What you need to know about this epic is that the world in which Belinda lives is a complete fairy tale. Her days consist of putting on makeup for three hours, playing cards, and drinking coffee. Belinda believes these things of trivial importance are of great importance to one's life. Everyone in this society takes his or her pleasure more seriously then anything else. .
Belinda is caught up in uninvited entry into personal space, an "intrusion" one might say. The problem of the poem becomes Belinda's overreaction to the lock of hair. Pope is blaming Belinda not for her reaction, but for her reason. Her reason, of course, being vanity. Belinda believes it has altered her beauty, yet she cannot see that the lock of hair has no value other than a meaning of her superficial beauty.
I believe Pope's reason for this satire was because of his political views towards society. The man just did not like what was going on around him. Pope uses this mock epic as a way to satirize his society. Pope makes everything ordinary appear extraordinary and emotional with the use of rhyming couplets, in order to reveal the truth.
Rhythm is an essential of all poetry. It creates tension, release, and helps us associate ideas because two words become linked. Pope's Rape of the Lock follows this to a great extent. The pattern of the rhyme scheme is aabb, meaning there is end rhyme. End rhyme is a rhyme occurring in the last word or syllable of one line with that of the next line. These words have both feminine and masculine rhyme variants that are multi-syllabic. These words are not homonyms or opposites. They are nothing of this sort. Yet these words are a form of eye rhyme, which is words that are similar in spelling but different in the way they are pronounced. There is no reverse rhyme, repeating vowel sounds, and no para-rhyme, which is beginning and end of words rhyme in consonants with different vowels in between.
