Let spades be trumps! she said, and trumps they were.

The line comes from Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem *The Rape of the Lock* (1712; revised 1714), a satirical treatment of an aristocratic quarrel. In Canto III, Pope famously stages a fashionable card game (ombre) as if it were an epic battle, elevating trivial social amusements into grand “heroic” action. The “she” is Belinda, the poem’s heroine, whose social power and momentary victories at the card table are narrated with the language of fate and martial triumph. The line marks the instant her will—naming spades as trumps—seems to command reality within the game’s miniature world.

Pope compresses the poem’s central irony into a single, decisive gesture: Belinda declares the trump suit, and the narration treats her choice as an almost sovereign decree—“and trumps they were.” The humor lies in the disproportion between cause and effect: a routine rule of a card game is rendered as an epic turning point, suggesting how high society invests immense importance in trifles. At the same time, the line hints at Belinda’s agency within the constrained arena available to her; her “command” is real, but only inside a game whose stakes are social display rather than substantive power.