[In the following essay, Quentin examines the relationship of form and content in Upon Nothing, considering the question of whether the missing metrical foot at the end of line 42 reveal something about the qualities of nothing discussed in the poem.]

In John Lennard's Poetry Handbook, subtitled ‘A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism’, there is a section intended to bring comfort to worried A-level students and undergraduates, and it advises them when confronted with a poem in an exam to ‘make a short technical description’, after which it assures them they will suffer ‘an embarrassment of things to remark’, top of the list being ‘metrical conformity and deviation’.¹ Armed with this advice, a practical criticism examinee would be overjoyed to reach the line 42 of Rochester's Upon Nothing, ‘And Nothing there, like stately Nothing Reigns’.² Unlike the hexameter one has come to expect at the end of each stanza, this line has but ten syllables. It is missing a foot on the end, a foot that is all too easy to imagine reigning at the end of the line like stately Nothing itself. Surely if any example of metrical deviation has semantic value contingent upon its context, this does. But did Rochester put it there with that purpose in mind? Is there a contemporary theory of contingent metrical semantics to justify our reading of a putative empty sixth foot? In 1690, Sir William Temple wrote that the Greek name for poets, and this would have been no news to anyone, signified ‘makers or Creators, such as raise admirable Frames and Fabricks out of nothing’.³ The purpose of this chapter is to decide whether there is anything in the qualities of Nothing generally, and Rochester's Nothing particularly, to help answer this question of the relationship between frame and fabric in his poem.

It is by no means a critical contrivance to expect of Upon Nothing an elucidation of an aspect of poetics. To write of Nothing that it had ‘a Being e're the World was made’, which Rochester does in the second line of this poem, is to alert the reader to the linguistic ontology of Nothing. The word is anomalous; the ‘no’ denotes absence of ‘thing’, but it operates like an adjective. ‘Nothing … / Thou had'st a Being e're the World was made’ is grammatically similar to ‘wild thing, you make my heart sing’, or any other sentence in which a qualified thing is the subject of an active verb. The word makes non-existence an accident, rather than an absence, of body. In the Rochester, the verb is the very verb ‘to have being’, which emphasises the spurious existence afforded Nothing by its having a name. ‘This word nothing is a name’, as Hobbes puts it in De Corpore, ‘which yet cannot be the name of any thing’.⁴ This is what led Parmenides to warn us in such strenuous terms of the dangers of the path of ‘is not’, for ‘you could not know what is not … nor indicate it’.⁵ To indicate Nothing is to give to Nothing a local habitation and a name, which is of course the preserve of the lunatic, the lover and the poet. A poem which indicates Nothing, then, is a sort of poem squared. Puttenham wrote that poets are makers ‘such as we may say of God who … made all the world of nought’.⁶ A poem about Nothing would therefore be a parody of the very process of poetic creation.

What then of the relationship in seventeenth-century poetics between form and content, frame and fabric? Sir William Temple's observation about poetry originating in Nothing is nicely balanced between the two, and that poetry is ‘making’ in these two distinct fields, what Harington described as ‘the two parts of poetry’,⁷ is widely acknowledged by the theorists of the seventeenth century and their Elizabethan forebears. There is, however, a consensus that the frame is less important than the fabric. Hobbes writes that ‘they that take for poesy whatsoever is writ in verse … they err’, or as Sidney put it, ‘it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet’, and for Sidney, poetry seems for the most part to be roughly synonymous with fiction.⁸ According to William Drummond, Jonson was occasionally prepared to maintain that ‘verses stood by sense without either colours or accent’,⁹ and so much of the debate in the field of poetics over the course of this period appears to be about what should go on within the arbitrary prescribed limits of poetic form, rather than concerning itself with the nature of that arbitrary prescription. Bacon writes that ‘poesie is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extreamely licensed’,¹⁰ and goes on to discuss at length the licence of fiction while barely mentioning again the restraint of measure. Ironically, this theoretical predilection for the idea of fiction was held responsible for the kind of restrictive evils we moderns associate with prescribed verse. Sir William Alexander writes that ‘many would bound the boundless Liberty of a Poet, binding him only to the Birth of his own Brains’, against which position Davenant replies ‘how much pleasure they loose … who take away the liberty of a Poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an Historian’.¹¹

