Success Quote by Alexander Pope

Pope compresses an entire social critique into eight words: romance is an anesthetic, marriage the rude recovery. The line turns on a clean, almost mechanical contrast - dream versus wake - that flatters courtship as imaginative possibility while quietly indicting it as self-deception. Courtship belongs to the theater: curated selves, strategic compliments, passions performed with an audience in mind. Wedlock is where the lights come up and the props look cheap.

The cynicism isn’t just about love going stale; it’s about institutions. In Pope’s England, marriage was as much contract as communion: property, lineage, social positioning. That reality lurks behind the verb choice. You can choose to dream; waking happens to you. Wedlock arrives not as a continuation of desire but as an imposition of structure - routine, obligation, finances, status. The wit is surgical: the phrase doesn’t condemn marriage in moral terms; it frames it as an epistemological shift, from fantasy to knowledge, from projection to fact.

Contextually, Pope writes from a culture obsessed with manners, reputation, and the gap between public performance and private truth - the same gap his satires love to puncture. The line lands because it mimics what it describes: it seduces with the softness of “dream,” then snaps to the harder consonants of “wedlock” and “wake.” It’s a miniature Popean move: charm first, correction second, leaving the reader laughing and slightly implicated.