SOURCE: Wilcoxon, Reba. “Pornography, Obscenity, and Rochester's ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment.’” Studies in English Literature 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1975): 375-90.

[In the following essay, Wilcoxon claims that Rochester's poem “The Imperfect Enjoyment” is not pornographic because it satisfies three aesthetic criteria: it uses complex linguistic devices to achieve psychic distancing; it is linked to a classical traditional of “imperfect enjoyment” poems; and it explores not only sexual but emotional, psychological, and ethical relationships between human beings.]

In the right-hand drawer of his writing desk, where he normally kept his flutes and music books, Samuel Pepys concealed a book that he thought “unfit to mix with my other books.”¹ It was Poems on Several Occasions By the Right Honourable, E. of R———, the abbreviation known to all as the notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Writing to his clerk in November, 1680, four months after Rochester's death, Pepys advised, “pray let it remain there, for as he is past writing any more so bad in one sense, so I despair of any man surviving him to write so good in another.”²

We cannot know exactly what Pepys meant by “so bad in one sense” and “so good in another,” but we can guess that he considered Rochester's poems indecent and possibly immoral, yet by some artistic standard effective and worth preserving. This split judgment of “good” and “bad,” essentially the ever-present dichotomy between the moral and the aesthetic, represents a common polarity among critics confronted with poetry or prose that is subject to the charge of pornography and obscenity. Rochester's long-standing reputation for pornography and obscenity has obscured the need to analyze his methods and the context in which he was working. Using as a test case “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” a poem blatantly shocking in sexual language and imagery, I shall attempt to clear Rochester of the blanket charge of pornography, to defend the obscenity in historical and aesthetic contexts, and to suggest a psychological and moral dimension in the poem that bears examining.

The appearance and disappearance of “The Imperfect Enjoyment” in the editions of Rochester's poems over a period of almost 300 years has been dependent on the moral persuasion of the editor (as would be expected, it was printed by Curll and omitted by Dr. Johnson) or the legal demands of the time. As late as 1964 Vivian de Sola Pinto was forced to exclude it from the collected poems “at the request of the publisher owing to the risk of prosecution in this country [Great Britain] under the existing law.”³ Currently, it appears in the David Vieth collection and elsewhere. The changing legal and moral status of “The Imperfect Enjoyment” makes attractive the proposition that pornography and obscenity are in the eye of the beholder; this, however, is a critical dead end. Understanding the effects of such poems requires an aesthetic context for the sexual images and foul language. For this purpose, it will be useful to attempt a differentiation between pornography and obscenity, an aesthetic distinction but not a legal one.

Etymology points to the exclusively sexual as the subject of pornography, pornē being the Greek for harlot. “Obscenity” is of doubtful etymology, although the Latin obscēnus or obscaenus is thought to be its derivation. Obscaenus originally meant adverse, inauspicious or ill omened; according to the New English Dictionary, the meaning was transformed into abominable, disgusting, filthy, or indecent. Havelock Ellis's interpretation is suggestive: “By the ‘obscene’ we may properly mean what is off the scene and not openly shown on the stage of life.”⁴ In usage, obscenity has always been a more extensive term that can denote sexual, scatological, and grotesque depictions of the physical. Thus all pornography is obscene, but not all obscenity is pornographic. Let us deal with the more restrictive term first.

