SOURCE: Wilcox, Helen. “Gender and Artfulness in Rochester's ‘Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover.’” In Reading Rochester, edited by Edward Burns, pp. 6-20. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

[In the essay below, Wilcox discusses the challenges of interpreting the highly sexual lyric “Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover” in a contemporary academic setting, and notes that the poem raises issues of voice, gender experience, wit, art, and compassion.]

As to the Work itself, the very Name of Rochester is a sufficient Passport wherever English is spoken or understood: And we doubt not but it will give the highest Delight to all those who have Youth, Fire, Wit and Discernment.¹

This essay arises primarily out of the experience of discussing Rochester's work with readers who possess plenty of ‘Youth, Fire, Wit and Discernment’, namely, fascinated but perplexed undergraduates. How does Rochester, they ask, achieve that astonishing rational directness, that surprisingly delicate lyric grace? Why does he so regularly challenge these, and his readers, with cynicism and obscenity? Is his wit sharpened in anger or love? Is it concerned or dispassionate? Is there a consistent perspective underlying and shaping the variety of poetic masks worn in and by the texts? More particularly, as a male author did he regard the human female with special distaste, or does the sometimes brutal attention given to her indicate attraction? How are human relations, Rochester-style, negotiated? And how are readers' relations and reactions to his texts to be understood and built upon?

This range of questions, adequate answers to which would fill a book, will be focused for the next few pages on just one lyric by Rochester, the one which has caused most impassioned disagreement and bewildered interest among my students—his ‘Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover’. The lyric raises issues of voice, gender, experience, wit, art and compassion; a close look at it may help to suggest ways of responding to Rochester's work and to late-twentieth-century readers' dilemmas concerning it.

1

Ancient Person, for whom I
All the flattering Youth defy;
Long be it e're thou grow Old,
Aking, shaking, Crazy, Cold;
                    But still continue as thou art,
                    Ancient Person of my Heart.

2

On thy withered Lips and dry,
Which like barren Furrows lye,
Brooding kisses I will pour,
Shall thy youthful Heat restore.
Such kind Show'rs in Autumn fall,
And a second Spring recall:
                    Nor from thee will ever part,
                    Antient Person of my Heart.

3

Thy Nobler part, which but to name
In our Sex wou'd be counted shame,
By Ages frozen grasp possest,
From his Ice shall be releast,
And, sooth'd by my reviving hand,
In former Warmth and Vigor stand.
All a Lover's wish can reach,
For thy Joy my Love shall teach:
And for thy Pleasure shall improve,
All that Art can add to Love.
                    Yet still I love thee without Art,
                    Antient Person of my Heart.(2)

As we might expect of Rochester, the immediate impact of the poem is contradictory. It is clearly dramatic, with a constructed female voice addressing her male lover intimately and apparently, at times, with tenderness. Yet despite this dramatized individuality, the lyric is strangely impersonal, with unnamed participants not even honoured with pastoral labels. What distinguishes them is simply their gender and age—this is an anonymous young woman verbally caressing an older man. It is important, though, to note that the title defines the relative social roles and status of these stereotypical characterizations. The female speaker is not immediately identified as a whore,³ nor even as a mistress; she is independent and as a ‘lady’ has some propriety. And in an already teasing inversion of conventional relationships and prevailing social conditions, the man is rendered secondary, dependent upon the ‘lady’ for his identity, as he is ‘her lover’.

How significant, however, are the differences in age and gender between the speaker and her lover? Initially it could be assumed that in these respects the speaker is identified with a number of disadvantages, at least in terms of seventeenth-century society. She is youthful and thus inexperienced, naïve; she is female, and thus liable to be a possession of either her father or her husband—a legal nonentity, a nameless subordinate absorbed into patriarchy just as a ‘rivulet’ is incorporated into a larger river.⁴ The anonymity of ‘young lady’ in the title is therefore perfectly apt: ‘young’ gives place to old, ‘lady’ to man. However, this is to reckon without Rochester's vision of the world, in which to be male is to be at the mercy of devouring females or unwilling physique, and to be old is to realize this all the more vividly. Timon, for example, is confronted with this assumption in the opening of Rochester's satire of that name:

What Timon does old Age begin t'approach
That thus thou droop'st under a Nights debauch?

