Rereading the Classics [Rochester]

I quote from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth ( New Haven: Yale, 1968). Vieth modernizes spelling and punctuation for reasons that to me are unconvincing but that pose no problems for the understanding of the texts.


     The work of James Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, is perhaps less well-known than his reputation. This is unsurprising for an individual for whom, as for Wilde, life was itself a work of art. In his own day, while his poetry was highly regarded, his behavior attracted even more attention. He was on the one hand an exemplary wit whose company, even in his youth, delighted Charles II and those about him with his ability to extemporaneously compose ironic comment on courtly life even as it unfolded. At the same time, even in the licentious context of Restoration mores, he was considered a notorious rakehell who engaged in scandalous and riotous behavior time and again. A confessed libertine and likely atheist who experienced an apparent deathbed conversion, he was posthumously again an exemplary figure, though of an altogether different sort than he had been at the outset of his brief and spectacular career.
     In spite of the occasional character of much of his verse and the fact that it was circulated largely in manuscript, he was highly regarded in his own day. Marvell according to Aubrey “was wont to call him the best English satyrist,” and, though they later fell out [1], Dryden dedicated Marriage à l la Mode to Rochester in the most fulsome terms, referring to himself as the nobler man’s “slave” and thanking him for assistance in the play’s composition, suggesting further that Rochester could far outdo him in playwriting. Dryden describes himself as “of an inferior wit and quality to you” and lauds “the excellency of your natural parts.”
     Dr. Johnson in the following century is torn between acknowledging the excellence of his writing and denouncing the immorality – worse, the blasphemy – of his views. Though his writing displays “genius” and “splendor,” according to Johnson, he was led by “dissolute and vitious company” into corruption and depravity. Constrained by these extra-literary considerations, Johnson balances his every comment. Rochester, he says, had “an active and inquisitive mind” and had a reputation as “the greatest scholar of all the nobility,” but only when he was not in the throes of one of “his paroxysms of intemperance.” His writing Johnson finds “smooth and easy,” exhibiting “sprightliness and vigour” though his achievement is circumscribed by his “ostentatious contempt of regularity.” “In all his works, Johnson concludes, “may be found tokens of a mind, which study might have carried to excellence.” [2]
     The same tokens of ambivalence persist in the rhetoric of Hazlitt’s discussion of Rochester whose work he characterizes as “the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness.” Finding in the poet “passionate enthusiasm” and even a sort of “sublimity,” he attributes this afflatus to the “extravagant heedless levity” reflecting a “contempt for everything that others respect.” Hazlitt does allow that “his epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written” and, in the wary tones of one risking approval of a monster, allows that “his poem upon Nothing is itself no trifling work.” [3]
     It is worth noting, perhaps, that, though we may have shed much of the prescriptive morality and insistent orthodoxy that was meaningful to Dr. Johnson, even a twenty-first century judge is likely to find Rochester a bit of a rotter. We can perhaps accept his advocacy of free love, but we are likely to grimace when he goes on to encourage incest and confess rape. The question of whether he was being candid or merely provocative is fortunately irrelevant as the issue of whether Rochester was a good man is entirely separate from that of his value as a writer.
     He compels our attention because, apart from composing the most scabrous poems of his era, he wrote epigrams as good as Jonson’s, songs as light as Herrick’s, philosophical and satirical poems to rival Swift or Pope, and a few love elegies as tender as Cowley or Donne as well.
     The issue of obscenity might well be treated first with the intention that it detract as little as possible from other inquiries. Rochester had a double motive for his vernacular and explicit sexual themes. First, to him the imperatives of eros were so powerful that he felt compelled to use the strongest possible language to accurately portray his experience. Equally significant was the use of transgressive language to strike a generally counter-cultural stance, odd though the term may seem when describing a courtier enjoying the confidence of the crown. Breaking with the conventions of his day not in morality alone, but also in philosophy and religion, Rochester found the aggressive language of obscenity a powerful signifier of his dissent.
