Racing (Allegory)
The most explicit way in which the allegory of racing occurs in this work is through an allusion to the Aeneid, and specifically to a story in which Nisus helps his lover Euralys win a race by tripping their opponent. Dryden compares himself to Euralys and Oldham to Nisus, suggesting that Oldham, himself unable to continue competing, is passing off his legacy to Dryden. The poem as a whole is concerned with the question of not only mortality, but also speed: does a longer life lead to better poetry, or does it merely exhaust the writer and lessen the potency of their work? Who has "won" this poetic race—Oldham, who has finished first and left the race in his prime, or Dryden, because he has the advantage of more time?
Rhyme and Meter (Motif)
Dryden is playful in his treatment of this motif: he describes rhyme and meter and simultaneously uses the poetic devices of rhyme and meter himself, intertwining the two in witty ways. In this poem, rhyme and meter collectively stand in for the aesthetic beauty and technical perfection of poetry. Oldham, Dryden suggests, is better-known for his ideas than he is for his technique, and his poems suffer from a certain lack of care in these aesthetic areas. However, Dryden also explains, this "rugged" tendency is what gives the poems their unique energy, and more practice as Oldham aged might have sapped them of this energy even while fixing some of their surface-level flaws. Dryden imitates the imperfections of his friend's work in his own poem. He disrupts his iambic pentameter meter with the line "Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line," introducing harsh consonants as well as altering stress patterns. Later in the work, he adds a third rhyming line to a rhyming couplet, disrupting a strict pattern of rhymed couplets. Through these deliberate imperfections, Dryden both mimics his friend's style and hints at the disruptiveness of death itself.