Much of the serious writing on pornography has been motivated by a passion for artistic, social, and intellectual freedom. The problem is compounded by the tendency to combine the visual and literary arts, for which aesthetic criteria are not necessarily the same. Moreover, discussions offering the most empirical evidence have concentrated on prose fiction rather than poetry. And there is little agreement on whether pornography is “art.” The two fundamental positions on this final question are exemplified by Abraham Kaplan in “Obscenity as an Esthetic Category” and by Morse Peckham in Art and Pornography. To Kaplan pornography is not art because it does not effect the aesthetic experience, “a kind of disinterest or detachment, a ‘psychic distance.’”⁵ He explains: “Of course, art evokes feeling; but it is imagined feeling, not what is actually felt as a feeling of what we do and undergo. And art works against the translation of imagined feeling into action. It does so partly by providing us insight into feeling, and so allowing us to subject passion to the control of the understanding.”⁶ By contrast, pornography is “promotional.” It is “not itself the object of an experience, esthetic or any other, but rather a stimulus to an experience not focussed on it. It serves to elicit not the imaginative contemplation of an expressive substance, but rather the release in fantasy of a compelling impulse.”⁷ On the other hand, Peckham holds that art and pornography are not mutually exclusive. Although he disclaims any absolute definition, Peckham gives as the single common denominator of all pornography “the presentation in verbal or visual signs of human sexual organs in a condition of stimulation.”⁸ This presentation can be art at a low cultural level (and usually is, he admits) or at a high cultural level. The higher the cultural level of pornographic art, according to Peckham, the greater its departure from conventionalized “perceptual fields,” the farther removed from the pragmatic, and the more difficult are the problems offered by the use of language. A related contention is that pornography at the low cultural level is likely to be monotonous because it has “a well-restricted iconographic program, delimited by the character of the enterprise.”⁹

What we have here, in two opposing aesthetic theories is a striking similarity in analysis of the object: the pornography that Kaplan sees and the low cultural level that Peckham sees are the same impoverished literary representation of sex. This deprivation has also been remarked by others. For example, in Libertine Literature in England David Foxon observes that pornography releases emotion by “simple technical means which do not usually deepen the quality of our experience.”¹⁰ Herbert Gold has found: “Erotic writing mediates between art and sex, but pornography tries to perform the mediation without your being aware of the medium—like a deluxe product sold for prevention of impotence only.”¹¹ To which he adds: “Pornography finally thinks of nothing more than the hand in the lap, and that is why it leaves sadness in its wake. But if the mind can deal with style, energy, complications and simplicity both, this sadness is overcome.”¹² Steven Marcus, in his well-documented The Other Victorians, is another who concludes that pornography is like propaganda and advertising in its call to sexual action. In it, language is merely an obstruction: “At best, language is a bothersome necessity, for its function in pornography is to set going a series of nonverbal images, of fantasies, and if it could achieve this without the mediation of words it would.”¹³ At its “purest” the pornography in fiction that Marcus analyzes is the low level defined by Peckham: verbal signs of stimulated sexual organs without exploration of emotional responses, personality, or values. We cannot, he says, speak of “relations between human beings” in such representations; instead, “They are rather juxtapositions of human bodies, parts of bodies, limbs, and organs; they are depictions of positions and events, diagrammatic schema for sexual ballets—actually they are more like football plays than dances.”¹⁴ We are given “sets of abstractions” for a world in which no one is ever jealous, possessive, or truly angry.¹⁵ Or, as another commentator sees it, the work is a fairy-tale existence in which erotic wishes are “lived out without punishment or unpleasant effects.”¹⁶

Of course, most of these conclusions are based upon evidence from fiction rather than poetry. It is probably more difficult for poetry to be entirely “schematic” sexually, since part of its fabric is emotional expression and since formal devices, such as meter and rhyme, tend to call attention to language. Nevertheless, the characteristics of pornography discovered by these critics enable us to make distinctions among seventeenth-century poems without calling upon individual moral values. For example, an epigram ascribed to Rochester in some editions but now disallowed is a brief but clear example of simplistic pornography on these criteria:

WRITTEN UNDER NELLY'S PICTURE

She was so exquisite a Whore,
That in the Belly of her Mother,
She plac'd her ——— so right before,
Her father ——— them both together.(17)

The epigram is an example of what Marcus means by “diagrammatic schema for sexual ballets.” Only the word “exquisite” provides any possibility of meaning beyond the image of bodies in conjunction.