The poet is nevertheless, as Jonson puts it ‘tyed … to numbers’, and there is no doubt that poets were to get them right according to what Dryden was happy to refer to by the end of the century as the ‘mechanical rules’ of English prosody.¹² Jonson, it will be recalled, thought that Donne deserved hanging for not keeping of accent.¹³ ‘The counting of the Syllables is the least part of the Poet's Work’, wrote Robert Wolseley in the preface to Valentinian, exemplifying the overall ethos that metre is a pre-existing requirement; the actual poetry goes into the words that fulfil that requirement.¹⁴ ‘Though the Laws of Verse … put great constraint upon the natural course of Language’, writes Hobbes, ‘yet the Poet, having liberty to depart from what is obstinate, and to chuse somewhat else that is more obedient to such Laws, and no less fit for his purpose, shall not be, neither by the measure nor the necessity of Rime, excused’.¹⁵

Hobbes dismisses Herbert's experiments in the most primitive of formally mimetic modes; ‘in a … Sonnet, a man may vary his measures, and seek glory from a needlesse difficulty, as he that contrived verses into the form of … a paire of Wings’.¹⁶ In this he is in accord with the prevalent sense that the relationship between form and content is arbitrary. According to Samuel Daniel, form is of necessity an arbitrary restriction unrelated to content, ‘especially seeing our passions are often without measure’, as he points out.¹⁷ When Chapman claims a semantic quality to verse in the following lines ‘Our Monosyllables so kindly fall, / And meete, opposde in rhyme, as they did kisse’,¹⁸ he clearly does not mean this kissing to relate to the content of the rhymed lines; he is, after all, writing about a martial epic. Davenant alerts us to the pitfalls of trying to extract sense from the formal and metrical properties of verse when he writes to Hobbes, ‘I shall say a little why I have chosen my interwoven Stanza of four, though I am not oblig'd to excuse the choice; for numbers in Verse must, like distinct kinds of Musick, be expos'd to the uncertain and different taste of several Eares’.¹⁹

As it happens, this indeterminacy is exemplified in criticism of Upon Nothing, the stanza form of which has been variously interpreted as assertive of the triumph of measure,²⁰ evocative of the chaotic,²¹ and even indicative of an elegiac and ultimately finite largeness whose precision makes the heterodoxy of the poem more subversive.²² Incidentally, the stanza occurs in Dryden's translation of the Aeneid. This is from the dedicatory letter to the Earl of Mulgrave: ‘Spenser has also given me the boldness to make use sometimes of his alexandrine line … it adds a certain majesty to the verse, when 'tis used with judgment, and stops the sense from overflowing into another line’. Shortly afterwards, he writes ‘I frequently make use of triplet rhymes, and for the same reason, because they bound the sense. And therefore, I generally join these two licences together, and make the last verse of the triplet a Pindaric [i.e. an Alexandrine]: for, besides the majesty which it gives, it confines the sense within the barriers of three lines, which would languish if it were lengthened into four’.²³ The business about majesty is a fiction. ‘When 'tis used with judgement’ means when the line is so written as not to fall apart into two trimeters, or when the content of the line is itself majestical. There is nothing majestical, for example, in the Alexandrine from Upon Nothing ‘And to be part of thee, the wicked wisely Pray’ (line 27), with its obvious caesura in the middle, and its alliteration on the paradoxical and distinctly unmajestical topic of the wicked wisely praying for oblivion. Dryden's fictitious hexametrical majesty is intended to excuse the manifest licence he is taking in order to keep his sense within his verses, a motivation he is happy to admit. But there is another excuse in the mention of Spenser, the evocation of a prosodic convention, an arbitrary limit defined by precedent.

Puttenham insists that ‘the Poet makes and contriues out of his owne braine both the verse and the matter of his poeme’, not ‘by any paterne or mould, as the Platonicks … do phantastically suppose’.²⁴ But anyone reading his manual, however taxonomic it might be in intention, could take one of the verse forms therein and use it as a pattern or mould for his own poem. In any case, formal prescription comes into play, at the very latest, as soon as the first stanza of a stanzaic poem is written; and certainly, if one sits down to write a sonnet, the standard sonnet forms exist already, as formal conventions, waiting to be given tangible existence by the words one writes on the page. As regards metre, does Puttenham expect us to believe what Jonson calls the observing of accent to have been re-invented anew for every poem written? If verse is made of naught then, whether Puttenham likes it or not, there is alongside that naught an empty pattern or mould such as the Platonicks do phantastically suppose. Verse form, to paraphrase Rochester, has a being ere the poem is made.