(ll.1-2)

And in Rochester's portrait of ‘rational’ human nature in ‘Satyr’, the last stage of life is mercilessly characterized:

                    Then Old Age, and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful, and so long,
That all his Life he has been in the wrong;

(ll.25-28)

Perhaps, bearing in mind Rochester's undermining of the traditional wisdom and authority of old age, the youthful naïvety, pride and hope of the young lady are preferable to ancient disillusion.

Relationships between these two extremes, a young woman and an old man, were common in seventeenth-century England, when so many women died in childbirth, leaving widowers who sought a new partnership and security of inheritance with a second, and sometimes even a third, young wife. Such relationships were often seen in mercenary terms, as in Dorothy Osborne's lighthearted account of

An old rich Knight, that had promised mee this seven year's to marry mee whensoever his wife dyed, and now hee's dead before her, and has left her such a widdow it makes mee mad to think on it, 1200 a yeare Joynter and 20000 in mony and personall Estate, and all this I might have had, if Mr Death had bin pleased to have taken her instead of him. Well whoe can help these things …⁵

These partnerships, however, frequently ceased to satisfy either party, and Robert Burton listed difference of age as one cause of melancholy between men and women:

A young Gentlewoman in Basil, was married … to an ancient man against her will, whom she could not affect; she was continually melancholy, and pined away for griefe.⁶

In Rochester's lyric, far from pining away, the autonomous young lady (who is not, it seems, married to her ancient beloved) puts all her energies into making the relationship physically and emotionally (and not necessarily financially) satisfying to them both. Yet again, Rochester is working against the grain of powerful social stereotypes.

Burton used the phrase ‘ancient man’ to refer simply to advancement in years, but it is worth pausing over the fact that Rochester distinguishes between ‘ancient’ and ‘old’. The latter appears to refer to more extreme senility—‘aking, shaking, Crazy Cold’—while ‘ancient’ implies the slightly less terminal, though not very flattering, ‘Withered Lips and Dry’. The chief meaning of the word ‘ancient’, as used in the refrain, ‘Ancient person of my heart’, is probably time-worn but long established, suggesting continuing loyalty to what we would term (again without direct reference to age) an ‘old friend’ (OED 5). The young lady's ‘heart’ stresses the ancientness of their love, not his maturity. Despite the poem's sometimes insulting references to the actual signs of great age in the lover's body, there are at the same time hints that ‘ancient’ has the sense of ‘venerable’ (OED 7), a person deserving care and respect. Some versions of the text adopt the spelling ‘antient’, itself an old-fashioned variant reminding us of the rarity of precious or antique objects (Walker shifts between the two). Does the continuing stress on the lover's physical state suggest that he is, in fact, being treated as such an object? This is, once more, an intriguing reversal of the obsessive itemising attention to the female body found in so much Renaissance and seventeenth-century English love poetry. But is this materialist attentiveness destructive or emboldening?

The young lady's account of her ancient lover's body given in the second stanza is dominated by metaphors of the natural world, metaphors in which gender associations are disrupted and blurred:

On thy withered lips and dry,
Which like barren Furrows lye,
Brooding kisses I will pour,
Shall thy youthful Heat restore.
Such kind Show'rs in Autumn fall,
And a second Spring recall:

(ll.7-12)

The male lover is the passive earth, the element so often regarded as the female principle; in Aristotle's binary world, the feminine is always associated with receptiveness and inactivity.⁷ Here, it is the male lover's lips and (by association) wrinkled brow which are likened to the ‘barren Furrows’ of the ground, ploughed (in phallic manner) by life's hard experiences. This is in contrast to Rochester's more conventional gendering of nature in ‘Upon his Leaving His Mistriss’, in which the earth is a female ‘seed-receiving’ womb on whom ‘no show'rs unwelcome fall’ (ll.15-17, p. 37). The ‘show'rs’ which fall in the young lady's song are her own kisses; in her patently wishful account of the future, she herself is the active (masculine) life force whose loving rain ensures a springtime of renewed vigour in her autumnal partner. The gendered opposition, already thus inverted from traditional usage, is complicated. Although much of her activity appears to be associated with the masculine, the lady's language of concern and healing restoration has overtones of maternal care, introduced primarily by the adjective ‘brooding’ (l.9) and the action ‘sooth'd’ (l.19). And while she is thus credited with motherly reviving powers which restore her lover's ‘Heat’, in the third stanza, he is associated not with this giving of birth but with the ice of age⁸ and the coldness of death, recalling the misery of a ‘winter's day’ in Rochester's ‘The Mistress’:

Where Life and Light with envious hast,
Are torn and snatch'd away.