A notch higher in quality is the song, “In the Fields of Lincoln's Inn,” which is in the 1680 edition of Rochester's poems but attributed by Vieth to Sir Charles Sedley. Mockery of the pastoral and the heroic enriches the meaning, but the principal purpose of the poem is to effect, in Marcus's terms, a blueprint for objects and not persons. “Nymph” Phillis solves the problem of simultaneous intercourse with two “shepherds,” Coridon and Strephon:

Nature had 'twixt C——t and A——se,
Wisely plac'd firm separation;
God knows else what desolation
Had ensu'd from Warring Tarse.(18)

The use of the heroic is comic—including puns such as “fierce intestine bustle” and “They tilt, and thrust with horrid pudder”—but the pornographic interest is still paramount. The relations of the human beings end as they began, on a merely physical plane with the nymph “Ballock beaten” and the shepherds “soundly tir'd.”

With these examples of, and specifications for, pornography in mind, let us consider Rochester's “The Imperfect Enjoyment.” I shall argue that the poem fulfills three aesthetic demands that pornography does not: it effects psychic distance through complex linguistic devices; it is intellectually and emotionally enriched by a classical and a seventeenth-century literary tradition; and it explores an emotional relationship between human beings and sets up a norm for that relationship.

The poem begins in a pornographic style, with a juxtaposition of bodies: “Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms, / I filled with love, and she all over charms.”¹⁹ Though this is clearly no carpe diem poem—both lovers are “equally inspired with eager fire, / Melting through kindness, flaming in desire” (3-4)—still the clichés of such love poetry, the “longing” and “kindness,” are a disarming preface to the amplification of physical images that follows:

With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightning, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.

(5-10)

The metaphors “Love's lesser lightning” and “the all-dissolving thunderbolt below” mitigate the explicitness of images by lending distance and a kind of elevation. The effect is mock-heroic, but the weight of the mockery is not being thrown at sex itself. The grandiose “all-dissolving thunderbolt,” the mighty weapon of Jove transformed into the phallus, prepares the way for the speaker's subsequent self-mockery and his curse on the fallen weapon, delivered with a curious mixture of comic and tragic tone that is not uncommon in Rochester's poetry.

In the next couplet similar heightening occurs as the poet invokes Platonic (or Neo-Platonic) concepts: “My fluttering soul, sprung with the pointed kiss, / Hangs hovering o'er her balmy brinks of bliss” (11-12). We may recall Donne's “Extasie,” in which “our soules, (which to advance their state, / Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee.” The soul in that instance is clearly a non-physical entity; in Rochester's couplet the dualism of soul and body is not so definitely maintained. Though it may be read as designating an emotion (even a “spirit” of sorts), Rochester's “soul” almost certainly finds issue not in philosophically conventional outlets but in phallic transmission, and so “hangs hovering” over the “balmy brinks” of his mistress' sexuality. Rochester is redefining the interplay of body and soul, and skillfully suspending the grounds of judgment between the two. This shifting between the abstract and the concrete, or the ideal and the real, is furthered by the seemingly innocent “pointed” kiss which “sprung” the soul. “Pointed” is abstract if one thinks of the meaning “to the point,” the essence of the intent; but it also suggests the concrete invitation to action conveyed by the “nimble tongue.” Both the verbals, “pointed” and “sprung,” carry a sly duality. The metaphor “balmy brinks” has an olfactory and visual tenor that further operates against the Platonic ideal. At the same time, however, “balmy brinks” has an application that moves it away from pornographic immediacy, since by its terms the female body becomes an emblem of external nature.

