The Battle of Ombre in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock The card game of Ombre was created in Spain in the early 17th century. There are many various names and various ways to play this card game. Ombre is a three-handed trick game and consists of four players, but only three active players. In Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Pope uses this card game to create a sort of mock-heroic effect in a sense of a sort of battle that is happening between Belinda and the baron. The author uses the deck of cards to create a battle scene to keep the poem as mock-heroic as possible.
Ombre is a card game that is very much similar to the modern game of Hearts and Spades. In Oliver Baker’s “Pope’s Ombre Enigmas in The Rape of the Lock” he states, “In order to appreciate the Ombre allusions in The Rape of the Lock a modern audience must understand how this complicated and counter intuitive card game is played.” (Baker 211). The game is played with a standard deck of cards with the 8’s, 9’s and 10’s removed. Each player is dealt 9 cards and the remaining 13 cards are placed in the talon, which is the pile of cards left after the deal. (McLeod sec. 2) The ranking of the cards depends on the type of “contract”. The rules of Ombre is that the players bid or auction on who will be able to take most of the tricks and the winning bidder becomes the declarer, or the Hombre and must play against both of the other two players. The player that wins the bid is allowed to declare which suit will be trump, which is the dominant color of the hand. After, each player plays a card counter-clockwise and in order to win, the declarer must take five tricks. In The Rape of the Lock, Belinda and the baron played in game contracts, which means that there is always a suit. The black aces are independent of which suit is trumps. In this game, the spade ace is called spadille, which is always the highest trump and the club ace is called basta, which is always the third highest. The term manille is the card that would otherwise be the lowest card in the trump suite and lastly matadors refers to the black aces and the highest three cards in the game (McLeod sec. 2).
Alexander Pope uses the game of Ombre to create a mock-heroic battle scene with Belinda and the baron by using metaphors, where Belinda and the baron are the captains and the cards are their army battling each other. In Oliver Baker’s article, he describes how the Belinda and the baron enacted this mock-heroic battle in the card game of Ombre (Baker 210). In Canto 3, Pope describes the cards in personification to make the deck of cards seem like human living queens, kings, and jacks in which they are commanding the rest of the cards:
‘Let Spades be trumps!’ she said, and trumps they were.
Now move to war her sable Matadores,
In show like leaders of the swarthy Moors.
Spadillo first, unconquerable lord! (Canto 3. Lines 46-49).
This section in the poem puts personification to the cards in which it makes it seem like an army at war and as well gives great justice in a mock-heroic epic. With the help of the Sylphs, Belinda has the four highest cards in the game, which she believes she will win. However, since she is the Ombre, she must win five tricks to beat the other players. Throughout this card game, Pope suggests that the card game is almost as if it’s a battle for love in Belinda’s terms, as she flirts her way throughout the poem. At the end of the card game, Belinda rises to victory saved by her “King of Hearts”, which foreshadows that there may be someone for her. Pope creates a mock-heroic effect to explain that he as well can write epic poems just with the use of the card game scene by the use of personification and metaphors. The use of this card game in the poem is to treat the card game as a great battle and using irrelevant events as though they were larger in life.
In The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope writes the card game as a mock-heroic battle. Since epics center around a heroic person and is often surrounded by a great battle, Pope creates a battle between Belinda and the baron by using forms of personification and metaphors to treat this card game as if Belinda and the baron were generals as they command their deck of cards in their hand. The use of this technique in Pope’s writing gives a great mock-heroic battle with just the use of a deck of cards.

Work Cited:
Baker, Oliver. Pope’s Ombre Engigmas in The Rape of the Lock. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 17.2-3. (2007): 210. Print.

McLeod, John. L’Hombre. John McLeod, 2003. Web. 02 February. 2015

Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. The Harbrace Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Jon C. Stott and Raymond E. Jones. 5th ed. Toronto: Nelson, 2012. 67-92. Print.

Work Cited:
Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. The Harbrace Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Jon C. Stott and Raymond E. Jones. 5th ed. Toronto: Nelson, 2012. 67-92. Print.