That form pre-exists substance is acknowledged by Sidney as an occasional phenomenon in bad rhymed verse: ‘It will be found’, he writes, ‘that one verse did but beget another’.²⁵ It is famously celebrated, however, by Daniel: ‘Ryme’, he tells us, ‘is no impediment to [the poet's] conceit, but rather giues him wings to mount, and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power.’²⁶ Jonson's claim that he wrote all his poems first in prose and then versified them would appear to contradict this theory, but even he I think could not deny Sidney's assertion that if rhyme is to be done well it requires ‘ordering at the first what should be at the last’, a clear statement of the pre-existing and prescriptive nature of poetic form, rather more convincing than his earlier suggestion that verse is merely ornament to matter.²⁷ This aspect of poetics is modelled in terms of the creation of the cosmos. Pre-existing prescriptive form is justified as analogous to the Pythagorean, and indeed Platonic, idea that the Universe is ordered by number. Campion writes that ‘the world is made by Simmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to Musick, and Musick to Poetry’.²⁸ Even Sidney, despite his insistence that ‘it is not rhyming and versifying that maketh a poet’, acknowledges poetry's ‘planet-like music’.²⁹

Nevertheless, it is to be assumed that matter as well as formal prescription pre-exists the poem; it is rare that poets fill formal requirements with unpremeditated words and see what emerges. This pre-existing matter is also understood cosmogonically, in this case as primordial chaos: ‘The body of our imagination’, asks Daniel, ‘being as an Vnformed Chaos without fashion, without day, if by the diuine power of the spirit it be wrought into an Orbe of order and forme, is it not more pleasing to Nature?’³⁰ In the same vein, Dryden describes primordial poetic matter as ‘a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark’.³¹ So where is Nothing in all this, the Nothing from which Puttenham, Theseus, Sir William Temple and the rest think poetry is made? There hardly seems space for it if symmetry and chaos have coexisted all along.

Clearly, the ubiquitous metaphor of God and the poet as analogous creators ex nihilo brings with it a complex cosmogonical problem, as indeed do most cosmogonies irrespective of their application in poetics. Genesis conflates chaos and non-existence by stating that the earth was both formless and void. It represents a point midway between the ancient Mesopotamian cosmogonies in which it originated, according to which Chaos precedes the ordering intelligence of the creator, and medieval Christian doctrine, according to which God is the sole originator of all things and creates out of nothing.³² Substance cannot be made out of nothing, because if body came into being, there would have been a time when it was not, and this is to take the Parmenidean path of ‘is not’, which way error lies. But body must have come into being during the creation, because otherwise God would not be the sole originator of all things, being therefore coeval with chaos.

Though this latter position is clearly heretical, it survived the Thomist onslaught³³ and lived on into the Renaissance for two reasons. Firstly, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo does not fit with the Old Testament, which admits only creation from the seas of chaos, except in two verses, Genesis 1.2 and 2 Maccabees 7.28, in which creation ex nihilo is hardly positively endorsed. Secondly, the classical tradition in favour of the chaos narrative is strong, particularly in Plato's Timaeus, the only Platonic dialogue to have had a significant doctrinal influence over the medieval period,³⁴ and also in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the creation narrative of which is thoroughly rooted in the Hesiodic cosmogony of chaos.

Nevertheless, Renaissance poets by no means forgot that the world was made of nothing too, and the coexistence of nothing and chaos is imagined sequentially. When Romeo comes across what he calls a ‘Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms’, he exclaims ‘O brawling love, O loving hate, / O anything of nothing first create’.³⁵ When Donne in the ‘Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day’ is transformed from one of ‘two Chaosses’, into a quintessence of nothingness, he becomes the elixir ‘of the first nothing’.³⁶ Romeo is presumably not a doctrinal expert, and in Donne the primacy of Nothing is both a concession to orthodoxy and an integral part of his metaphor. Spenser's solution to the problem of the coexistence of Nothing and chaos, in the Garden of Adonis passage of the Faerie Queene, however, engages much more directly with the actual ontological problem of creation. He writes that

in the wide wombe of the world there lyes,
In hatefull darknesse and in deep horrore,
An huge eternall Chaos, which supplyes
The substances of natures fruitfull progenyes.
All things from thence doe their first being fetch,
And borrow matter.(37)

Chaos here partakes of the origins of things; it is in the womb of the world, not the world itself. The matter from which temporal tangible things are made exists prior to the existence of those things, and, as Spenser goes on to indicate, it exists after those things to which it has given substance cease to exist:

That substance is eterne, and bideth so,
Ne when the life decayes, and forme does fade,
Doth it consume, and into nothing go.