The aesthetic distancing, achieved by “balmy brinks,” as well as by the lightning and the thunderbolt, can be appreciated by comparison with the crudity of a similar scene in “A Dream” (“Twas when the sable Mantle of the Night”), formerly attributed to Rochester:

Methought I found her prostrate on her Bed,
Only her Smock cov'ring her Maidenhead;
I heav'd it up, sweet Linnen, by your Favour;
I felt, but how my moisten'd Fingers then did savour!
I look'd, and saw the blind Boy's happy Cloyster,
Arch'd on both Sides, lye gaping like an Oyster;
I had a Tool before me, which I put
Up to the Quick, and strait the Oyster shut.(20)

That the male's mastery in this poem is cast in a dream sequence, where he meets no obstacles, is consistent with the judgment that pornography is wish-fulfillment unimpeded by the contingencies of reality. Events are otherwise in “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” where the promise of fulfillment is broken by a reality that no doubt elicited sympathy from Rochester's largely male audience:

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,
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.

(13-18)

“Convey my soul up to her heart” continues the parody of Platonic idealism, but then the language coarsens with the reversal of events. Still, “Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt” proves anything but a crudity. It is in fact a triumph of erotic definition, a metaphor for the mistress' sexual attraction, a power reaffirmed, more conventionally, by the subsequent reference to “her fair hand, which might bid heat return / To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn” (31-32). In short, the word “cunt” functions as synechdoche, with the part standing for a whole cluster of attributes (consider the similarity of effect if we substitute the word “Queen”).

The entire description of the love scene, which is direct and comparatively unelaborated, is the stuff of pornography; yet the general meaning and the speaker's emotional reaction are antithetical to pornography, where every sexual fantasy ends in success and no one ever admits, as the poet does here, “Succeeding shame does more success prevent, / And rage at last confirms me impotent” (29-30).

Rochester is delineating a situation inherently embarrassing and one to which probably no lover outside of pornography has been immune; yet the contrast between the erotic foreplay and the sudden betrayal of the lovers' anticipation is a comic incongruity. There are both pathos and ridicule in the image of the desirable and desiring woman removing the “clammy joys” and exclaiming, “All this to love and rapture's due; / Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?” (23-24). The satire broadens as the lover attempts to “show my wished obedience,” only to discover that the body will not respond to the will. The subject can be seen as impotence or limitation, but not under a rubric either pornographic or merely negativistic. Rochester is striving for a seriocomic image of the human predicament.

Literary precedent itself militates against readings of Rochester that are overly solemn. To the extent that such precedent is brought into play, the poem acquires additional aesthetic distance by virtue of the reader's increased contemplative engagement. Pornography, it will be recalled, short-circuits the mind for the most direct route to sexual arousal. Once we recognize that Rochester is working in a tradition as old as Ovid and Petronius and as recent as his French and English contemporaries, we are less prone to conclusions that are too simplistic.

The situation in Ovid's Amores and in Petronius' The Satyricon differs from “The Imperfect Enjoyment” in that the male partners suffer impotence at the outset and not premature ejaculation. But the role of the women is much the same: they are willing, cooperative, and disappointed. With all three writers, the lover's recognition of his impotence is followed by chastisement of the phallus. Frustration leads to aggression, and aggression is vented on the offender, a seriocomic technique that trades on the primitive objectification of the phallus as a thing in itself, a power apart. The mock-encomium by Rochester is the most extensive and the most revelatory of the speaker's character.

Rochester begins his address to the male organ on a note of veneration, much as the epic hero would address his trusted spear. Although the military metaphor for the sexual act is ancient and widespread, perhaps the images and the puns here owe something to Encolpius' rationalization in The Satyricon, “it was less myself than my instrument that failed. As your soldier, lady, I stand ready to die in the breach, but I am a soldier now without a spear.”²¹ Rochester makes the same dissociation of self and body as he contemplates the cause of his frustration:

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—
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.