(ll.3-4)

If the young lady's metaphors and envisaged successes are ambiguously gendered, her modest voice in stanza 3 is a deliberately feminine construction:

Thy Nobler part, which but to name
In our Sex wou'd be counted shame,

(ll.15-16)

The self-conscious reference to ‘our Sex’ is a reminder of the connection between the feminine and restraint, in language and action. Silence and chastity, not-naming and not-shaming, were closely interlinked in seventeenth-century expectations of womanhood, as the rhyme aptly underlines. Ironically of course, the ostentatious modesty of her carefully oblique reference to the lover's sexual organs ensures that the young lady's discussion is no longer oblique. It highlights her knowledge of male sexuality, as much as it demonstrates her awareness of what is expected of an innocent young lady's conversation. The personal and the social, though distinct, are shown to be inseparable here. The dangers of female obedience to the social code, when such coyness ran contrary to genuine female desire, were outlined bleakly by Rochester in the conclusion of ‘Song’:

Then if to make your ruin more,
                    You'll peevishly be coy,
Dye with the scandal of a Whore,
                    And never know the joy.

(ll.13-16)

However, the joyfully sensual language in the earlier stanza of the ‘Song of a Young Lady’ defies the subsequent prim deference to feminine verbal modesty. The context of the final stanza eventually clarifies what the ‘Nobler part’ refers to, though in the circumstances one wonders how ironic this reference is, bearing in mind the ‘withered’, ‘barren’ and ‘frozen’ state of her ancient lover. Elsewhere in Rochester's work, the physical has in fact shown itself to be ‘the frailer part’, while the ‘nobler’ is an adjective reserved for the ‘tribute of a heart’, the metaphysical aspect of love (‘The Fall’, ll. 14-16). Contemporary understandings of love often identified the honourable realm of love with the feminine ideal—chaste, noble—and the physical realm with masculine initiative; as a real ‘Young Lady’ wrote in 1691, ‘Female our Souls, all Masculine our Love’.⁹ There may well, therefore, be several layers of irony in this reference to the ‘Nobler part’. In its immediate application, the stark reality is that the lover's penis is feeble and in need of revival; by ironic transfer, nobility refers to the ideal of love rather than its inadequate physical reality; and in taking this transfer of meaning, the ‘nobler part’ ceases to be a reference to virile masculinity at all but becomes associated instead with the feminine soul. To ‘name’ the genuinely ‘nobler part’ would, then, lead to not ‘shame’ but to a transformation of values.

The ‘Song’ thus makes possible a number of metamorphoses within (and between) its lines: male to female, physical to spiritual, modesty to outspokenness, winter to spring. Perhaps most importantly, the progression of the poem marks a movement from the natural to the artful, as the strangely reversed cycle of seasonal growth is shown to have been brought about by ‘all that art can add to love’. This is an artful lyric, as a look at its structure shows. The initial stanza is carefully framed in first and last lines by the ‘ancient person’ who is the focus and addressee of the poem. As the stanzas proceed they grow in length, mirroring the spring-like fertility recounted in the second stanza and the expansive revival of the third. Meanwhile, the underlying concept of constancy is expressed in the vocabulary and structure of the refrain, returning to the lover each time with terms implying continuation, notably the repeated ‘still’ of perpetuated loyalty. Even as the lyric speaks of improvements and additions—and the stanzas add their extra lines in mimicry—the unchanging refrain works in a contrary motion, defying the very notion of change which the young lady promises. That change, too, is knowingly artful, a conscious reversal of the conventional romance narrative in which the love of a young man transforms an old hag into a beautiful maiden; in this newly engendered tale, the loyalty of a young lady transforms an ancient person into a vigorous lover.

The word ‘art’ occurs three times during the lyric, and its developing meanings epitomize the progress of the poem. Its first appearance is not as a noun at all, but incidentally, as part of the verb to be: ‘But still continue as thou art’ (l.5). This provides both an aural anticipation of the artistry referred to later and an indication of the status quo at the beginning of the poem, a kind of naturalness, the state of being. The second and third uses of ‘art’ come in adjacent lines towards the end of the poem:

All a Lover's wish can reach,
For thy Joy my Love shall teach:
And for thy Pleasure shall improve,
All that Art can add to Love.
                    Yet still I love thee without Art,
                    Antient Person of my Heart.

