[In the essay that follows, Clark points out that female readers and critics have been surprisingly uncritical of the misogynistic elements in Rochester's poetry, concluding there must be a quality in his poetry that elicits this response. Clark seeks to discern this quality by assessing the degree of “progressivism” in his libertinism, analyzing his plaintiveness and vulnerability, and exploring the paradoxes of the failure of the body in his poetry.]

Given Rochester's undisputed status as ‘one of the dirtiest poets in the canon’,¹ one might think that any sustained consideration of his work would at some point involve detailed attention to the issue of misogyny. This has not, however, proved to be the case. It is not that feminist criticism has neglected his writing: in the last 20 years Fabricant, Wilcoxon, Wintle and Nussbaum have all provided illuminating commentaries.² Yet considering the attention devoted to inceties of satiric form or problems of textual attribution, this aspect of his work has suffered at least comparative neglect, the issues involved apparently being regarded as simultaneously too self-evident and too problematic. The general impression given is that Rochester has been too readily indulged by his proponents and too easily dismissed by his detractors, and that both parties have tended to rest their respective cases upon the more restricted question of obscenity.

In degree of physical specificity, lines such as ‘whether the Boy fuck'd you, or I the Boy’ (‘The Disabled Debauchee’, l.40) look positively anodyne in comparison with Dorset's ‘strange incestuous stories / Of Harvey and her long clitoris’, or claims that Mulgrave ‘rears a little when his feeble tarse’ is presented with ‘a straight well-sphincter'd arse’.³ As Dustin Griffin observes, ‘his obscenity and misogyny are mild when compared to Oldham or Robert Gould or a number of anonymous Restoration satirists’.⁴ Barbara Everett finds these terms evidence of ‘betrayal of human sense and meaning to mere grunting phatic gesture’.⁵ Perhaps, but they may equally well be seen as part of the Royal Society ideal of purifying the dialect of the tribe.⁶ Lines such as ‘Her Hand, her Foot, her very look's a Cunt’ (‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, l.18) content themselves with the naming of parts as a talismanic invocation. Rochester may not be quite as briskly common-sensical as Suckling (‘As for her Belly, 'tis no matter, so / There be a Belly, and a Cunt, below’),⁷ but there is still little sense of uneasy lingering on threatening physicality. As Farley-Hills points out,⁸ a line such as ‘A thing whose bliss depends upon thy will’ (‘The Discovery’, l.23) seems almost to disdain innuendo, the impulse to ‘cry cunt’ in order to ‘friske his frollique fancy’ (‘An Allusion to Horace’, l.74). Instead there is a kind of tactile empiricism concerned to define the qualities of the object at hand. Rochester's ‘And a Cunt has no sence of conscience or law’ (‘Against Marriage’, l.8) makes the same play as Shakespeare's ‘Love is too young to know what conscience is’ (Sonnet 151, l.5); but without an equivalent erotic charge of phonetic decomposition: ‘con-science’, ‘con-sense’, ‘cuntsense’.⁹ Rochester is equally disinclined to extend the trope in the manner of Oldham's ‘Her conscience stretch'd, and open as the Stews’ (‘A Satyr upon a woman’, l.85).¹⁰ Elusiveness within a formulaic diction is far more characteristic than lurid or surreal metaphoric extrapolation.

I take it for granted that sexual explicitness is not a regrettable occasional blemish in Rochester's poetry, but one of its chief attractions. Attempts to segregate the salacious, or if one prefers, pornographic, elements from the aesthetic are misguided and inappropriate, if not downright hypocritical. The phenomenon is, however, by no means a simple one. The powerful misogynistic elements would lead one to expect a reinforcement of authority, covert or explicit strategies of dominance: ‘And therefore what they fear, at heart they hate’ (‘A Satyr against Reason’, l.45). Yet this is not supported by the history of reception. The ‘Lady’ in ‘Timon’ famously ‘Complain'd our love was course, our Poetry, / Unfit for modest Eares’ (ll.102-03); the ‘Prologue’ to Sodom declares, ‘I do presume there are no women here / 'tis too debauch'd for their fair sex I fear’; and Robert Wolsley insisted in 1785, ‘neither did my Lord Rochester design those Songs the Essayer is so offended with … for the Cabinets of Ladies’.¹¹ Nevertheless, of an admittedly sparse documentary record, female readers from Aphra Behn to Barbara Everett have proved singularly undeterred by this aspect of his work and willingly heeded the opening address of ‘Signior Dildo’: ‘You Ladyes all of Merry England’ (l.1).