(37-45)

This verse sentence, with a periodic postponement of the main verb (“lies”), is remarkable for its compression of detail. And yet, shot through as it is with sexual metaphors and puns, like “dye” (for orgasm) and “stiffly resolved,” it is without prurience. Rather than issuing a call to sexual action, it reports the life of lust in masculine terms of violence and weaponry. Sex is shown ultimately as pure power, a rapine of male and female alike—even, presumably, inanimate objects—in any or all of which “a cunt it found or made.” The significance of “invade / Woman or man” is not deviance, but the voracity of the sexual appetite. The result is a startling contrast between former sexual prowess and the present “withered flower,” a descendant of Ovid's “hesterna languidora rosa.”

In the satiric apostrophe that follows (46-61), beginning “Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,” the blade as instrument is transformed into blade as person, who is characterized as a subject remiss in duty to a ruler. He is a “deserter” who mistakes allegiance, for he is “true to lewdness, so untrue to love.” The personification of a disloyal subject is expanded:

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,
But if his King or country claim his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head.

(52-57)

Again, we see Rochester trading on conventions of sexual discourse that are found in Petronius and Ovid. Threatened with a razor by Encolpius, the cause of his shame “shrank, too scared to watch.”²²

Rochester's soldier demonstrates a misplaced heroism, bold in his attack on whores, a coward in the presence of “great Love”:

Ev'n so thy brutal valor is displayed
Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But when great Love the onset does command,
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar'st not stand.

(58-61)

That which is recreant to the prince is also recreant to a principle, and perhaps the image was chosen to suggest the common origin of the two words. Throughout the passage (46-61) we see the ethical hedonist at work and perceive a distinction being drawn between qualities of pleasure. The soldier who is “true to lewdness, so untrue to love,” who betrays the command of “great Love,” has failed to distinguish between better and worse, higher and lower. The concept of love, whatever it may mean precisely for Rochester, is clearly a norm against which choices of action are measured. Without abandoning the pleasure principle, Rochester conveys the idea that sensuality per se is somehow inadequate.

The power of sexual impulses, of unbounded desires, is affirmed in the dark irony of the last lines (62-72), where the phallus again becomes object rather than person, as Rochester addresses the “Worst part of me,” Ovid's “pars pessima nostri.” The venomous comparison with hogs indicates that Rochester does not accept sexual gratification as a value in itself:

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 on gates do rub themselves and grunt.

(62-65)

There is a hint of disclaimer in the “common fucking post,” as if the speaker disclaims responsibility. It is possible to see an ambiguous attitude toward nature, a suggestion that, in sexual matters at least, one is inevitably a victim. In the active role, the dart of love is directed by nature (l. 39); in the passive, the instrument becomes a “common fucking post,” toward which nature impels the swinish whores. In a world of mechanical appetite, he who has used others as objects becomes an object in turn.

The irony of the closing anathema is that the curse delivered on a part of the body affects the whole:

Mayst 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 didst refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend.
          And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
          To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

(66-72)

Rochester's lover does not seek restoration but emasculation. Although there is some justice in Ronald Berman's verdict that “In Rochester there is the same union between sexuality and destruction so much in evidence in De Sade,”²³ it must be remembered that De Sade never turns that destruction on himself. In “The Imperfect Enjoyment” at least, there is more of the hair shirt, the plucking of the eye that offends, which is foreign to De Sade's pornography, or to any pornography for that matter.

On the aesthetic criteria here advanced, the complexities of “The Imperfect Enjoyment” acquit the poem of pornographic purpose or effect. Yet the charge of obscenity remains substantial, if we mean by obscenity not, as Judge Woolsey defined it in his famous Ulysses decision, “tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts,”²⁴ but the more general context of the offensive, the indecent, the normally hidden elemental activities of man and the “forbidden” words that apply to them.

Rochester himself, in the “Allusion to Horace,” speaks of “songs and verses mannerly obscene, / That can stir nature up by springs unseen, / And without forcing blushes, warm the Queen.” The word “mannerly” is difficult to interpret, since it could designate either manners or morals. Although the context suggests some kind of polite prurience, a broader principle than social propriety is needed to encompass Rochester's use of the obscene. Of assistance are two comments, one by Rochester and another by his friend and defender, Robert Wolseley.

