Summary
At the start of Book III, Dulness takes the sleeping King Cibber back to her temple and lays him to rest on her lap. This is a coveted position, one that has generated the token fantasies of romantics, scientists, politicians, poets, architects, and so on. As King Cibber sleeps, Fancy flies him down towards the Underworld, where he can see the realm of Elysium, where only the most exceptional humans and demigods dwell in the afterlife. Sibyl, the Greek prophetess who acted as Aeneas' guide to the Underworld in Virgil's Aeneid leads Cibber now as he descends into the mythological afterlife. Immediately, Cibber is greeted by other dull poets and writers who help him along, like Taylor, who paddles him across the river Styx.
Cibber encounters Bavius, a notoriously bad poet and critic from ancient Rome, who is responsible for dipping the souls of poets into the river occupied by Lethe, goddess of forgetfulness and oblivion. This act of dipping is meant to dull these spirits so that they are ready, upon entering the world, to serve Dulness. Cibber notes that there are countless numbers of these souls on the riverbank waiting to be called to Earth. Then Settle, an English poet and playwright whom Pope critiques as dull, appears as a Sage to Cibber. Settle, boring and relatively unchanged from his form in life, addresses Cibber and invites him to see the place where his own soul was made dull, a privilege few individuals ever experience. His unique position is due in part, Settle tells him, to the fact that he is the one who will now act as the central point for Dulness' reign, understanding and relating its history, while also forging its imperial future.
In order to see the true extent of Dulness' power and territory, Settle takes him up to a hilltop known as the Mount of Vision. He shows him Dulness' past to the east, where so many great empires have succumbed. Science, however, has proven difficult, and conquered some territory that otherwise might belong to Dulness. To the south and north, he sees Science halted by large scores of Dulness' armies from all corners of the globe, which are largely linked to religious movements like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He says that once the Goddess is able to bring people to heel, it creates vast happiness, thus warning Cibber that while the world he is to bring about seems a good one, he ought to be careful not to dominate so harshly that this fog of contentedness might be corrupted.
Great Britain is singled out in Settle's monologue as Dulness' next and most vital target. Settle introduces Cibber to a few servants of Dulness who might be of assistance in his mission, and Cibber analyzes their skill sets and what they might bring to the ultimate goal. These figures are destroyers and corrupters of language, sciences, and order, agents of Dulness at Cibber's disposal. He notes that while all of them, in stealing or borrowing from great minds, are sons of these thinkers, they, like all sons, come to hate all that their fathers give them, and hence serve Dulness and degrade art and scholarship. At this moment, we see a small shift occur in Settle in which he warns these men not to "scorn" those from whom they have plagiarized and whose values they have rejected. A "ray of Reason" makes its way into his mind and then immediately disappears into the dark fog of Dulness once more.
Suddenly, the scene changes and King Cibber finds himself surrounded by monsters and visions of chaos: "Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, / A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball" (ln. 238-240). These mark the start of Dulness' new and stronger reign under King Cibber, but he doesn't recognize these incarnations until the Angel of Dulness explains to him that these are prophecies of what is to come under his rule. Settle celebrates with him but also is concerned having seen similar tendencies at work in his own time. Readers are then given a brief timeline of how Dulness might spread across Britain, beginning most strongly in opera and the theaters. Eventually, though, the dream promises that Dulness shall spread as far as court. Cibber is once again anointed, this time by Bavius with a poppy plant, and the energy and excitement bubbling around these prophetic visions of Dulness' reign are so overwhelming that Cibber finally cries "'Enough! enough!" (ln. 339) and is woken abruptly from his dream.
Analysis
In Book III, readers are finally shown the full scale of Dulness' reign. We see this both in the things the poem describes and in the way it describes them. While we have seen crowds around Dulness before, looking at Dulness through history and the souls she intends to claim as her own creates an overwhelming sense of dread at facing numbers so large and seemingly unstoppable. For example, when King Cibber is shown the “millions and millions” (ln. 31) of dull souls waiting to be sent to earth from the underworld, the reader is inundated with similes to describe this terrifying mass:
“Thick as the stars of night or morning dews,
As thick as the bees o’er vernal blossoms fly,
As thick as eggs at Ward in pillory.” (ln. 32-24)
As we progress through the books, the sense of a building and unstoppable force continues to grow, and with that, the text must instill in the reader a greater sense of panic. Disturbing similes grouped together in this way pushes the reader towards this effect.
This sense of progression for Dulness exists not only in the geographic expansion we are shown either. The characters themselves seem to show a continuing growth in power. Settle is described as he meets Cibber as “the great father to the greater son” (ln. 42). Both are “great” figures, both are strong in the eyes of Dulness and have important sway, but as the generations continue, each gets stronger and thus more difficult, if not impossible to stop. The book itself builds this way, showing us dull souls who may be sent to Earth at the beginning, and ending with the vision of Chaos’ certain reign. By the end, the reader, like Cibber, is meant to feel as though it has all been too much (ln. 339).
One important symbol is revealed in the description from the top of the Mount of Vision. Cibber looks to all directions except west. The west, where the sun sets, is often meant to signify death according to classical and literary tradition. By not including the west, readers are led to believe that the sun will never set on Dulness and that her reign is inevitable.
Similarly, though Cibber descends to the Underworld, he is led by “Sibyl,” the guide of Orpheus—one of the few figures from Greek mythology to travel to the Underworld and return to the land of the living. This illustrates early on that Cibber is immune to the touch of death. While the realm of the dead should be a hopeless one, readers quickly discover that for Dulness, this is a breeding ground where “Old Bavius sits to dip poetic souls, / And blunt the sense, and fit it for a skull / Of solid proof, impenetrably dull” (ln. 24-26). Even the realm which should signal the end only signals new life for Dulness. This is the reader’s first glimpse into the Chaos that they won’t see fully realized until Book IV.
