Who Breaks A Butterfly Upon A Wheel? - Pope's Satire

Pope's Satire

The line "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" forms line 308 of the "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot" in which Alexander Pope responded to his physician's word of caution about making satirical attacks on powerful people by sending him a selection of such attacks. It appears in a section on the courtier John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey, who was close to Queen Caroline and was one of Pope's bitterest enemies. The section opens as follows:

Let Sporus tremble –"What? that thing of silk,

Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?

Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;

Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,

Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys,

Sporus, a homosexual favored by Emperor Nero, was, according to Suetonius, castrated by the emperor, and subsequently married. Pope here refers to accusations made in Pulteney's Proper reply to a late scurrilous libel of 1731 which led to Hervey challenging Pulteney to a duel. Hervey's decade long clandestine affair with Stephen Fox would eventually contribute to his downfall. As first published the verse referred to Paris, but was changed to Sporus when republished a few months later.

What? that thing of silk uses a metaphor of a silkworm spinning that Pope had already used in The Dunciad to refer to bad poets. The then common tonic ass's milk was part of a diet adopted by Hervey. This painted child comments on make-up such as rouge used by the handsome Hervey.

Another graphic instance of the usage can be found in An Introduction to Harmony by William Shield (1800), wherein he writes : "Having brought this Introduction to Harmony before that awful Tribunal, the Public, without first submitting it to the inspection of a judicious friend, I shall doubtless merit severe correction from the Critic; but as my attempt has been rather to write a useful Book, than a learned Work, I trust that he will not break a Butterfly upon the wheel for not being able to soar with the wings of an Eagle."