(Faerie Queene, III.vi.37)

Tangible reality is clearly then not substance, but the temporary combination of substance and form; substance itself does not partake of the order of reality in which things are or are not. An absence, a ‘nothing’, in tangible reality before or after the existence of a thing means that its matter is in the realm of pure substance, the womb of the world.

This ontology is Platonic: it comes from the Timaeus, in which there are three orders of being: the realm of pure form, the realm of pure substance which is a homogeneous chaos, and the space in which the combination of form and substance is manifest. Plato helps us here with an analogy that reverses the qualities of substance and tangible reality. Eternal substance is like a sheet of gold, into which shapes are pressed. The tangible world has the ontological status of those shapes while visible as impressions in the gold. In this cosmology, ‘nothing’, has the status of space, the absence of impressions in the gold being equivalent to nothing in tangible reality. When Donne partakes of the first nothing he is re-begot ‘of absence, darkness, death, things which are not’; things, in fact, which, like ‘nothing’, are merely names denoting absences.

Here, then, is a cosmogony of poetry. Poetry, like Plato's cosmos, has three orders of being: the pre-existing conventions of metre and poetic form, imagined as we have seen as the eternal numbers according to which the world was made; the pre-existing substance of the poet's thoughts, imagined as we have seen as a chaos; and the nothing that is the absence of a poem before it has been written. It is this nothing that is the backbone of my contention that the relationship between form and content in poetry written according to the theories of the Elizabethans and their successors is arbitrary, not collaborative. Nothing is what form and content have in common before they are combined in the tangible world of the poem. Their only accident in common is absence. ‘Because I count it without reason’, writes Sir John Harington of a Latin epigram, ‘I will English it without rhyme’,³⁸ giving rhyme and reason a mutual contingency that is ontological and nothing more.

In fact, just as the tangible world is imperfect, so the actual poem is imperfect; it will be recalled that Hobbes described how the sense is not aided but compromised by metre, and that Dryden described the licences he took with metre to contain the sense. Is there any space left for a collaborative understanding of form and content? It could be argued, and I would agree, that the imaginative links between cosmology and poetics faded over the course of the seventeenth century, and a collaborative understanding of form and content crept in. In 1674, apparently the year of composition of Rochester's poem, Thomas Rymer wrote of a verse of Virgil's: ‘the numbers are so ratling that nothing can be more repugnant to the general repose and silence which the Poet describes’.³⁹ He is anticipating Pope's dictum ‘The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense’,⁴⁰ which, though it implies no semantic of metrical deviation, certainly implies a secondary acoustic semantic, to which metre and verse form might contribute. So what of Rochester himself? Was he heir to the Elizabethan cosmogony of poetics or was he a pioneer of formal mimeticism? Does the missing foot mean Nothing, or does it not mean anything at all?

Rochester's cosmogony in Upon Nothing is principally concerned with a question that does not arise in the cosmology of poetics, the old question of why nothing should become something in the first place. ‘What need’, asked Parmenides, ‘would have driven [that which is] later rather than earlier, beginning from the nothing, to grow?’⁴¹ If nothing had a being ere the world was made, in that before the world was made, nothing existed, then what made the world? Of course in line 6 Rochester tells us that ‘What’ did indeed make the world, where ‘What’ is the creator God shaved to infinitesimal thickness by Occam's razor. ‘What’ is that which existed along with primitive Nothing and caused it to become something. The problem is explored through a paradoxical chronology; the creation happened at the moment when time began, and at that moment Nothing something straight begot, and then, presumably a ‘then’ of chronological succession rather than simultaneity, ‘all proceeded from the great united What!’. In this stanza, ‘Something’ is synonymous with the ‘What’; it was begot at the very moment when time began and all, that is everything, proceeded from it. If everything proceeded from it after it itself came into being then it must be no thing, which is why Nothing begot it straight: that first something is in fact coeval with Nothing and partakes of it. This explains how the primal Nothing can be predicated by a past participle in line 3: Nothing is ‘Well fixt’ because it was fixed by that generative principle that is and is not nothing, that does not partake of existence, but must exist to cause existence. Nothing and the ‘great united What!’ begot each other at that eternity of infinitesimal duration at the beginning of time. The third and fourth stanzas restate the paradox. Line 7 points out that something is ‘the General Attribute of all’, and line 10 reminds us that the existence of all is contingent upon the prior existence of something. Nevertheless, this paradox having been exploited long enough, we suddenly find ourselves on familiar territory in stanzas 5 and 6.

