Confronting Impotence in Seventeenth Century Verse

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of the poems, those in brackets to endnotes.  The poems by Rochester, Behn, and Etherege follow the essay in the order in which they are discussed.

 

      A significant portion of lyric poetry concerns love, and the greater part focuses on the pains of love-longing.  Few poems celebrate the joys of married life.  Yet pitfalls exist for the lover apart from a stand-offish beloved.  Male impotence, though it seems very nearly a human obsession to judge from the array of nostrums (as well as legitimate medical interventions) that claim to treat it, is rarely the subject of poetry.  Indeed, what the advertisements today call E. D. has been considered such a source of shame that the very subject is often tabooed.

     In poetry, of course, language mediates the gap between the reader and experience, and there only rhetoric can ameliorate the world’s woes.  Restoration poets in England, often following the lead of France, devised a variety of strategies to confront sexual failure with language in a series of witty psychologically and socially revealing “imperfect enjoyment” poems [1].  In literary terms, these works represent yet another case of the transformation of convention, illustrating the generative possibilities of literary convention.  While maintaining the same narrative and sharing significant elements of tradition, each seventeenth century poet used rhetoric to develop a distinct tone accompanying significantly different thematic implications.

     In the Ovidian model for these impotence poems [2] the persona, while boasting of past sexual performances, finds himself at a loss.  He considers whether he might be the victim of magical spells [3], a likelihood the lady endorses, though she suggests the real reason may be his having just had sex with someone else.  The poem ends with her poised exit, comely yet as she exits, having given up and bid farewell to the would-be lover.  In spite of her sprightly dismissal of her partner, the reader may infer a certain male defensiveness in the posited causes for his failure.  Neither a magic spell nor sexual exhaustion impugn a man’s identity as simple impotence might, and the poem maintains a tone of sophisticated play in spite of the man’s chagrin.  In the end the woman’s unnecessary washing indicates an agreement to keep the evening’s disappointment to themselves.  As worldly lovers, they have experienced such a scene before.

     The seventeenth century writers who composed what have come to be employ several different strategies to displace the distress caused by impotence.  In the most well-known of these, the Earl of Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” the most significant innovation is to describe the basic difficulty as a case of ejaculation praecox rather than impotentia coeundi.  Thus the problem may be ascribed in part to an excess rather than a lack of erotic excitement.  This crisis occurs in line fifteen of a seventy-two line poem, allowing the author to spend his remaining rhetoric on denouncing his unfaithful member, which he had mock-heroically praised as an “all-dissolving thunderbolt.” (10)  Though he had earlier, with neo-Platonic language, expected his genitals to “convey my soul up to her heart,” (13) (an inversion of the courtly concept of love entering at the eyes), the lover’s sexual enthusiasm outlives his erection which has become a “dead cinder” (33), a “withered flower.” (45)  Having fallen from Jovian lightning-dispensing power, his penis is now “a rakehell villain who shrinks and hides his head” (57), a “base recreant” (61), finally to appear entirely objectified, passive, and disagreeable, “a common fucking-post” (63) for porcine whores to rub against. 

     Rochester’s poem concludes with a grandly extravagant seven-line curse, a comic display in which he calls down venereal disease upon his penis, condemning it never again even to piss.  This malediction is animated by the speaker’s libertinism, apparently undiminished even if he cannot personally participate.  This motive, a kind of disembodied erotic enthusiasm, blends with the blustering tone of an embarrassed sexual failure to construct a sublimely comic picture of sexual ambition and the ridiculous self-denunciation which at once foregrounds and covers his actual lack of satisfactory performance.  The poem may be read as a satiric portrait of both the intensity of sexual desire and the ludicrous male reaction to an encounter that becomes an embarrassing debacle.

     Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” resembles Rochester’s in theme and in the implication of premature ejaculation.  The lovers’ disappointment is attributed to an “Excess of Love” (88); he has been “or'e ravish'd” (69), betrayed by “Pleasure, which too much Love destroys” (75).

 

       . . . the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.

                                        (138-140)

 

     The tone, however, dramatically differs from Rochester.  In literary terms, in spite of the reference to a “Shepherdess” (138), Rochester observes no pastoral conventions, presenting his couple more or less realistically.  Behn’s use of pastoral names for her couple invokes a tradition in which love songs and songs of love-longing are common, a tradition which makes ample allowance for satire as well.  Her conclusion is a scene from Poussin with nymphs, Daphne, Apollo, and Venus added to the use of “Shepherdess.”  In this pretty confection the flurry of references provides ironic distance from the bed, and vituperation, so significant in Rochester’s poem, plays little role in Behn’s.

