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Reregistration
Task A - our answer
Pope borrows the register of the cooking recipe to give his instructions
for writing an epic, and the effect is clearly bathetic and humorous.
Anyone can cook a dish by following a recipe carefully. But writing a
decent epic is a much more skilled affair, which very few can manage.
The recipe format is signalled by the prepositional phrase title (which
was common for recipes in the 18th century) and the use of imperative
constructions and the verbal lexis of cooking ('take', 'add', 'mix', 'foam',
'thicken', 'brew'). But the nouns which act as objects to these straightforward
culinary verbs refer to weather conditions, not foodstuffs, and four of
them are Greek words referring to the four winds (If you want to impress
your friends: Eurus = east wind, Zephyr = west wind, Auster = south wind
and Boreas= north wind). So the irony comes about because of the careful
linguistic mixing of the arcane and the mundane.
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