Nothing has a kind of extended family; we saw it in Donne's ‘absence, darkness, death, things which are not’, and we see it here. ‘Matter’ is the offspring of Nothing's ‘Race’, and assisted by form it combines to ruin Nothing's ‘Line’, by producing body, Nothing's ‘Foe’. Clearly body is opposed to Nothing, but it is preceded by rebellious agents that partake of Nothing. Matter has been held in Nothing's embrace since the moment of creation. This is just the kind of ontology we found in Spenser, and in line 21 Spenser's very womb image is recalled. A Lucretian version of the same ontology is explored in Rochester's eschatological Nothing poem, the translation from Seneca beginning ‘After Death nothing is, and nothing Death’.⁴² ‘Dead’, he writes, ‘we become the Lumber of the World: / And to that Mass of Matter shall be swept, / Where things destroy'd, with things unborn are kept’ (lines 8-10). Here is that same identity of non-entity that makes unformed matter a kind of nothing, coeval with the Nothing into which form and matter become body. When Hobbes discusses what he calls Materia Prima in De Corpore, he says of it that it is body in general, it is just a name, and it is nothing.⁴³ He explains this with the following analogy. If one were to invent a name for the substance that can be either water or ice, it would refer to water and ice in general, it would be just a name, and it would be nothing. Body in general, then, is primordial matter, which is no thing, and corresponds exactly to that kind of nothing that is chaos in Plato or Spenser. It goes without saying that form too is not in itself tangible body, and is therefore also no thing. Just as we found in ontology and poetics elsewhere, form and matter, prior to creation, are only linked by common familial ties with primordial absence.

This is roughly in accord with Cowley's Davideis, apparently one of the sources of Upon Nothing. Cowley's creation narrative has an unusually comprehensive cosmogony of poetics. Having just previously narrated that ‘All … / From out the womb of fertile Nothing ris’,⁴⁴ he sets up the following analogy:

As first a various unform'd Hint we find
Rise in some god-like Poets fertile Mind,
Till all the parts and words their places take,
And with just marches verse and musick make;
Such was Gods Poem, this Worlds new Essay;
So wild and rude in its first draught it lay;
Th'ungovern'd parts no Correspondence knew,
An artless war from thwarting Motions grew;
Till they to Number and fixt rules were brought
By the eternal Minds Poetique Thought.

(p. 253)

Cowley has already explained that God's ‘spirit contains / The well-knit Mass, from him each Creature gains / Being’ (p. 251); in other words, the primordial stuff has no more tangible being than the ‘fixt rules’ with which it will be combined, and according to which it will be knit by the spirit of God. The ‘first draught’ was a ‘Hint’ of being.

I do not, however, consider my anti-mimetic argument about Rochester's metre to be proved by his acknowledgment of this orthodox post-Renaissance cosmogony of poetics. It is clearly the very act of bringing something out of nothing that interests Rochester, not the mechanical details of that act, or the different kinds of nothing that in combination produce something. If stanzas five and six are merely toeing the orthodox ontological line of his time for want of a more interesting cosmogony to explore, we cannot necessarily expect of Rochester an engagement with their implications for poetics generally, and for the ontology of the sixth foot of the 42nd line of his poem specifically. Furthermore, were I to consider my point proved, it would automatically undermine itself. My inferences pertaining to ‘Well fixt’ in line 3, for example, are invalid if ‘Well fixt’ is there to make up the Alexandrine. If form and content in poetry are indeed an unsatisfactory compromise between arbitrary numbers and matter without measure, then ‘Well fixt’ could so easily be an addition to an original pentameter ‘And art alone of ending not afraid’. The line is much smoother as a pentameter without ‘Well fixt’ than it is as a hexameter with a caesura after the first syllable and a trochee for a second foot. ‘Well fixt’ is not even necessary for the sense. Is it just there to ratify the numbers? The same could be asked of the word ‘strait’ in line 5, so central to my contention that the generative principle is coeval with Nothing. Is the word in fact not there for its sense of chronological immediacy, but because it makes up the pentameter in the way that having ‘did beget’ instead of ‘begot’ would do, but without necessitating a change of rhyme? In denying the semantic properties of metrical feet, does the poetic cosmogony of the time by implication deny the semantic properties of the words required to fill them?