     A more radical deviation, doubtless the aspect attracting the most comment in recent years, is the greater complexity of the woman’s psychology in “The Disappointment.”  Whereas neither Ovid nor Rochester contains any indication of reluctance on the woman’s part, in Aphra Behn’s poem Cloris’ attitude is more problematical.  Though she submits because she could “defend her self no longer” (4) and she clearly declares that she might as well die as submit to his desire (29), she still “permits his force” (14) and, indeed, seeks through her actions “to draw him on” (17).  This ambivalence is consistent to the end, saying “Cease — cease” (25), yet “each touch” awakens “new Desires” (35).  On the one  hand, the lovers are belligerents and her body a besieged city, (“the Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy” [40]), yet both are “in Transports” (53).  She is a sacrificial victim (46 and 58) yet she seeks to excite him  (103) and finds his genitals like a betraying “snake,” not for their threat but due to inability to perform (110).  She feels in the end ambivalence, “Disdain and Shame” (118) both because of the woman’s place in society which prizes chastity in respectable women while valuing sexual “conquest” in men.  Some critics have thought that the lady is merely expressing conventional objections she does not feel, though it seems far more likely that both her attraction and aversion toward sex are genuine and well-justified, though contradictory.

     Another variation is added to the structural play of the transformation of convention with the playwright George Etherege’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment” though the basic scenario is unchanged: the coming together, the unsuccessful love-making, and the lady’s retreat.  Her psychomachia over consent is dismissed as a becoming pose of “modesty” (3), such that she resists “with pleasing force” (2).  His persona views the woman’s actions as complex and dialectic; her eyes and her arms have different goals, but the entire pursuit is thus rendered only the more titillating, the revelation of her body becomes a lengthy tease, part of their sophisticated mutual erotic game. [4]  “To save a lily she must lose a rose” (14).  Yet, in the end, when about to initiate intercourse, in the martial imagery absent in Ovid but appearing in both Rochester and Behn, the lover finds himself “dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall” (30). 

     Rather than generating a flow of invective as in Rochester or the Classical pastoral tapestry woven by Behn, Etherege exploits the situation to create neatly balanced rhetorical formulae, often paradoxical after the manner of an Oscar Wilde play.   The effect is sparkling wit.   Virtually every line is a bipolar balance in partial self-contradiction.  In the poem’s last twelve lines I count no less than eleven such figures in a rhetorical tour de force.   

 

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

Here opposed are pleasure and love, the blush (indicating acquiescence) and the frown (suggesting resistance), finish and start, female and male, victory and loss, shame and glory, weakness and strength, presence and absence, comfort and care, happiness and beauty.  All are natural or near antonyms except the first and last, already prominent by position, which thereby receive increased attention.   The neat wit of the concluding line caps a dazzling display of conceptual manipulation in which the “pretty amorous discourse,” while disrupted in the story’s imaginative world, is so adroitly managed on the page that the potency of the poet is restored through his adept use of language.  What ends in railing for Rochester, and in something like a painted screen in Behn, seems in Etherege calculated, part of the set-up for a display of flashy one-liners.

     Rochester found enough potential for variation in the convention to write another poem titled “The Imperfect Enjoyment.”  This version is utterly different in tone from its better-known namesake.  Though the plot-line remains the same, the persona in this piece never loses equipoise.  A rhetoric of balanced periods built of bipolar oppositions presents a resolution in art and sound if not in lived experience. 

     The opening line might puzzle the modern reader: “Fruition was the question in debate.”  At issue is the value of orgasm, often taken as the measure of sexual success.  For D. H. Lawrence and for Norman Mailer in the twentieth century the pursuit of the perfect orgasm acquired immense significance.  Yet in the seventeenth century a small subgenre of poems questioned the value of coming to “fruition.”  For Henry King, for instance fruition is “the bane” that undoes love.  [5]  Rochester seeks a “middle way,” in which sexual denial only heightens pleasure and “feigned virtue” is “but a bawd to vice.” (8)  Again eliding the greater hazard for women in sexual indulgence, he treats his lover’s resistance as coyly coquettish, yet cautions that it may end poorly with “the victor’s fate” being “to die at the entrance of the op’ning gate” (37-38).  He accepts responsibility for the failure of the encounter yet, instead of angry denunciations of his private parts, he adopts a cool position of sly wit.