(ll.21-26)

What is it that ‘art’ can add to love? Clearly this is a use of art as skill (OED 1), a reference to a lover's techniques learned, perhaps, from Ovid's Ars Amatoria and undoubtedly echoing its title. There is an implication that pleasure in love may be learned (and taught); that the young lady is ‘mistress’ of these arts is implied in the steady growth of the stanzas and their ever more hopeful sense of improvement. Similarly in Rochester's poem ‘Verses Put Into a Lady's Prayer-Book’, the speaker urges that, with the aid of love, he and his lady:

                    … By easie steps may rise
Through all the Joys on Earth, to those Above.

(ll.16-17)

In both poems the lovers' experience of joy is progressively upgraded, the ‘easie steps’ here echoing the idea of the lover as a pupil in the young lady's school of love. But in contrast to this practical sense of art as learned skills, the final use of the word in ‘Song of a Young Lady’ introduces overtones of undesirable unnaturalness (OED 2), deceit and trickery, as she assures her lover that her affection for him is ‘without Art’—in other words, unaffected and without guile. But if such meanings are prominent in this final usage, may they not also lurk in the earlier references to art? Can any interference of art in nature ever be trusted?

This question, one which underlay many Renaissance and seventeenth-century debates about love, is particularly pointed when we recall the artfulness of the poem itself, not just in its self-conscious lyric structuring but also as an artifact, a ‘counterfeit’ as Sidney would have it.¹⁰ If this is potentially true of most poems, it is especially true here when the character of the speaker is so obviously artificial: a female voice constructed by a poet known to be male. There are, moreover, significant implications in the idea of artistry when applied to a female writing verse, suggesting extra layers of deceit and danger. As Rochester famously wrote in A Letter From Artemiza in the Towne to Chloe in the Countrey (p. 83), a woman speaking in poetry was hardly to be trusted:

                    Whore is scarce a more reproachable name,
Than Poetess:

(ll.26-27)

Nor was Rochester alone in implying this. Margaret Cavendish, who wrote prolifically at this time, knew that to be a ‘writing lady’ was seen as an aberration and a threat; her texts encroached upon male rights, for men

hold books as their crown, and the sword as their sceptre, by which they rule and govern.¹¹

Literary artistry and the arts of social control were not far apart in the later seventeenth-century. Even the outspoken Cavendish distinguished between her writing and that of her husband: while he ‘wrote’ with ‘wit’, she ‘scribbled’ with mere ‘words’.¹² And as the anonymous female author of ‘The Emulation’ wrote in 1683, men

                              let us learn to work, to dance, to sing,
                    Or any such like trivial thing,
Which to their profit may Increase or Pleasure bring.
                    But they refuse to let us know
                    What sacred Sciences doth impart
                    Or the mysteriousness of Art.

Yet, despite being denied access to the sanctuary of high art, this female poet concluded that women can produce poetry in their own way:

To Nature only, and our softer Muses, we
Will owe our Charms of Wit, of Parts, and Poetry.(13)

This recalls the statement of the ‘young lady’ at the end of her song, that she loves ‘without Art’ both in her honest passion and her simple lyricism. A plain style without the counterfeits of complex rhetoric was also favoured by Dorothy Osborne, who commented that, in contrast to the frank artistry of a female writer, it was

an admirable thing to see how some People will labour to find out term's that may obscure a plain sence, like a gentleman I knew, whoe would never say the weather grew cold, but that Winter began to salute us.¹⁴

So, while the artful ‘young lady’ risks her reputation as a woman by making so bold as to write in verse at all, her conclusion in its denial of art typifies the peculiar entanglement of the female writer, who uses art to hide it in order to retain some vestige of acceptable and apparently honest femininity.