In a letter to Henry Savile, Rochester speaks of “The Lowsiness of Affairs in this place … (forgive the unmannerly Phrase! Expressions must descend to the Nature of Things express'd).”²⁵ From this we can infer that he distinguished between polite language and expressive language at a realistic level. In Wolseley's preface to Rochester's version of Valentinian, he declares that all he is “oblig'd to defend, is the Wit of my Lord Rochester's obscene Writings, not the Manners; for even Wit it self, as it may be sometimes unseasonable and impertinent, so at other times it may be also libertine, unjust, ungrateful, and every way immoral, yet still 'tis Wit.”²⁶ Lashing out at the Earl of Mulgrave's condemnation of Rochester for “Bawdry barefac'd, that poor pretence to Wit,” Wolseley retorts that “it never yet came into any man's Head who pretended to be a Critick, except this Essayer's, that the Wit of a Poet was to be measur'd by the worth of his Subject, and that when this was bad, that must be so too: the manner of treating his Subject has been hitherto thought the true Test, for as an ill Poet will depresse and disgrace the highest, so a good one will raise and dignifie the lowest.”²⁷ Rochester holds that the language communicates the quality of the thing or experience; Wolseley, that the manner not the subject (i.e., how rather than what) determines literary worth. Both of these views are of a piece with the twentieth-century argument of Kaplan in “Obscenity as an Esthetic Category”: “In short, obscenity, like art itself, is not a matter of referential, but of expressive meanings. What is relevant is not subject, but substance; not an isolable message, but an embodied content.”²⁸ The importance of literary context was equally recognized by Judge Woolsey in the judgment of Ulysses: “In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt's sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers.”²⁹

Thus, if the obscenity of “The Imperfect Enjoyment” is set in place, it becomes a rhetoric of realism typical of satire. As Northrop Frye has observed, “genius seems to have led practically every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene.”³⁰ The sexual words, which stay close to their referents, enforce an immediacy of experience not otherwise possible.³¹ They make the capsule drama come alive as no euphemisms or circumlocutions could. In addition, if we recall Rochester's strictures against meaningless abstractions in the poems Upon Nothing and A Satyr against Mankind we can see how the language of sexuality could function as apposite symbols of the only sources of knowledge, the senses. When Mulgrave in his “An Essay Upon Poetry” criticized Rochester for “obscene words, too gross to move desire,” he was in one sense right, but for the wrong reason. They fail to move desire not because they are too gross but because they are integral parts of a seriocomic mosaic and an index to the poet's own reality.

Judgment in this matter is also affected, we must remember, by versification, by the skillful use of the couplet. Although William Piper finds in Rochester's couplets a prevailing stiffness that is due to his “emphasis on point and wit,”³² the movement of the discourse in “The Imperfect Enjoyment” is notable for a varied pace that corresponds with meaning. For example, in the love-play of lines 7-10, enjambement, with the first three verses ending on verbs, carries the sense quickly forward, consonant with “lightning,” “swift orders,” and the thunderbolt. The succeeding closed couplet is a pause, in keeping with “Hangs hovering.” And the climax, which is at once an anti-climax, of verses 13-16, again picks up speed, accompanied by an alliteration of the liquid “I” to echo meaning. A second illustration is the beginning of what I have called the mock-encomium (37-45): the single sentence that proceeds hurriedly with the described violence and drags to a slow close in “Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower,” a line that defies rapid reading aloud. This pattern is typical of the poem. While the technique tends to bring obscene words into focus, it invests them at the same time with significance beyond the uses of perversity. In other words, the metrical ordering also operates against the impression of “dirt for dirt's sake.”