For this response to be possible, Rochester's poetry must offer ‘something Genrous in meer Lust’ (‘A Ramble’, l.98). In order to locate and define this quality, I will assess the degree of ‘progressiveness’ in his libertinism, in the context of recent models of homosocial bonding. I shall then analyse his distinctive plaintiveness and vulnerability, and explore some of the paradoxes of the truth of the failure of the body in his verse.

II

The perennial problem of Rochester criticism has been to link his satirical and lyric modes, and Hobbesian individualism has regularly been invoked to perform this generic unification. The only truth is that provided by the none too reliable senses: the only legitimate ethics must be founded on their possibilities and limitations. In Lockean epistemology, awareness of the ‘flying Houres … Whose Images are kept in store / By Memory alone’ (‘Love and Life’, ll.4-5) produces an imperative to conserve, hoard and protect a finite and dwindling ‘stock of ideas’: in fairly simplistic terms, a bourgeois philosophy of accumulation. The libertine recuperation of Hobbes, in contrast, provokes a spendthrift pursuit of immediate and intense sensation: ‘The Pleasures of a Body, Lam'd with lewdness, / A meer perpetual motion makes you happy’.¹²

It has frequently been argued that the libertine ideal of mutually reciprocated desire (‘For did you love your pleasure lesse, / You were not fit for me’ (‘Song’, ll.19-20) has implications for the social and political domain: as Sarah Wintle puts it, ‘pleasure through sexual variety’ may ‘lead to an attitude which grants rights or equal pleasure and promiscuity to women’.¹³ This potentially emancipatory aspect is, however, embedded in and impeded by a matrix of reactionary attitudes. Rochester's poetry ‘oscillates’ between the two, providing an empirical confirmation of their continued incompatibility.

Several immediate objections may be lodged against such an approach. It divests Rochester's poetry of cognitive status by treating it as a secondary manifestation of intellectual debates that precede it, and so reduces it to a merely symptomatic status. Secondly, the ameliorative nature of an atomistic individualism may be questioned. Even celebration of female sexual desire defines the gender in terms of an innate eroticism rather than an autonomous subjectivity. It requires immediate reconstitution in terms of contract, which Hobbes simply underwrites an authoritarian status quo. It is simple enough to regard the variety of relations women have with men—sexual, familial, economic—as entered into a formal if unspecified point. Hobbes may point out that ‘If there be no contract, the Dominion is in the Mother’,¹⁴ but this is surely one reason why one always seems to exist. Thirdly, the relative equality of ‘In Love 'tis equal measure’ (‘Song’, l.14) relies on a fictitious balance, disregarding the actual economic and political status underlying the ‘nice allowances of Love’ (‘A Ramble’, l.110), such as those made by, for example, Rochester to his mistress, Elizabeth Barry. ‘For none did e're soe dull, and stupid, / But felt a God, and blest his pow'r in Love’ (Artemiza, l.48-49); but that ‘power’ manifests itself in a variety of cultural forms unavailable to a woman.

Mastery is not so much absent in Rochester as reversible: to be enslaved is quite as appealing an option as to enslave, though the question of who ultimately stages the scenario remains. In ‘Fair Cloris’, the swain, although ‘Lustfull’ remains a ‘Slave’ (l.26). The language of decorous sadomasochism abounds in the early lyrics: ‘To see my Tyrant at my Feet; / Whil'st taught by her, unmov'd I sit / A Tyrant in my Turn’ (‘Pastoral Dialogue’ ll.53-55). ‘Kindness’ itself ‘guilds the Lovers Servile Chaine and makes the Slave grow pleas'd and vaine’ (‘Song’, ll.15-16). In ‘Insulting Beauty’, it is boasted, ‘I triumph in my Chain’, (l.14); and the speaker of ‘The Discovery’ goes so far as to regret ‘dying’ only because ‘I must be no more your slave’ (l.44). In this context it is even possible to put a positive gloss on the power of the testicles to ‘make a Man a Slave / To such a Bitch as Willis’ (‘On Mistress Willis’, ll.3-4).