 

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.

                                                                       (41-2)

 

The poem concludes with a plea for, of all things, sexual mutuality and even a sort of temperance.

 

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;              

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.

        (45-48)

 

 

     Having traced an aggressive and vituperative male voice, half-wild with the very idea of sex, self-obsessed and pushed into transgressive language in Rochester, and a more elegant though also more conflicted female voice in Behn, retreating behind the pastoral stage set, the reader finds in Etherege a more poised and polished response to sexual failure, and finally, in a return to Rochester, a measured and confident compromise.  If the anxieties of sexual performance and the ambivalences of sexual relations in a patriarchal society are not resolved, they seem to dissolve in the poise and polish of these poems. 

     Through alterations in the timbre, as one might say, of the poet’s rhetoric each has dismissed the problems of male/female relations and of sexual ego in the way of art, much as a stage magician will distract the viewer with a flourish of a scarlet handkerchief.  Yet each transformation of the “imperfect enjoyment” convention implies a specific attitude and values.  The ranting anger of one poem by Rochester corresponds to irritable frustration in mood and selfishness in love, justified by what might be called faith in the importance and profundity of sexual experience.  Behn explores female ambivalence, and illustrates the politic considerations she, and not he, must bear in mind.  Then in Etherege the reader encounters the pleasure of structural play, similar to that experienced by listeners to the Goldberg Variations.  While the reader’s interest may be maintained by the subject matter of love, the poet’s aim is less to comment on that topic than to put together becoming structures of language.  The second poem by Rochester presents the theme well-digested, thoroughly processed by a progression of authors, the rhetoric tired out by use, its possibilities plumbed, though the theme is certain to return in new dress.

 

 

 

 

1.  The term was first used by Richard Quaintance in “French Sources of the Restoration ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poem,” Philological Quarterly Vol. 42, No. 2,  (Apr 1, 1963).  The French models for such poems, Quiaintance’s principal topic, is not part of the present inquiry.

 

2.  Amores 3.7 which was translated by Marlowe among others.  While Ovid is by far the most important influence, Petronius (Satyricon, 128-140) and Tibullus (I, 5) may play a role as well.

 

3.  Impotence remains a common reason to suspect witchcraft in Africa today.  The fear of “penis-snatchers” is one contemporary form of this suspicion.

 

4.  Martial provides a neat statement of the idea.  “Do you ask what sort of maid I desire or dislike, Flaccus? I dislike one too easy, and one too coy. The just mean, which lies between the two extremes, is what I approve; I like neither that which tortures, nor that which cloys.” (1,57  “To Flaccus”)

 

5.  King’s “Paradox. That Fruition Destroyes Love” says

Fruition therefore is the bane t'undoe

Both our affection and the subject too.

'Tis Love into worse language to translate,

And make it into Lust degenerate.

Suckling wrote two poems against fruition, and Aphra Behn “To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,

I filled with love, and she all over charms;

Both equally inspired with eager fire,

Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.

With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,             [5]

She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.

Her nimble tongue, Love’s lesser lightening, played

Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed

Swift orders that I should prepare to throw

The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.                              [10]

My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,

Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.

But whilst her busy hand would guide that part

Which should convey my soul up to her heart,

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,                                 [15]

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,

And from her body wipes the clammy joys,                 [20]

When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er

My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?"

She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;

Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,                         [25]

To show my wished obedience vainly strive:

I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.

Eager desires confound my first intent,

Succeeding shame does more success prevent,

And rage at last confirms me impotent.                       [30]

Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return

To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,

Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more

Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.

Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,            [35]

A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.

This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,

With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;

Which nature still directed with such art

That it through every cunt reached every heart — [40]

Stiffly resolved, ’twould carelessly invade

Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:

Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made —

Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,

Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.          [45]

 

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,

False to my passion, fatal to my fame,

Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove

So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?

What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore            [50]

Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before?

When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,

With what officious haste dost thou obey!

Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets

Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,          [55]

But if his king or country claim his aid,

The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;

Ev’n so thy brutal valour is displayed,

Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,

But when great Love the onset does command,    [60]

Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand.

Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,

Through all the town a common fucking-post,

On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt

As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt,    [65]

May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,

Or in consuming weepings waste away;

May strangury and stone thy days attend;

May’st thou ne’er piss, who did refuse to spend

When all my joys did on false thee depend.           [70]

 

   And may ten thousand abler pricks agree

   To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

 

 

 

The Disappointment

Aphra Behn

 

1

ONE Day the Amarous Lisander,

By an impatient Passion sway’d,

Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,

Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;

All things did with his Love conspire,

The gilded Planet of the Day,

In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,

Was now descending to the Sea,

And left no Light to guide the World,

But what from Cloris brighter Eyes was hurl’d.     10

 

2

In alone Thicket, made for Love,

Silent as yielding Maids Consent,

She with a charming Languishment

Permits his force, yet gently strove ?

Her Hands his Bosom softly meet,

But not to put him back design’d,

Rather to draw him on inclin’d,

Whilst he lay trembling at her feet;

Resistance ’tis to late to shew,

She wants the pow’r to say — Ah! what do you do? 20

 

3

Her bright Eyes sweat, and yet Severe,

Where Love and Shame confus’dly strive,

Fresh Vigor to Lisander give :

And whispring softly in his Ear,

She Cry’d — Cease — cease — your vain desire,

Or I’ll call out — What wou’d you do ?

My dearer Honour, ev’n to you,

I cannot — must not give — retire,

Or take that Life whose chiefest part

I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart.             30

 

4

But he as much unus’d to fear,

As he was capable of Love,

The blessed Minutes to improve,

Kisses her Lips, her Neck, her Hair !

Each touch her new Desires alarms !

His burning trembling Hand he prest

Upon her melting Snowy Breast,

While she lay panting in his Arms !

All her unguarded Beauties lie

The Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy.                    40

 

5

And now, without Respect or Fear,

He seeks the Objects of his Vows ;

His Love no Modesty allows :

By swift degrees advancing where

His daring Hand that Alter seiz’d,

Where Gods of Love do Sacrifice ;

That awful Throne, that Paradise,

Where Rage is tam’d, and Anger pleas’d ;

That Living Fountain, from whose Trills

The melted Soul in liquid Drops distils.                   50

 

6

Her balmy Lips encountring his,

Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn’d,

Where both in Transports were confin’d,

Extend themselves upon the Moss.

Cloris half dead and breathless lay,

Her Eyes appear’d like humid Light,

Such as divides the Day and Night;

Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay ;

And now no signs of Life she shows,  cont

But what in short-breath-sighs returns and goes. 60

 

7

He saw how at her length she lay,

He saw her rising Bosom bare,

Her loose thin Robes, through which appear

A Shape design’d for Love and Play;

Abandon’d by her Pride and Shame,

She do’s her softest Sweets dispence,

Offring her Virgin-Innocence

A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;

Whilst th’ or’e ravish’d Shepherd lies,

Unable to perform the Sacrifice.                               70

 

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,

Thee too transported hapless Swain,

Found the vast Pleasure turn’d to Pain :

Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !

The willing Garments by he laid,

And Heav’n all open to his view ;

Mad to possess, himself he threw

On the defenceless lovely Maid.

But oh ! what envious Gods conspire

To snatch his Pow’r, yet leave him the Desire !      80

 

9

Natures support, without whose Aid

She can no humane Being give,

It self now wants the Art to live,

Faintness it slacken’d Nerves invade :

In vain th’ enraged Youth assaid

To call his fleeting Vigour back,

No Motion ’twill from Motion take,

Excess of Love his Love betray’d ;

In vain he Toils, in vain Commands,

Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands.                     90

 

 10

In this so Am’rous cruel strife,

Where Love and Fate were too severe,

The poor Lisander in Despair,

Renounc’d his Reason with his Life.

Now all the Brisk and Active Fire

That should the Nobler Part inflame,

Unactive Frigid, Dull became,

And left no Spark for new Desire ;

Not all her Naked Charms cou’d move,

Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love.      100

 

11

Cloris returning from the Trance

Which Love and soft Desire had bred,

Her tim’rous Hand she gently laid,

Or guided by Design or Chance,

Upon that Fabulous Priapus,

That Potent God (as Poets feign.)

But never did young Shepherdess

(Gath’ring of Fern upon the Plain)

More nimbly draw her Fingers back,

Finding beneath the Verdant Leaves a Snake.           110

 

12

Then Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,

Finding that God of her Desires

Disarm’d of all his pow’rful Fires,

And cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-dew.

