27 pages • 54 minutes read
VoltaireThe Lisbon Earthquake
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1756A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The universal chain
The universal chain appears most prominently in Lines 83-84, where the pessimist speaker asks if the chains of fate are so strong that even God himself is bound by them. Though the concept of the universal chain only breaks through the surface of the poem once, it undergirds the pessimist’s argument because it acts as a synecdoche for God’s powers. If the chain cannot be broken, then God is not omnipotent; if the chain can be broken, then God permitted thousands of innocent people to die at Lisbon and he is therefore not benevolent. These possibilities are returned to throughout the poem, even without continued mention of the universal chain.
The chain itself is a principle of causation that Leibniz used. Effectively, it holds that the cause of each major event is contained in the preceding event, and that event’s cause is also contained in some preceding event, and so on until it reaches an action undertaken or ordained by God.
The potter’s vessel
The symbol of the potter’s vessel ties in with the theme of human frailty. In a counterargument to the main speaker’s conceit that humans suffer too severely under God’s whims, the potter’s vessel is offered from Line 99 to Line 103 as an analogy for the human condition. Though it is not clear whether this counterexample is offered by the optimist speaker or whether it is an example of the pessimist speaker preempting their opponent’s counterarguments, the potter’s vessel is nonetheless a perfect example of human frailty under God as it is conceived in the poem.
The potter’s vessels are “brittle, vile, and low” (Line 100), three conditions that the pessimist associates with humanity. The vessels are presented as illustrative of a human ideal, where the created asks nothing of the creator (Lines 99-100). The comparison is absurd, as the poem points out, because the vessels are incapable of speech or thought (Line 101). However, the comparison’s absurdity only doubles the irony when the speaker later talks of humans being unable to communicate with God (Lines 168-169, 182-84). The connection between human bodies and the potter’s vessel is also reinforced in Lines 205 where the speaker calls the body a “mass of fluids mixed with tempered clay.”
Images of Death
Death imagery may be the most prominent motif in the poem, and the speaker regularly showcases graphic imagery to enhance their argument. The speaker early in the poem invites the poem’s audience to “Approach in crowds, and meditate awhile” on the images of death and destruction they are about to present (Line 6).
Death imagery becomes one of the speaker’s most important rhetorical tools which they perhaps employ more than any other. Images of death resulting from the earthquake are used throughout the poem, but are most concentrated in the first 50 lines (Lines 6-16, 27-30, 44-45). Presenting these images early establishes that the poem’s argument takes both empathy and sensory details into consideration. The death imagery is also used later in the poem for similar reasons (Lines 121-29, 201-09).