Mutuality, equality, in Rochester, tends to be achieved in terms of stand-offs, explicit negotiation, rather than persuasion, consummation. This needs to be reduced, as Wintle does, to a ‘bleak notion of contract: I use you, you use me’.¹⁵ There is an unusual (if not unprecedented) sense of considering one's mistress worth talking to even after sleeping with her. There is no influx of power through casual disparagement, none of the animus in excess so deplored by Ricks in Donne.¹⁶ Whatever hostility there is seems primarily self-directed, a point to which I wish to return.

Adult equals are by no means the automatic paradigms for sexual encounters. Rochester's erotic landscape is inhabited by a broad and varied cast, including Signior Dildo, the oceanic Duchess of Cleveland and a herd of grunting pigs. It is mistaken to presume condemnation of or repulsion from grotesquerie. There remains something uniquely calm, unflustered, practical, about the attitude of the ‘Young Lady’ towards her ‘Ancient Lover’, whatever the relative proportions of nature and ‘Art’ in the ‘reviving hand’ (ll.25, 19).¹⁷

The ‘something Genrous in meer lust’ permits an unmisgivingness about a wide variety of sexual scenarios that extends far beyond the point of simple amoralism: ‘Things must go on in their lewd natural way’ (‘Fragment’). Where Keats's proclamation ‘even now, clammy dew is beading on my brow’ implies solitude and self-absorption,¹⁸ in Rochester, the ‘clammy joys’ (‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, l.20) seem to involve actual and specific modes of conduct. The attention of the poetic voice is concentrated on the niceties of its etiquette: Everett rightly stresses ‘tis power of latency, its character of reserve’.¹⁹

Restoration anti-feminist satire habitually denounces women for both harbouring animal lust and then pretending to restrain it: ‘Poor helplesse Woman, is not favour'd more. She's a sly Hypocrite, or Publique Whore’ (‘An Epistolary Essay’, ll.95-96). In Rochester, the grande dame becomes a figure of urgent self-gratification: in ‘Mistress Knights Advice to the Dutchess of Cleavland in Distress for a Prick’, despite the demurral, ‘Though Cunt be not Coy, reputation is Nice’, the Duchess states a forthright preference for being ‘Fuct by Porters and Carmen / Than thus be abus'd by Churchill and German’, (ll.4, 11-12), a contest between female desire and male hypocrisy that recurs throughout Rochester.

The ethic of ‘generosity’ is espoused in numerous contexts: in addition to the title of this essay, ‘Be generous, and wise and take our part’. (‘Second Prologue’, l.38); be not ‘Generous and grateful never’ (‘Dialogue’, l.26); seek ‘true gen'rous Love’ (‘Woman's Honor’, l.11); praise those ‘whose Principles most gen'rous are, and just’ (‘A Satyr against Reason’, l.125); ‘In a generous Wench theres nothing of Trouble’ (‘Against Marriage’, l.10); and ‘Love, the most gen'rous passion of the mynde’ (A Letter from Artemiza, l.40).

From here it would seem a short step to celebration of a universal principle of fecundity: the Lucretian Venus. This, it seems, is provided in ‘Upon his leaving his Mistress’:

Whilst mov'd by an impartial Sense,
Favours like Nature you dispense,
With Universal influence.
See the kind Seed-receiving Earth,
To Ev'ry Grain affords a Birth;
On her no Show'rs unwelcome fall,
Her willing Womb, regains 'em all,
And shall my Celia be confin'd?
No, live up to thy mighty Mind,
And be the Mistress of Mankind.