Such a denial would certainly explain Rochester's interest in the paradoxical nature of the creative act itself rather than the process by which that act occurs. If the correlation between cosmogony and poetics does inhere in this poem, the question, ‘What quality in nothing causes it to become something?’ is analogous to the question, ‘What quality in the absence of a poem causes the poet to sacrifice his measureless pre-poetic chaos on the altar of arbitrary form?’ It will be recalled that to write a poem upon nothing is to satirise the very process of poetical composition. If this poem argues for a pervasive semantic ambiguity in poetry as a result of poetry's compromisive nature, then it thereby shows why the very process of poetical composition is so deserving of such satire. In the field of poetics it is a great united why? Twice in the first seven stanzas Rochester reminds us that all this creation will fall back into the boundless self of Nothing, driven back into its womb, and I am reminded of the end of Daniel's Defence of Ryme, where having defended the arbitrary limit of form as creating an orb of order out of chaos, he tells us, the very mise en page tailing off into nothing, that ‘we must heerein be content to submit ourselves to the law of time, which in few yeeres wil make al that for which we now contend Nothing’.⁴⁵

Appealing to Rochester's other pronouncements on poetry is not entirely helpful. He does advocate respect for a vague kind of formal prescription in ‘An Allusion to Horace’: ‘within due proportions circumscribe / What e're you write’ (lines 20-1) but this is no mechanical formalism, for he mocks Dryden for finding Fletcher and Beaumont ‘uncorrect’ (line 82) and appears to espouse a doctrine of liberty from extremes of prescription, without positive advocacy of a semantics of metrical deviation. He makes it clear, in the Sidneyan vein of denying the definitive status of form and metre in poetry, that ‘Five hundred Verses every morning writt / Proves you no more a Poet than a Witt’ (lines 93-4), and in An Epistolary Essay asks ‘Why shoud my prostituted sence be drawn / To ev'ry Rule their mustie Customes spawn?’ (lines 85-6), though of course it is not clear on whose behalf. Nevertheless he appears to show tendencies towards collaborative poetics in the imitation of Boileau, when he mocks Halfwit's exclamation ‘There's fine Poetry! you'd sweare 'twere Prose, / Soe little on the Sense, the Rhymes impose’ (Satyr. [‘Timon’], lines 119-20), an exclamation based on the theoretical assumption that form and content are arbitrarily linked, and the less the two impose on each other, the better both are.

The most positive theory, however, to emerge from Rochester's explicit engagements with poetics seems to advocate sheer hard work. In ‘An Allusion to Horace’ he advises that the poet ‘Compare each Phrase, Examine every Line, / Weigh every word, and every thought refine’ (lines 100-1). But this is by no means an advocacy of formal and semantic collaboration, it argues rather for the Hobbesian considered approach to minimum compromise mocked in the figure of Halfwit. In any case, I do not believe a word of it. I am much happier believing as Rochester's own thoughts on the matter the sentiment expressed in the epistolary essay; ‘But 'tis your choice whether you'l read or no. / If likewise of your smelling it were so: / I'd fart just as I write, for my own ease’ (lines 34-6). It seems unlikely that Rochester, so adept at disseminating the image of himself as the readiest way to hell, would want us to extrapolate from his advice to other poets an image of him hunched over a paper cross-hatched with deletions, trying to impress us with his compared phrases, examined lines, weighted words and refined thoughts. On the contrary, it is much more likely that he would wish to be thought of as concerning himself with idle nothing, than with poetry.

