Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time,
And make two lovers happy.

These lines come from Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic poem *The Rape of the Lock* (1712; revised 1714), spoken in the episode where the beau Baron prepares to seize a lock of Belinda’s hair. In a parody of epic prayer scenes, he addresses the “gods” with exaggerated solemnity, asking for supernatural help not for war or empire but for a trivial social triumph. The comic inflation of a fashionable flirtation into cosmic stakes is central to Pope’s satire on the aristocratic “toilette” world and its values, where romantic pursuit and reputation can seem as momentous as fate itself.

The speaker’s plea—“annihilate but space and time”—hyperbolically frames romantic desire as a wish to overcome the basic conditions that keep lovers apart: distance and delay. In context, Pope uses this grand language ironically. The Baron’s “heroic” invocation mimics classical epic, but the goal is merely to secure a lock of hair, exposing the vanity and theatricality of polite society’s passions. The couplet also captures a genuine human impulse beneath the satire: love’s impatience with separation and its fantasy of immediate union. Pope lets the elevated diction both mock and momentarily dignify that longing.