(ll.12-21)

‘Confin'd’ expands beyond possession by an individual male (‘To damn you only to be mine’, l.4) to a vision of unlimited universal access. However, the problem with such a celebration of impassive abundance is that the iconography cannot be kept on a solely mythological level: it must necessarily become involved in narratives of contract and estrangement. In ‘Song’, ‘She's my delight, all Mankinds wonder; But my Jelous heart would break, should we live one day asunder’ (ll.14-16), the speaker fears being asunder from ‘Mankind’ as much as from his mistress. To be included is always to be included alongside, amongst: the most forceful assertion of female autonomy is simultaneously the strongest confirmation of the social bond between men. Thus the ‘Mistress of Mankind’ (typically endowed with a ‘mighty Mind’) fuses personal with cultural libido: ‘By merit, and by inclination, the joy at least of one whole Nation’ (ll.6-7). Or, more crudely, ‘Each Man had as much room, as Porter, Blunt, or Harris, had, in Cullens, Bushel Cunt’ (‘Timon’, ll.93-94).²⁰

This communalizing function is evident in the middle section of ‘A Ramble in St James's Park’, a conjunction of satiric commentary on sexual mores, specific, empirical, concrete, with the apostrophic mode, more usually delivered from an unspecified vantage to an unidentified mistress:

Gods! that a thing admir'd by mee
Shou'd fall to so much Infamy.
Had she pickt out to rub her Arse on
Some stiff prickt Clown or well-hung Parson
Each jobb of whose spermatique sluce
Had fill'd her Cunt with wholesome Juice
I the proceeding shou'd have prais'd
In hope she had quence'd a fire I'd raised.
Such naturall freedomes are but Just
There's something Genrous in meer lust …

(ll.89-98)

Corinna retains initiative, choice, the power of ‘picking out’: the speaker bewails his exclusion from the her ‘Divine Abode’, (l.39). (The initial ‘Consecrate to Prick and Cunt’, (l.10) and final ‘dares prophane the Cunt I swive’ (l.166) gives a religious framing to the whole poem.) Everett describes the poem as a ‘savage, dangerous, yet obscurely innocent fantasy—innocent from the sensed rectitude which its upside down fury violates, the contained and quashed romantic idealism’; and her instinct is sound, I believe, to see the poem as ‘an actual if finalizing perpetuation (for all its grossness) of earlier Renaissance modes of idealization’.²¹ The sexual ‘thing’ is initially ‘admir'd’, and the note of limpid self-pity retains a sense of etiquette, humility, deference (‘praised’). The ‘Infamy’ to which it is opposed remains indeterminate. The capacity of the narrator to make such a judgement is uncertain after his initial departure from the ‘grave discourse’. Hence the oddness of the subsequent accusation, ‘To bring a blott on Infamy’, (l.104): not so much to exceed the bounds of shame as bring the category itself into disrepute. ‘Thing’ can also be read as penis (with a play on ‘fall’): and it is tempting to make the psychoanalytic extrapolation, of Corinna representing the virility that the speaker lacks.

There is a querulous comic note in the feminine rhymes; and also an absence of hierarchy recalling the social as well as sexual dimensions of the ‘all-sin-sheltering Grove’: ‘And here promiscuously they swive’, (l.25, 32). The ‘spermatique sluce’ of ‘stiff-prickt Clowns’ and ‘well-hung Parson’ provides not corruption or disease but a ‘wholesome Juice’. ‘To rub her arse on’ continues the ‘proud bitch’ image: but as with the later ‘longing Arse’ (l.41) has a potential homo-erotic dimension. ‘Quence'd the fire’ is a typical literalization of a precieux diction, dousing the ‘flame’ with other men's semen.²² ‘I'd raised’ suggests the arousal of the ‘knight errant Paramours’ by the speaker himself. The ‘natural freedomes’ represent not liberation from but facilitation of exchange between men: ‘meer lust’ is not an underlying impulse, basic motivation, but an unattainable, longed-for, standard.

The relation of ‘I’ to ‘all Mankind’ initially seems antithetical, but in the course of the passage undergoes a physical assimilation. There is a typically determinist note in the severity of ‘Fate’. ‘Priviledge above’ and ‘nice allowances’ attribute a certain authority to the speaker, but this is immediately compromised by the infantile dependence of ‘humble fond believing me’. The ‘meanest part’ could be genitals of either sex or a role in ‘loves Theatre the Bed’ (‘Leave this gawdy guilded Stage’, l.5). ‘Ungratefull’ most immediately refers to the flouting of contract by Corinna, but can be extended to the speaker's own behaviour or the reader, pre-emptively rebuked for simultaneously witnessing and violating the erotic intimacy. There remains a sense of decorum, almost gentility, in the ‘digestive surfiet water’ served up; and an infinite poignancy in ‘content’, whose obvious sexual play cannot detract from the peculiar resonance of ‘Grace’.

