What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs,
What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things,
I sing—This Verse to C—, Muse! is due;
This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:
Slight is the Subject, but not so the Praise,
If She inspire, and He approve my Lays.

Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou'd compel
A well-bred Lord t'assault a gentle Belle?
Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor'd,
Cou'd make a gentle Belle reject a Lord?
And dwells such Rage in softest Bosoms then?
And lodge such daring Souls in Little Men? (Canto 1)

Basic set up:

This is the beginning of Pope's famous mock epic.

The first few lines of The Rape of the Lock tell us pretty much straight up that the content of this epic is going to be, well, trivial. The poem is about "mighty Contests" that "spring from trivial Things." The subject of the poem, according to the speaker, is "Slight."

Not that we're surprised, exactly. This poem, after all, is about a guy stealing a lock of hair from a woman. That's it, folks. We're just dealing with a bunch of silly lovers in a drawing room here.

The subject of the poem may be trivial, but the style is anything but. In these first few lines, for example, Pope directly references the epic genre: the speaker's invocation to the muse "I sing—This Verse to C—, Muse!" is a device that's found in all famous epics. Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid, for instance, both begin in just this way.

In presenting this contradiction between trivial content and grandiloquent style, the beginning of Pope's Rape of the Lock shows us just what mock epic is all about. It's all about silly things spoken about in a grand way, because speaking about silly things in a grand way makes the silly things seem even sillier.

The lovers in this poem may take themselves totally seriously, but Pope is here to show us just how ridiculous they really are.