     Still, the reader of his most infamous composition Sodom is likely to find it tiresome once past the amusement of noting which vulgar terms have survived the centuries and which have vanished entirely has subsided. The best one can say of Sodom is that it is less obsessive than de Sade and less mechanical than Aretino. Turns of wit here and there keep the reader going, but it is not surprising that the play has only been performed only a very few times. [4]
     The “Song” beginning “My dear mistress has a heart” is an early piece, melodious enough for a musical setting with a texture of complaint and paradox familiar from many courtly love poems. The poet is the mistress’ slave, his love-service captured through her eyes, yet she remains in the verse’s alternately extreme and tender language “wild, and apt to wander.” Fearing separation, which apparently has not even occurred, he appreciates his own love-intoxication the more, feeling “melting joys,” and “killing pleasures, wounding blisses.” His compliments are grandly hyperbolic: angels listen when she speaks,” and she is “all mankind’s wonder.” Only in the quiet violence of the language – words like “wild,” “killing,” and “wounding” are used – does Rochester betray the intensity of his passion.
     A number of other songs combine courtly elements with their antithesis, a deflating comic physicality bearing hints of vulnerability, mortality, and despair. The fact that pastoral heroines were rural does not lessen the surprise of an opening line like “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay.” More shockingly, while pastourelles sometimes described what looks very much like rape, the treatment was typically aestheticized, artificial, and muted. Rochester is willfully outlandish. Roused to “rescue your bosom pig from fate” at the Freudian entrance to Flora’s cave, Chloris is graphically taken: “Now piercéd is her virgin zone.” Unsatisfied with this lurid account, the poet pushes his possibilities. Chloris wakes to find that her rape was a dream. Aroused, she masturbates and at the end with “her own thumb between her legs,/ She’s innocent and pleased.” Lying among the grunting animals, she finds that sexual satisfaction has restored a sort of Edenic purity and joy. Rochester has shamelessly repackaged sexual assault as a female fantasy. If we are disturbed, we are likely responding as the author wished.
     The poet excelled in epigrammatic improvisations, virtually all of which are sharply satiric .[5] He ridicules the translators of the Psalms in “Spoken Extempore to a Country Clerk after Having Hears Him Sing Psalms,” Louis XIV in “Impromptu on Louis XIV,” Charles’s mistresses in “On Cary Frazier,” and “On Mrs. Willis,” and the king himself in the “Impromptu on Charles II” that says the king “never said a foolish thing,/ Nor ever did a wise one.” Often by implication, and explicitly in “Rochester Extempore,” he includes himself as a target, declaring himself a “rascal.”
     Among the best of Rochester’s longer satirical pieces is “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” a location which, the poet says, while St. James “has the honor on’t,” “tis consecrate to prick and cunt.” The landscape is dream-like: “rows of mandrakes tall did rise,/ Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.” As though in a seventies bathhouse, he describes dark figures representing all levels of society passing intent on sexual encounters. Suddenly he sees his beloved Corinna cruising, receptive to the advances of three men at once. Claiming that he is indifferent to her seeking sexual pleasure but only disapproves of her becoming “a passive pot for men to spend in” and wishes she would seek out a worthier replacement for him. He concludes by cursing her in words of disgusted vituperation: “May stinking vapors choke your womb.”
     “Tunbridge Wells” is equally fierce and more universal in its indictment finding of man that “in all his shapes he is ridiculous” with our vaunted reason in fact “humanity’s worst disease.” In contrast the author’s horse “doing things fit for his nature,/ Did seem to me by far the wiser creature.” Among his other longer comic pieces “Signior Dildo” is outstanding for its sustained wit, developing one variation after another of the ladies’ affection for the eponymous object.