‘Pleasure for excuse’ seems to ascribe a libertine autonomy, ‘naturall freedoms’: ‘abuse’ refers to his own ‘dram of sperm’ as much as Corinna's behaviour. ‘Meer lust’ cannot be taken as simply an anti-inflationist view of ‘pleasure’: a secular pastime. (Though there is no compunction about describing Corinna as ‘joyfull and pleas'd’ (l.80) at her liaison.) The poem would be much simpler and more manageable if this were a clearly available standard. Yet the ‘pleasure’ of the speaker lies more in his relation with Corinna's other lovers than in any momentary spasm of ejaculation. Indeed, orgasm as an entity in itself is immediately redefined in term of two overlaid relations: an apostrophic address to Corinna, and an indirect communion with ‘halfe the Town’. ‘Spewing home’ seems more appropriate to the behaviour of the narrator himself; and if one pursues this somewhat lurid transference, he receives as well as adds to the ‘seed’ within. The voracity of the ‘devouring Cunt’ seems part of its attraction rather than a cause of repulsion. ‘Full gorges’ would seem attached to ‘Cunt’, but transfers itself to the speaker in both active and passive senses: he is himself swallowed up²³ but also bloated by receiving the ‘vast meal’. The ‘nasty slime’ is displaced from the juices of female arousal onto the male ejaculate; but the point is that the two are inseparable, and satisfaction is received from contact with both.

One might go so far as to say that the affair is only fully consummated in the moment of infidelity. The term ‘betray’ comes to represent both revelation and exposure. The expression that gives public significance is brought into existence by a movement inseparable from fickleness and duplicity.²⁴ As Everett says, the narrator of a Rochester poem is always hoping ‘that he will betray love enough’.²⁵ Logically, Corinna cannot reveal ‘secrets’ until they have been confided in her, but the implication seems to be that she already has been ‘faithless’. This, of course, conforms to the argument for mutable desire espoused in some of the lyrics. Nevertheless, the implication is that she is attractive precisely because of, not in spite of, her ‘Treachery’. ‘When leaneing’ refers both backwards to the ‘Paramours’ engaged in love-making and forward to the narrator seeking comfort: the two are telescoped into being simultaneously present. ‘And Reason lay dissolv'd in Love’ is not the prelude to disaster, Samson in Delilah's lap, but the desired outcome, the culmination of the preceding accelerated pattern of inversions.

The primary tension of the passage lies in its conflation of third-person satire with second-person apostrophe: ‘But mark what Creatures women are How infinitly vile when fair’, (ll.41-42). The definition is not the result of taxonomy, categorization, but of the movement between vileness and fairness: the apparent stability containing progressively more estranged extremes. There is a summoning and makingpresent of physical residue, an inverted and arguably perverse idealization of a gluttonous absorption of the male body. The hostility towards the male rivals is merely an inversion of the attraction towards physical contact via the ‘devouring Cunt’. I now wish to discuss the relation of this mutual accentuation to the presence of communal judgement in Rochester's verse.

III

One by-product of the foregrounding of the instance of utterance in Rochester's lyrics is the reduction of the masculine community to ‘The false Judgement of an Audience / Of Clapping-Fooles’ (‘An Allusion to Horace’, (ll.13-14). In Rochester there is never any sense of transmission of a received and proven wisdom. ‘The Mistress’, for example, offers a series of outward addresses: ‘You Wiser men despise me not’; ‘Had you not been profoundly dull, You had gone mad like me’; ‘Nor Censure us You who perceive My best belov'd and me’ (ll.13, 19-20, 21). These are not apologies or appeals for social endorsement so much as a kind of pre-emptive debunking. Yet there is no corresponding idealization of the lovers: where Donne's ‘The Good Morrow’ celebrates the power which ‘makes one little roome an every where’,²⁶ the lines, ‘To make the old World, a new withdrawing Room, Whereof another World she's brought to Bed!’ provoke nothing but mockery in ‘Timon’ (ll.148-49).

