Response

Mock-heroic is supposed to be the mode where you catch difficulty vanishing — the epic machinery applied to trivial material, the gap between register and subject performing its own joke. But the passages my retrieval returned don't do that. They do something stranger, and the contradiction between them is more useful than the confirmation I was looking for. Finch's 'A Description of One of the Pieces of Tapistry at Long-Leat' and Keats's 'Lamia' both stage the same scene: a crowd of watchers confronting something that shouldn't be possible, and one figure among them who looks harder than the rest. In Finch, it is the sceptic who presses his eyes so close to the blinded sorcerer that "enliv'ning Beams might from them […]ly / To re-inkindle, by so just an Aim, / The radial Sparks" — Finch. In Keats, it is Apollonius, who "something too he laugh'd, / As though some knotty problem, that had daft / His patient thought, had now begun to thaw, / And solve and melt" — Keats. Both figures perform scrutiny as aggression. But Finch's sceptic is defeated by what he sees — "He, who question'd, now deplores the Deed" — Finch — while Keats's philosopher succeeds, and his success destroys the thing he examines. The sceptic's gaze would re-kindle; the philosopher's gaze dissolves. These are opposite outcomes from the same posture, and the poems do not agree about whether looking harder is an act of repair or an act of murder.

Neither poem is mock-heroic, which is what the prompt expected me to find. Finch is writing ekphrasis of ekphrasis — a poem about a tapestry about a painting about a miracle — and every layer of mediation is rendered in the plainest Augustan couplets, as though the accumulation of frames is difficulty enough without tonal mismatch to announce it. The difficulty is structural, not stylistic: by the time we reach the sceptic's eyes, we are four removes from any event, and yet Finch writes as though we are watching it happen now. The present tense does the work that mock-heroic usually does with bathos — it closes a distance that should be unclosable. Keats does the opposite. Apollonius's laugh is the moment where comic difficulty appears and immediately performs its own disappearance: the problem "had now begun to thaw, / And solve and melt" — Keats — and the melting is literal, because Lamia herself will dissolve under that gaze. The laughter authenticates the seeing, exactly as Dryden's and Rochester's comedy authenticates through membership. But what it authenticates is destruction. The joke lands, and the palace vanishes.

The contradiction I cannot resolve: Finch's sceptic who looks too hard is converted. Keats's philosopher who looks too hard is vindicated. In one poem, scrutiny fails and the miracle survives. In the other, scrutiny succeeds and the beauty dies. Both poets understand that examining a constructed thing — a miracle, an illusion, a palace that wasn't there yesterday — is dangerous to the examiner or to the examined or to both. And neither is neutral about it. Finch's sympathy is with the miracle; Keats's is with the illusion. The philosopher is right, and Keats hates him for it. The sceptic is wrong, and Finch admires what defeated him. What mock-heroic would do — what Prior or Pope would do — is hold both positions simultaneously, letting the form's tonal double-vision keep the question open by making it funny. These poems are not funny. They are dead serious about what happens when you look at a made thing and ask whether it is real. The comedy of difficulty performs its own disappearance; the tragedy of difficulty performs someone else's.