how they are uniquely created. But the quote that I had chosen said that heaven was unkind to man, saying that man does not think he was created fairly. The animals however in the quote "Each beast, each insect, happy in its own" states that the animals are content with what they are given and Heaven is unkind to man because man is not content with what he has. The only way

I could understand this section was to take each line in one at a time and cipher what it meant and then put them all together in order to make sense on the whole paragraph.

Another problem for me was ciphering section seven of An Essay on Man. I had a problem generating this sections them because of lines like line 210 "From the green myriads in the peopled grass." This meant nothing to me until I looked up the word myriad which was an adjective that mean a numerous number and peopled which was an adjective also which meant furnished with people. A quote that helped me greatly in this section was "Forever separate, yet forever near." Therefore, by looking up quotes such as this one in this section I figured out what the subject matter of the section was. The main subject was the difference between man and animal is broad but at the same time similar. All