     “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” was probably Rochester’s most widely circulated poem during his lifetime and it has maintained its prominence perhaps because of its weight and wit, but its ambitious and provocative title is sufficiently intriguing to attract attention. As the skill of manipulating symbols is the definitive characteristic of humanity the poem promises to condemn itself doubly. A man attacking mankind, using reasons to condemn reason promises to be an ingenious paradox, if nothing else, though wit and not logic is the real attraction. After parenthetically identifying himself as “one of those strange, prodigious creatures, man,” he supports both adjectives by saying he would prefer to be anything but a man. It is certainly odd to reject oneself, yet the very seriousness, the honesty, even, of the impulse is an impressive assumption of responsibility, even noble.
     In heroic couplets, carved as though of stone, yet sounding like the table talk of a raconteur, Rochester places himself squarely among the skeptics by describing reason as an illusion, in one of the poem’s memorable metaphors, an “ignis fatuus” of the mind. This false light leads the persona through “error’s fenny bogs” only to come at last to the indeterminacy of “doubt’s boundless sea” where he paddles about until defeated by mortality, finally realizing that “all his life he has been in the wrong,” and that “his wisdom did his happiness destroy.” “Wit” (meaning not cleverness but ratiocination) turns out to have been a mere “frivolous pretence.”
     Should a stern superego, with “some formal band and beard,” scold him with pious commonplaces, arguing that man’s reason is evidence of divinity, giving “the world true grounds of hope and fear,” Rochester responds that it is specifically this delusion that he “despise[s],” , that “each heavy sot can pierce/ The limits of the boundless universe.” Though one would expect Rochester the skeptic to be very close to cynicism, he makes Diogenes the image of a fool, taking to his tub and to asceticism. The only person who would spend his time in thought must surely be he who has “nought to do.”
     In fact the sole use of thought is to determine action, and “our sphere of action is life’s happiness,/ And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an ass.” On the other hand, reason employed to make choices based on sense impressions is useful, “right reason.” Humankind, however, remains for him detestable, far less efficient than beasts at knowing and attaining their proper ends. Humans are perverse, vicious for no good reason, excelling only at “wantonness.”
     The evils of people arise out of their fear and confusion, a thought in curious harmony with Buddhist ethics, though Rochester goes on to declare that, in this moral wasteland, one has no choice but to be unscrupulous. “Men must be knaves, ‘tis in their own defence;” therefore, life amounts to a grand competition to be “the greatest knave.”
     The poem concludes with a final turn of wit. There is unlikely to be a single exception to the rule that people act out of fear and ignorance. Every individual in court is jostling for personal advantage, and every churchman a hypocrite. Should there, however, be such a prodigy as an honest man, it would be the exception that proves the rule, demonstrating only that “man differs more from man, than man from beast.”
     Even more metaphysically daring, “Upon Nothing” [6] begins with familiar notions but builds into a grand contemplation of its extraordinary subject, interrogating every duality in the height of the empyrean before returning to the phenomenal world in a satiric conclusion. The triplets of the verse generally present a problem in the first two lines, resolved in the third, while the consistent rhyme in each stanza reinforces the sense of order, of something within nothing.
     The opening stanza names the topic and implies the motive for the inquiry by noting that only nothing is “not afraid” of mortality. The next triplet paraphrases the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, saying “all proceeded from a great united What.” His customary ambivalence toward the world of lived experience is evident in his rather Gnostic reference to matter as “the wicked’st offspring of thy race.” He suggests that in the mystery of nothingness “the truth in private lies.” People are “blind” before the “great Negative.”
     Here he engages the heart of duality.


Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate,
And True or False, the subject of debate,
That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state—


     In his third line, as though triggered by the word debate (and Rochester did take part in debates in the House of Lords), his philosophic superstructure gives way and, from questioning the nature of reality, he satisfies himself with the simpler task of making fun of Parliament. This social critique then expands to cover governments and nobility more generally and to touch on a series of national stereotypes before equating gratitude, kings’ promises, and whores’ vows all as equally empty. [7] It is as though the text dramatically enacts before the reader’s eyes the dizzying unsustainable heights of skepticism only to take refuge the easier targets available on every side in a fallen world.
     “The Mistress” strikes me as wholly earnest, a love poem to set beside Propertius and Tibullus, suggesting no shock but rather tender, attached, slightly melancholy reflection. The opening indicates the equally irresistible power of love and the passage of time.


An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter’s day,
Where life and love with envious haste
Are torn and snatched away


     The joys of his mistress are clearly ambivalent: his soul is “the living tomb” of love, “lovesick,” he feels her “wounding eyes.” He and she “sigh and lament, com plain and grieve.” Their passion is invested in “fantastic fancies,” and “frail joys;” he is in a sense dead, “:no more a soul, but shade.” The conclusion is one of these “fancies,” as the poet hopes for an affection “fixed and dear” “to make us blest at last.” To him his agony is nothing but “love raised to an extreme.” He hopes yet to be “blest at last,” to experience a felicity which can only arrive with love, but which seems always in practice elusive.
     The hedonist Rochester, in search of the highest pleasure, the perfect orgasm, the most ravishing beauty, writes most commonly of imperfect love. He can imagine in “The Fall” a prelapsarian sexual paradise free of frustration, but he cannot find it. Wishing always to “raise pleasure to the top” (“To a Lady in a Letter”), he writes of impotence (“The Imperfect Enjoyment”),near-impotence (“A Satyr on Charles II”), and voyeurism (“The Disabled Debauchee”). Even successful completion of a sexual act can bring only indifference in its train (“The Platonic Lady”). Several poems suggest a homosexual preference (“Upon His Drinking a Bowl”) or that the persona would prefer alcoholic intoxication to sex (Song “How happy, Chloris, were they free”).
     The slide into disgust with sexuality and the body that has appeared already in “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay” and “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” is reinforced by numerous other negative archetypes of the feminine such as the superannuated slut with “old blear eyes” in “Timon” and Mrs. Willis (“On Mrs. Willis”) whose “belly is a bag of turds,/ And her cunt a common shore,” yet “ballocks” make men her slaves. Only Swift, whose poetic line was sometimes similar, was equally receptive to the flesh and horrified by it.
     Thus for Rochester wit becomes a fall-back position. If humans find themselves in an intolerable existential void, they are able yet to generate sparks of wit containing sufficient bright genius to maintain balance while illuminating the tragedy of life. The suddenness and surprise of wit exercises to the full humankind’s prodigious cognitive powers (which Rochester finds more often a handicap than an advantage), flinging a sort of desperate joy in the face of circumstance.
     Perhaps the most poignant expression of his undying desire to seize a beautiful moment from the passing parade of vanities is the lyric “Love and Life.” After noting that one possesses neither the past nor the future, and that even the present flows rapidly by, he takes refuge in the sincerest love, committing that moment to his beloved. “Talk not of inconstancy,/ False hearts, and broken vows,” he says, since “all that heaven allows” is “this livelong minute,” but that can itself be “a miracle.” Rochester’s oeuvre is centered on his path through the absurd spectacles her saw all about him, beckoned always onward by that vision of paradise promised by the notoriously transitory bliss of sexual pleasure.



1. Indeed, their hostility reached such a point that Rochester seems to have been guilty of arranging with thugs to waylay and beat Dryden.

2. Lives of the English Poets.

3. In Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, “On Dryden and Pope.”

4. Some dispute the authorship of the play. It was performed in 1986 at Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1999 by the Dysfunctional Theatre Company in New York, and 2011 by the Movement Theatre Company for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Portions are performed in the 2004 movie The Libertine.

5. “To My More Than Meritorious Wife” is an exception. The abandoned libertine seems to have been a devoted husband at the same time.

6. Cf. William IX’s poem on nothing in which unreturned love is the decentering energy.

7. The reader will be reminded of Donne’s Song “Goe and catch a falling star.”