[In the following essay, Paulson charges that most critics have treated Upon Nothing with too great seriousness, arguing that one needs to understand the bawdy pun on “what” in the second stanza to appreciate its wit and tone of exuberant irreverence.]

Critics of the satire Upon Nothing, written by John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, agree that it is a paradoxical and witty poem, a profound satire based on skeptical philosophy, and a parody of the creation myth found in the first chapter of Genesis.¹ It is witty and profound and it is a parody of Genesis, but most of the very perceptive commentaries on Upon Nothing have treated the satire with a singular solemnity, and most critics have failed to see the laughter, whether cosmic or not, co-existing with the serious skepticism.² None seem to have noticed the bawdy pun on “What?” in the second stanza. This pun establishes the controlling metaphor of generation and birth developed in a series of witty paradoxes in the first seven stanzas of the poem.

A clear idea of the wit of Upon Nothing and its tone of exuberant irreverence cannot be understood without an awareness of this pun.

E're time, and place, were, time, and place, were not
When Primitive Nothing, something strait begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united—What?

(Text: A-1680-HU)³

The final line of this stanza contains the elevated tone of mock-serious irony, common to a paradoxical encomium, but it also contains the startling pun on What?, a pun not elevated at all. When the line is spoken aloud the combination of final plosive consonants t and d in united cause the final d to be pronounced more like t. This effect is emphasized if a pause is demanded between the final t sound and What?. The final t sound in united becomes a part of the last word in the line producing t—W'at? (twat).⁴ The bawdy pun may seem outrageous, but no more so than the verbal irony of Hamlet's “Do you think I meant count[-]ry matters?”

The final line of this stanza in Professor David M. Vieth's recent edition of The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester reads “Then all proceeded from the great united What,” omitting the dash and question mark.⁵ Vieth's copy-text is the Bodl. MS. Tanner 306, fol. 410^r.⁶ However, this line in three early and reliable texts (the A-1680-HU, the Gyldenstolpe MS., and the Yale MS.) do contain the dashes and question mark.⁷ The scribe of the Bodl. MS. probably did not recognize the pun, and certainly not its importance in the poem, and ignored the dash and question mark while transcribing. The pun on What exists with or without the punctuation, but the pun is already submerged, and excluding the dash submerges it even further. Excluding the question mark denies the irony of the line and the humorous eyebrow-raising question. Rochester deliberately used the dash and question mark, I think, to inform the pun and emphasize the great question, giving the query an assumed tone, or a pose of quizzically ironic, wide-eyed ignorance.

The pun on What, though at first surprising, continues the imagery of generation and birth begun in the second stanza, “When Primitive Nothing, something strait begot.” This imagery is continued in the third stanza:

Something, the gen'ral Attribute of all,
Sever'd from thee, [its](8) sole Original,
Into thy boundless self, must undistinguish'd fall.

Together the images form one extended metaphor. Figuratively and literally, “the great united—What?” is the vagina and womb of Nothing, from which “all proceeded.” “Something” is born of Nothing and is “sever'd” from its “sole Original” as a child's umbilical cord is severed at birth from the womb of its mother.

Stanzas four through seven of Upon Nothing develop and return to the imagery of generation and birth: stanza four, “And from thy fruitful emptinesses hand, / Snatcht Men, Beasts, Birds, Fire, [Water,]⁹Aire, and Land”; stanza five, “Matter, the wicked'st Offspring of thy Race”; stanza six, “With form, and Matter, time and place, did join, … / To spoil thy peaceful Realm, and ruin all thy Line.” Stanza seven completes the cycle; with the aid of Time the offspring which came from Nothing are ultimately driven back to the womb of Nothing: “And to thy hungry Womb, drives back thy Slaves again.”

The logic of the first seven stanzas of Upon Nothing is a series of wonderfully self-evident contradictions. The wit and humor of Rochester's satire come from the juxtaposed incongruity of calmly revealing the incomprehensible and abstract absolute—Nothing—as a concrete, earthy personification. As Professor Anne Righter Barton points out, Rochester plays “with concepts of Being and non-Being in a way designed to call the structure of language itself into question.”¹⁰ Nothing is both the begetter and bearer of “something.” To beget and bear postulates a union of some kind, but exactly “What” could have become joined together is the problem. Nothing is the “sole Original,” yet it “united” to give birth. The result of this most singular union, in a very literal sense, is the deliberately vague “something.” John Harold Wilson states that Upon Nothing is “a grim parody on a famous theme in Genesis—the Creation” and “something” is “Rochester's ironic name for God or Spirit.”¹¹ Rochester's parody of Creation is really exuberant rather than grim satire, and a single interpretation of the deliberately vague “something” discounts the variety of ironic possibilities such a general term can connote and with which Rochester plays throughout the satire.

The satire is certainly a devastating attack on revealed religion and the Christian dogma of Creation ex nihilo, but the blasphemy, if indeed it is such, is buoyant, bubbling with irreverent good humor. The author is obviously enjoying himself as he expands his skepticism within a framework of laughter at the attempts of theologians and philosophers who struggle to explain and prove that which must be left to faith—or to doubt.

Notes

1. John Harold Wilson, The Court Wits of the Restoration (Princeton, 1948), pp. 137-138. V. de Sola Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit (Lincoln, 1962), pp. 114-116. Ronald Berman, “Rochester and the Defeat of the Senses,” Kenyon Review, XXVI (1964), 359. Howard Erskine-Hill, “Rochester: Augustan or Explorer?” Renaissance and Modern Essays (London, 1966), p. 56. Anne Righter [Barton], “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” Proceedings of the British Academy, LII (1967), 62.

2. The one exception is Pinto, but he confuses his point with an irrelevant comparison between Rochester's Nothing and Blake's Nobodaddy (p. 116).

3. Text: A-1680-HU. See Rochester's Poems on Several Occasions, ed. James Thorpe (Princeton, 1950), p. 51. All subsequent quotations from Upon Nothing, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this text.

4. The first time “twat” appears in written English according to the OED is in 1656 in R. Fletcher's translation of Martial. The OED also records a maxim from the Vanity of Vanities published in 1660: “They talk't of his having a Cardinalls Hat, They'd send him as soon as Old Nuns Twat.” Upon Nothing was probably composed between 1675 and 1678.

5. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven, 1968), p. 118.

6. Ibid., p. 206.

7. See The Gyldenstolpe Manuscript Miscellany of Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and other Restoration Authors, ed. Bror Danielsson and David M. Vieth (Uppsala, 1967), p. 153. Yale MS., p. 108. For a discussion of the Yale MS., see David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry (New Haven, 1963), pp. 65 ff. Whether this evidence demands a change in the choice of copy-text, or simply a departure from the chosen copy-text, is a question for an editor, but both the recognition of the pun and the textual evidence suggest the necessity of the dashes and the question mark.

8. The A-1680-HU (Thorpe, p. 51) reads “it's” which has to be a typographer's error.

9. This reading is found in Vieth's copy-text and in the Gyldenstolpe MS. See Danielsson and Vieth, p. 154.

10. Anne Righter [Barton], p. 62.

11. Wilson, p. 137.