Who can the Nymphs Confusion guess ?

The Blood forsook the kinder place,

And strew’d with Blushes all her Face,

Which both Disdain and Shame express ;

And from Lisanders Arms she fled,

Leaving him fainting on the gloomy Bed.                   120

 

13

Like Lightning through the Grove she hies,

Or Daphne from the Delphick God ;

No Print upon the Grassie Road

She leaves, t’ instruct pursuing Eyes.

The Wind that wanton’d in her Hair,

And with her ruffled Garments plaid,

Discover’d in the flying Maid

All that the Gods e’re made of Fair.

So Venus, when her Love was Slain,

With fear and haste flew o’re the fatal Plain.            130

 

14

The Nymphs resentments, none but I

Can well imagin, and Condole ;

But none can guess Lisander‘s Soul,

But those who sway’d his Destiny :

His silent Griefs, swell up to Storms,

And not one God, his Fury spares,

He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars,

But more the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.                 140

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

Sir George Etherege

 

AFTER a pretty amorous discourse,          

She does resist my love with pleasing force;        

Moved not with anger, but with modesty,            

Against her will she is my enemy.             

Her eyes the rudeness of her arms excuse,                   5

Whilst those accept what these seem to refuse; 

To ease my passion and to make me blest            

The obliging smock falls from her whiter breast.

Then with her lovely hands she does conceal      

Those wonders chance so kindly did reveal.                  10

In vain, alas! her nimble fingers strove   

To shield her beauties from my greedy love:       

Guarding her breasts, her lips she did expose,    

To save a lily she must lose a rose.          

So many charms she has in every place,                     15

A hundred hands cannot defend each grace.       

Sighing at length her force she does recall,          

For since I must have part she’ll give me all.        

Her arms the joyful conqueror embrace,              

And seem to guide me to the sought-for place:           20

Her love is in her sparkling eyes express’d,           

She falls o’ the bed for pleasure more than rest.

But oh, strange passion! oh, abortive joy!            

My zeal does my devotion quite destroy:             

Come to the temple where I should adore                    25

My saint, I worship at the sacred door;  

Oh, cruel chance! the town which did oppose     

My strength so long, now yields to my dispose;  

When overjoy’d with victory I fall            

Dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall,                       30

Without the usual ceremony, we             

Have both fulfilled the amorous mystery;             

The action which we should have jointly done,   

Each has unluckily perform’d alone;        

The union which our bodies should enjoy,                    35

The union of our eager souls destroy.     

Our flames are punish’d by their own excess,     

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Fruition was the question in debate,       

Which like so hot a casuist I state,           

That she my freedom urged as my offense          

To teach my reason to subdue my sense;             

But yet this angry cloud, that did proclaim                    5

Volleys of thunder, melted into rain;       

And this adult’rate stamp of seeming nice,          

Made feigned virtue but a bawd to vice;

For, by a compliment that’s seldom known,         

She thrusts me out, and yet invites me home;              10

And these denials, but advance delight, 

As prohibition sharpens appetite;            

For the kind curtain raising my esteem,  

To wonder as the opening of the scene, 

When of her breast her hands the guardians were,    15

Yet I salute each sullen officer:  

Tho’ like the flaming sword before my eyes,        

They block the passage to my paradise; 

Nor could those tyrant-hands so guard the coin,

But love, where’t cannot purchase, may purloin:         20

For tho’ her breasts are hid, her lips are prize,    

To make me rich beyond my avarice;      

Yet my ambition my affection fed,           

To conquer both the white rose and the red.      

The event proved true, for on the bed she sate           25

And seemed to court what she had seemed to hate;       

Heat of resistance had increased her fire,            

And weak defense is turned to strong desire.      

What unkind influence could interspose,              

When two such stars did in conjunction close?            30

Only too hasty zeal my hopes did foil,    

Pressing to feed her lamp, I spilt my oil; 

And that which most reproach upon me hurled, 

Was dead to her, gives life to all the world,         

Nature’s chief prop, and motion’s primest source,      35

In me lost both their figure and their force.         

Sad conquest! When it is the victor’s fate,           

To die at the entrance of the op’ning gate:          

Like prudent corporations had we laid    

A common stock by, we’d improved our trade;            40

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.     

When next in such assaults I chance to be,          

Give me less vigour, more activity;          

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;      45

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.         

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.”