I say ‘idle’ nothing with good reason.⁴⁶ Idleness is a primordial quality as Wycliffe shows in his 1388 Genesis, in which he, not inaccurately, translates the Vulgate's ‘inanis’ as ‘idle’; ‘the erthe was idel and voide’. Creation in Rochester spoils Nothing's ‘Peaceful Reign’ (line 18), a reign in which matter and Nothing would have lain in eternal embrace if it were not for the activities of ‘the great united What!’ (line 6). Nothing is, as we have seen, a womb, and according to Rochester in Love to a Woman, the womb is the ‘dullest part of Gods Creation’ (line 4). This poem shares certain concerns with Upon Nothing: it denounces the normal processes of procreation in the way that Upon Nothing satirises creation itself, on the grounds that created things are fated eventually to become nothing. To ‘Drudg in fair Aurelias womb’ like a slave, is only to ‘gett supplies for Age and Graves’ (lines 7-8), the same process as turncoat Time's driving of Nothing's slaves back to her ‘hungry Womb’ (line 21) in Upon Nothing. In both cases the effort required to snatch things from the idleness of Nothing's womb serves only to return those things to it. That ‘slaves’ are required to sate Nothing's hunger only adds to the picture of Nothing's decadent idleness.

The idleness of Nothing, however, reflects on its encomiast. In the song Love to a Woman he gives the alternative to reproductive drudgery in idle parts, which is (as well as busy love with a personage of parts less idle) engendering wit. But this is clearly an idle pursuit; not choosing out for one's happiness the idlest part of God's creation gives one the leisure, that ‘the Porter and the Groom’ (line 5) do not have, to be idle oneself. Upon Nothing is certainly the result of an engendering of wit; in permitting himself to satirise creation rather than engaging in procreation, might Rochester be putting into practice the idleness that he has thereby earned himself?

In Paradoxica Epidemica, Rosalie Colie identifies two main kinds of writing about nothing, the one being the simple and superficial use of the linguistic and ontological paradox of nothing to produce amusing trivialities, in which category she places Rochester's poem, and the other being the use of nothing to articulate large-scale tragic themes, as in Shakespeare's tragedies. The former category is poetry with a mock subject, the latter is poetry in which the true subject is the human race. But if the former is poetry with a mock subject, then it too must have a true subject, and I think that subject is the author. This is well exemplified by another work in the category of ‘entirely trivial’, Fielding's essay On Nothing, in which he writes towards the end ‘surely it becomes a wise man to regard Nothing with the utmost awe and adoration; to pursue it with all his parts and pains; and to sacrifice to it his ease … and his present happiness’.⁴⁷ Fielding implies that the truly wise man pursues only ease and happiness, a pursuit manifestly engaged in by the encomiast of Nothing, for whom the subject itself is nothing, and the facility and paradoxical pleasure of its praise is everything. Of course the passage explicitly states that the wise man is the encomiast of Nothing, a man not just characterised by his interest in the topic of Nothing, and his pursuit of ease, but also characterised as not regarding anything with awe; he is a leisured satirist, who does nothing with any great sincerity of endeavour. This is the Rochester with whom we are familiar, a man who blasphemes his God and libels kings for his own and our amusement, a man who writes great poetry about nothing at all. Is the careful weighing of syllables appropriate to such a man?

Fortunately, it does not matter to us if this self-image of the encomiast of Nothing is a fiction or not. If, bearing in mind the Davenant Metrical Indeterminacy Principle,⁴⁸ we adopt a new interpretation of the missing foot of line 42, the question of whether there is a semantically active empty foot there is solved. Let us interpret it, not as signifying stately Nothing reigning at the end of the line, but as indicative of Rochester's leisured carelessness, in which case it makes no difference if it is a genuine metrical error, or a carefully considered strategy to portray himself as too much at his ease to care about or even notice a metrical error. The effect is the same. It is in any case no great interpretative leap thus to unite the two sides of an argument which has only ever been about whether the missing foot means Nothing, or does not mean anything at all. It was perhaps overly optimistic to expect an unequivocal answer to the question, ‘Is there or is there not an empty sixth foot at the end of line 42?’, or an unequivocal answer to the question, ‘Is there or is there not a semantics of metre?’, from the poem itself, a poem which as much as anything can, or indeed as only Nothing can, blurs the distinction between those two great ends of Fate, ‘Is’, and ‘is not’.