Nor is the usually hidden subject matter of ejaculatio praecox without a redeeming level of literary allusion. Through the parallels with Ovid and Petronius, we have already seen that impotence and attention to the phallus are not original with Rochester. If the context is extended further to the seventeenth-century literary scene, we gain access to another measure of complexity. At least five French and five Restoration “imperfect enjoyment poems” (including Rochester's) appeared between 1577 and 1682,³³ and they represent irreverent burlesque of the artificial and over-idealized love poetry of their immediate predecessors. Imperfect enjoyment poems were a naturalistic correction of attitudes expressed in the numerous “against fruition poems” which followed a Petrarchan, courtly-love tradition of the superiority of the ideal over the actual. Paradoxically, although imperfect enjoyment poems reject the contemplation of love for the physical act, they tend to affirm that, in fact, the actual is less than satisfactory.

Imbedded in Rochester's version, on the surface a depiction of a less-than-satisfactory libertine life, is a psychological and ethical mandate for a male-female relationship. In this connection, it is important to keep in mind that though pleasure is the summum bonum for Rochester, he constantly examines through his poetry the values by which pleasure is to be measured. Unlike De Sade, he does not equate it with the infliction of pain or with power. If the first element of morality, as Berman holds, can be found in Rochester's passionate self-consciousness,³⁴ part of that self-consciousness is an awareness of the needs of others. How the human predicament subverts the fulfillment of those needs, rather than an obsession with the failure of the senses, is the preoccupation of “The Imperfect Enjoyment.”

The theme emerges through the two controlling logical propositions in the poem: in a situation where “great Love” is present, the lover is inadequate; in a situation where feeling or concern for the gratification of the sex object was not present, the lover experienced unlimited sexual power. With the speaker, we are impelled to consider what accounts for the difference. The answer is at once psychological and ethical.

The most apparent difference between the lover's past prowess and present impotence is his emotional involvement. The narrator tells us of his shame and rage; he is “trembling, confused, despairing.” The emotional complication is not unmixed with an ego-drive for power and with male pride. As Theodor Reik has observed, many men—notably the Don Juan type—are in sex concerned only with victory, and “conquest becomes a matter of personal prestige.”³⁵ But events in “The Imperfect Enjoyment” suggest a psychological experience beyond frustration at the failure of sexual power. In spite of the sensuality in the opening scene, and the coarse joke at the end, the narrator conveys affection and tenderness toward the disappointed mistress. She smiles, she chides, she has a fair hand, she is his “great Love,” and she is the “wronged Corinna.” That he wishes to show his “wished obedience” implies a concern beyond the satisfaction of lust.

In the account of past triumphs, debased sexual objects are dominant. The speaker's loathing for the hog-like whores is patent. And the insufficiency of sexual power alone is poetically reinforced by the insistence on unrefined language of sex-tingling cunt, oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore, fucking post; and by diminishing physical references—rub, grunt, ravenous chancres, consuming weepings, and the like. By contrast, when the fair mistress is present, the language of sex, though it still might be thought unrefined by some, is not conjoined with images that debase her.

Thus, one kind of sexual relationship is clearly attacked and another not. That which is not invokes an ideal of mutual consideration and equality, an ideal that Rochester also advances in a number of other poems, such as “The Advice,” “A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover,” “The Fall,” and the short lyric, “Leave this gaudy gilded stage.” In this last we find:

To love's theater, the bed,
                    Youth and beauty fly together,
And act so well it may be said
                    The laurel there was due to either.
'Twixt strifes of love and war, the difference lies in this:
When neither overcomes, love's triumph greater is.(36)

However hedonistic the goal, there is a right way and a wrong way. In “The Imperfect Enjoyment” the implied criterion of right exceeds the mutual physical pleasures of the bed. The speaker, who has “wronged” Corinna, acknowledges an obligation beyond the mere satisfaction of self and an obligation to the needs and desires of another. Such a concern is surely an ethical statement, transcending any disagreement about sexual mores.