However, within her ‘Song’ the young lady makes reference to other arts than poetry. The art which ‘teaches’ love is a particularly brazen subject for a female speaker, and introduces ideas not only of sensual prowess but also of the art so often associated with the feminine: making the female body itself into a work of art, to attract a lover. In contrast to this female social artistry, Rochester depicts the equivalent art of the masculine in military terms, using the vocabulary of conquest in the ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’: the male approaching with ‘stiffly resolv'd’ penis like a ‘dart of love’ which violently ‘pierc'd’ its object (ll.41-43). Female ‘arts’ are rarely seen by Rochester as so direct or aggressive; even the less accomplished women in ‘Upon His Leaving His Mistriss’ attempt ‘by their Arts’ to make ‘one happy Man’ (ll.10-11). And if they are deceptive or underhand, female arts are generally shown to be manipulative rather than destructive. As another of Rochester's female voices comments in Artemiza to Chloe:

They little guesse, who att Our Arts are griev'd,
The perfect Joy of being well deceaved.

(ll.114-15)

How well, then, are we readers deceived by the arts of ‘Song of a Young Lady’? Initially we tend to connive contentedly in the fiction of a crafted female persona, a double counterfeit because of the known gender of the author. But beyond this, what are the possible deceptions operating? The young lady asserts at the beginning that she defies ‘all the flattering Youth’ in order to remain true to her ancient lover; but how far is her song itself an instance of superficial flattery rather than tender concern? And if such flattery has a hollow ring to it, how far can ‘age’ turn the tables on youth and defy its deceiving flattery? But when we pause to consider the possible reactions of the ancient person(a), we realize that, for all the female artfulness, the focus of the poem, in addition to being the current inadequacies of his physical being, is in fact his own joy, his ‘pleasure’; the song holds out tempting mirages of new life and restored virility for him. Equally, there is a strong sense of the lady's delight in her powers of restoration and her proffered arts, recalling the lines in ‘To a Lady in a Letter’:

For did you love your pleasure lesse,
You were noe Match for mee.

(ll.27-28)

The lady and her lover, despite imbalances of weakness and power, experience and innocence, seem to be on equal terms when it comes to agreeing to the pursuit of pleasure. Or is this another of the song's riddling deceptions, making us forget temporarily the inevitable inequalities also explored in the poem?

With all its layers of irony, the ‘Song’ has to be read as a wryly amusing poem; it certainly contains the ingredients of a comic scenario in its complex juxtapositions of youth and age, art and nature, loving and insulting language. But is the laughter affectionate or mocking, and does the lady laugh, or just her reader? There is undoubtedly some irony at the expense of her ancient lover, particularly focused on his ‘Nobler part’ and all that is signified by that phrase and its careful contextualising in the song. But it is difficult to discern how knowing the young lady is, especially with regard to her own self-ridicule. The mock-modesty of the beginning of the third stanza seems to me to be well under her control; she has assumed too many powers in stanza 2 to remain unaware of the falseness of her coy tones in the subsequent lines. But the denial of ‘art’ at the end of a precisely-constructed work of art in which the ‘arts’ of love have been so ostentatiously displayed, is a layer of irony which appears to be the poet's own rather than that of his persona. There is an implication that the male poet will not permit his ‘young lady’ to get away with controlling the ambivalences in a woman's role as simultaneously experienced and naive lover, as artful but required by social and literary convention to be artless. The lady, then, is mocked by her creator for thinking that she can really love ‘without Art’ when the very statement is an acknowledgement of her social arts. Her loyalty, too, which might be seen as her genuinely ‘Nobler part’, is perhaps itself the subject of mockery; why should a young lady turn down all the attentive youth to devote her time to this ‘withered’ ancient? It is possible, however, that this devotion is not a cause of amusement but of hope, offering reassurance to the male author (and male readers) that a powerful woman (despite all kinds of powerlessness) can be a source of restoration rather than intimidation. The poem is in some ways an answer to the obsessive male fear of dependency and impotence, expressed most forcefully by Rochester in the mock-heroic lines of the ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’:

Eager desires, confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame, does more success prevent,
And Rage, at last, confirms me impotent.
Ev'n her fair Hand, which might bid heat return,
To frozen Age, and make cold Hermits burn,
Apply'd to my dead Cinder, warms no more,
Than Fire to Ashes, cou'd past Flames restore.

(ll.28-34)

The ‘Song’, echoing the metaphors of passionate heat and ‘frozen age’ employed here, is the antidote to this fear, the assertion that a fair female ‘hand’ as both caresser and written art can indeed kindle new fires, even in the most ancient of men.