Notes

1. John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook (Oxford, 1996), p. 184.

2. All quotations are taken from the broadside version illustrated in figure 11.

3. Sir William Temple, ‘Of Poetry’ (1690), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, edited by J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols (Oxford, 1908-9), III, 73-109 (p. 74).

4. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore (English version 1656), I.ii.6, in The Complete Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth, 10 vols (London, 1839), vol. I.

5. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 1983), p. 245.

6. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589) in Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols (Oxford, 1904), II, 1-193 (p. 3).

7. Sir John Harington, A Preface, or rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie (1591), in Smith, II, 194-222 (p. 204).

8. Thomas Hobbes, Answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650), in Spingarn, II, 54-6 (p. 55); Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), edited by Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester, 1973), p. 103.

9. Ben Jonson, edited by Ian Donaldson (Oxford, 1985), p. 603.

10. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), in Spingarn, I, 1-9 (p. 5).

11. Sir William Alexander, Anacrisis (1634), in Spingarn, I, 180-9 (p. 185); and Sir William Davenant, Preface to Gondibert (1650), in Spingarn, II, 1-53 (p. 10).

12. Ben Jonson, p. 587; John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, and other Critical Essays, edited by George Watson, 2 vols (London, 1962), II, 236.

13. Ben Jonson, p. 596.

14. Robert Wolseley, Preface to Valentinian (1685), in Spingarn, III, 1-31 (p. 27).

15. Thomas Hobbes, Preface to Homer (1675), in Spingarn, II, 67-76 (p. 69).

16. Hobbes (1650), p. 57.

17. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme (1603?), in Smith, II, 356-84 (p. 366).

18. George Chapman, Preface to Homer (1610-16?), in Spingarn, I, 67-81 (p. 79).

19. Davenant, p. 19.

20. David Farley-Hills, Rochester's Poetry (London, 1978), p. 178.

21. Griffin, p. 279.

22. Paul Baines, ‘From “Nothing” to “Silence”: Rochester and Pope’ in Reading Rochester, edited by Edward Burns (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 137-65 (p. 149).

23. Dryden, II, 237, 247.

24. Puttenham, p. 3.

25. Sidney, p. 133.

26. Daniel, p. 365.

27. Ben Jonson, p. 603; Sidney, pp. 133, 103.

28. Thomas Campion, Observations on the Art of English Poesie (1602), in Smith, II, 327-55 (p. 329).

29. Sidney, pp. 103, 142.

30. Daniel, p. 366.

31. Dryden, I, 2.

32. For a useful summary of this issue, see under ‘Creation’ in A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, edited by R. Coggins and J. Houlden (London, 1990).

33. ‘It is more unthinkable that matter exist in actuality without form than an accident without a subject’, St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated and edited by T. Gilby (London, 1964-80), X, 66.1.

34. See Plato, Timaeus and Critias, translated and edited by H. D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 21-2.

35. Romeo and Juliet, I.ii.174-6.

36. Donne: The Complete English Poems, edited by C. Patrides, revised by R. Hamilton (London, 1994), p. 40.

37. Spenser: Poetical Works, edited by J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1912): Faerie Queene, III.vi.36-7.

38. Harington, p. 201.

39. Thomas Rymer, Preface to Rapin (1674), in Spingarn, II, 163-80 (p. 175).

40. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by John Butt and others, 11 vols (London, 1939-69): An Essay on Criticism, line 365.

41. Kirk, Raven and Schofield, p. 249.

42. Senec. Troas. Act. 2. Chor. Thus English'd by a Person of Honour.

43. De Corpore, II.viii.24.

44. See Davideis, in Abraham Cowley, Poems, edited by A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905), p. 251.

45. Daniel, p. 384; the mise en page, however, is not reproduced in Gregory Smith.

46. See Oxford English Dictionary, where its first sense (as used by Wycliffe) is given as ‘Empty, vacant’, and its second sense as ‘Void of any real worth, usefulness, or significance’.

47. Rosalie Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica (Princeton, 1966), p. 229; Henry Fielding, ‘On Nothing’, in A Book of English Essays (1600-1900), edited by S. Makower and B. Blackwell (Oxford, 1912), pp. 78-90 (p. 90).

48. See above, p. 91.