What Rochester seeks to express at gut-level through obscenity and at the intellectual level of wit in “The Imperfect Enjoyment” is his version of the shadow which falls, as T. S. Eliot writes, “Between the potency / And the existence.” That shadow is brightened by what seems to me a sound depiction of human psychology and a clear ethical command for a relationship in which sex is necessary but not sufficient. This is Rochester as lover rather than rake, and poet rather than pornographer.

Notes

1. Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Years of Peril (New York, 1935), p. 340.

2. Bryant, p. 340.

3. John Wilmot, Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. xlix.

4. Havelock Ellis, “The Revaluation of Obscenity” in More Essays of Love and Virtue (Garden City, N. Y., 1931), p. 100.

5. Abraham Kaplan, “Obscenity as an Esthetic Category,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 20 (1955), 548.

6. Kaplan, p. 548.

7. Kaplan, p. 548.

8. Morse Peckham, Art and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation (New York, 1969), p. 47.

9. Peckham, pp. 60-61.

10. David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England: 1660-1745 (New Hyde Park, N. Y., 1965), p. 46.

11. Herbert Gold, “The End of Pornography,” SR, October 31, 1970, p. 26.

12. Gold, p. 64.

13. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1966), p. 279.

14. Marcus, p. 274.

15. Marcus, pp. 277, 273.

16. Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, Pornography and the Law: The Psychology of Erotic Realism and Pornography (New York, 1959), p. 265.

17. The Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon, Dorset, The Duke of Devonshire, Etc. (London, 1721), I, 112. John Wardroper in Love and Drollery (New York, 1969) notes that the verse, applied to more than one Restoration courtesan, is a translation of an epigram found circulating in Madrid in 1622 (p. 296).

18. John Wilmot, Rochester's “Poems on Several Occasions,” ed. James Thorpe (Princeton, 1950), p. 56.

19. John Wilmot, The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven, 1968), p. 37. End punctuation here and elsewhere modified as necessary.

20. Works of the Earls, I, 94.

21. Petronius, The Satyricon, tr. William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor, 1962), p. 159.

22. Petronius, p. 163.

23. Ronald Berman, “Rochester and the Defeat of the Senses,” Kenyon Review, 26 (1964), 355.

24. John M. Woolsey, “The Monumental Decision of the United States District Court Rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey Lifting the Ban on ‘Ulysses.’” in James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1934), p. xiii.

25. John Harold Wilson, ed., The Rochester-Savile Letters: 1671-1680 (Columbus, 1941), p. 73.

26. Robert Wolseley, “Preface to Valetinian, A Tragedy, As 'Tis Alter'd by the Late Earl of Rochester (1685),” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1909), III, 24.

27. Wolseley, ed. Spingarn, III, 15-16. Dustin Griffin in Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester (Berkeley, 1973) also calls attention to this defense and argues that Rochester's obscenity may have an aesthetic or moral purpose (pp. 83-86).

28. Kaplan, 551.

29. Woolsey, p. xii.

30. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1968), p. 235.

31. Marcus says that forbidden words “present themselves to us as acts” because they have undergone the least evolution in speech (p. 280).

32. William Bowman Piper, The Heroic Couplet (Cleveland, 1969), p. 319.

33. Richard Quaintance, “French Sources of the Restoration ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poem,” PQ, 42 (1963), 190. The theme also appears in folk poetry. In Frederick J. Furnivall's Loose and Humorous Songs: From Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript (Hatboro, Penn., 1963) the song “Walking in a Meadow gren” tells of a lover who suffers premature ejaculation (pp. 3-5), and a country swain in “A Creature for Feature” (pp. 53-54) laments:

    But woe mee, & woe mee! alas, I cold not raise!
    itt wold not, nor cold not, doe all I cold to please.
    his ink was run, his pen was done.

    Percy's folio manuscript is dated around 1660.

34. Berman, 356.

35. Theodor Reik, Psychology of Sexual Relations (New York, 1945), p. 161.

36. Vieth, p. 85, ll. 5-10.