But no poem, especially by Rochester, is likely to be quite as simple as that in its optimism. The ‘Song’ appears to be simultaneously a railing of the male ventriloquist-poet against his own sex's vulnerability to the frailness of the physical (and to the attentions of women), and a searching for an image of the youthful life force—which mingles male and female as the lady's metaphors reveal—to ensure rejuvenation. It is a reassuring assertion of the potential of loyalty and affection against the odds; yet it is also a disconcerting exploration of the power of art (particularly female arts) to conceal and trick as well as to heal. William Hazlitt said of Rochester that ‘his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds’,¹⁵ and like diamonds they also have innumerable surfaces, the source of their teasingly unfathomable wit. The ‘Song’ sparkles with a multiplicity of implications about women and men, about art and truth. As readers we have to learn, like Artemiza, to be ‘Pleas'd with the Contradiction’ (l.30) and to perceive within that the beginnings of a vision. In the case of the ‘Song’, this entails an understanding of the social and personal constraints on women and the implications of ‘art’ in their hands, but further, hints at the possibility of a destabilising of fixed gender roles in language and in relationships. What is perhaps most startling about the poem is the almost impudent control taken by the young lady, despite her comments on the possible ‘shame’ of her attitude. In Rochester's poem ‘Womans Honor’ (p. 22) he establishes gendered meanings of honour, conventionally regarded in the seventeenth-century as chastity in women and public integrity in men:¹⁶

Consider reall Honour then,
                    You'll find hers cannot be the same,
'Tis Noble confidence in Men,
                    In Women, mean mistrustful shame.

(ll.21-24)

These terms are triumphantly inverted in ‘Song of a Young Lady’; her tone and approach ring with ‘Noble confidence’, the serenely perceived vision of a lover restored through her art and her love. ‘Shame’ is absent from her dealings (even ironically, banished from her language) and is transferred instead to the unspoken shame of male sexual failure. What makes it, finally and surprisingly, into a love song, is the fact that the bitterness of the often discomforting contradictions is subsumed into a refrain of overriding affection. ‘Art’ and ‘heart’ remind us of the constraining opposition of the constructed and the natural, in poetry and in gender, but these binaries are allowed, for the duration of the poem at least, the harmony of a rhyme:

Yet still I love thee without Art,
Antient Person of my Heart.

(ll.25-26)

Notes

1. From the preface to The Poetical Works of Rochester (1761 p. v, in Rochester: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Farley-Hills (London, 1972), p. 202.

2. The text is taken from The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1984), pp. 32-33. All subsequent references to Rochester's works are from this edition; page numbers are given in the main text.

3. See Rochester's A Letter from Artemiza in the Town to Chloe in the Countrey (pp. 83-85) on pp. 129-34 and further discussion below.

4. See T. E., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632), pp. 124-25.

5. Dorothy Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. Kenneth Parker (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 87.

6. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford, 1989), part 1. Sect.2 Memb.4. Subs. 7, Vol.I. p. 366.

7. See discussion of this and other fundamental ideas of women ‘coming second’ in Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987), pp. 178-233.

8. Because of the uncertainty of seventeenth-century punctuation, some modern texts print ‘ages'’ instead of ‘age's’ in line 17, following it with ‘From their ice’ instead of ‘From his ice’ (Veith's emendation). Rochester may well have intended the initial ambiguity, implying ancientness across the ages as well as in one man's age. Walker's text respects this by printing ‘Ages’, though he adopts the emendation to ‘his’.

9. A Young Lady, ‘Maria to Henric’ (1691) in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse, ed. Germaine Greer, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone and Susan Hastings (London, 1988), p. 371.

10. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester, 1973), p. 101.

11. Margaret Cavendish, preface ‘To All Writing Ladies’, Poems and Fancies (1653), no pagination.

12. Cavendish, ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life’ (1656) in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by a Seventeenth-Century Englishwoman, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London, 1989), p. 93.

13. ‘Triumphs of Female Wit, in some Pindarick Odes. Or the Emulation’ (1683), in Kissing the Rod, pp. 310-12.

14. Osborne, Letters, p. 131.

15. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), in Rochester: The Critical Heritage, p. 214.

16. For a contemporary reference to this difference of meaning according to gender, see ‘The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’ in The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford, 1979), p. 116.