The testimony of the isolated speaker is displaced onto an almost phenomenological emphasis on the personal body; it articulates not the authority of collective experience but an estrangement from and within it. There is no protective persona of a public self, but equally no post-romantic subjectivity conflating the two spheres. Not only Rochester, but also Sedley, Dorset and the rest seem almost devoid of political and social identities in their verse. It has often been noted how little Rochester deals with the public sphere: attempts such as Paulson's to read the obscene as ‘the private half of a basic analogy between public and private life’,²⁷ have little purchase compared to the reverse movement that transforms Charles II into an alter-ego and displaced father-figure, and his mistresses into demonic maternal presences.

It can, of course, be argued that Rochester's verse at all times presupposes a homosocial bonding. There would seem ample support for this in comments such as Pope's ‘Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease’, Marvell's ‘merry gang’, and Dryden's ‘men of pleasant conversation …’ ambitious to distinguish themselves from the herd of gentlemen, by their party!²⁸

Scorne all Applause the Vile Rout can bestow,
And be content to please those few, who know …
I loathe the Rabble, 'tis enough for me,
If Sidley, Shadwell, Shepherd, Witcherley,
Godolphin, Buttler, Buckhurst, Buckingham,
And some few more, whom I omit to name,
Approve my Sense, I count their Censure Fame.

(‘An Allusion to Horace’, ll.102-03, 120-25)

There is a predictable hauteur in the roll-call perhaps, but the ‘few, who know’ have scarcely any significant presence in Rochester's verse. There is a peculiar solipsism, a sense of self-directedness, with little or no sense of a Rochester poem being for anyone, whether wife or mistress, specific male confidante or broader circle.

‘Love a Woman! y'are an Ass’ advises staying at home with a ‘lewd well-natur'd Friend, Drinking, to engender Wit’ (ll.11-2). Yet there is no equivalent to the cheerfully louche exchanges between Buckhurst and Etherege. Where their verse-letters celebrate a benign itinerary of collective indulgence (‘Then the next morning we all hunt / To find whose fingers smell of cunt’),²⁹ Rochester's ‘Regime d'viver’ offers an irascible filofax of cyclic, solitary debauchery, whose culminating animus—‘Then crop-sick, all Morning, I rail at my Men, And in Bed I lye Yawning, till Eleven again’ (ll.13-14)—expands out from an immediate circle of servants onto a whole gender: ‘Men’ in general.

Even in Sade, as has often been noted, there is an ethic of friendship³⁰ and a certain clubbability has accompanied most outbursts of ethical antinomianism and romantic diabolism. In contrast, Rochester's ultimate slight in ‘On Poet Ninny’, ‘The worst that I cou'd write, wou'd be noe more, Than what thy very Friends have said before’ (ll.27-28), reflects much more on the companions than the supposed target. No distinction is drawn between Artemiza's ‘To heare, what Loves have past, In this Lewd Towne’ (ll.32-33), and the ‘grave discourse, Of who Fucks who and who does worse’ (‘A Ramble’, ll.1-2). The monkey that she addresses as a ‘curious Minature of Man’ is a ‘dirty chatt'ring Monster’ (Artemiza, ll.143, 141) and while ‘dirty’ may do no more than reflect contemporary standards of hygiene, ‘chatt'ring’, voluble, gossipy, empty-headed, reverses the stereotype of feminine volubility.

The ‘dull dining Sot’ pursues Timon, ‘but as a Whore, With modesty enslaves her Spark, the more’ (ll.9-10), a comparison that both refuses to differentiate between male honour and female modesty, and gives an explicitly sexualized dimension to male social intercourse. After attributing a libel to Timon (which may or may not be the poem itself, yet to be written), ‘to his dear mistake, Which he, by this, had spread o're the whole Town, And me, with an officious Lye, undone’ (ll.28-30). This vulnerability to public opinion again feminized (‘undone’), is powerfully prefigured in Strephon's early dialogue with Alexis:

As Trees are by their Barks Embrac'd,
Love to my Soul doth cling;
When torn by th' Herd's greedy taste,
The injur'd Plants feel they're defac't,
They wither in the Spring.

(‘Pastoral Dialogue’, ll.61-65)

The arboreal ‘Soul’ is divided into ‘Tree’, ‘Bark’ and the ‘Herd's greedy taste’: ‘Love’ serves the function of a protective surface, but is itself ‘defac't’, ‘torn’, and ‘injur'd’. In ‘Timon’, the congregation of ‘all brave Fellows’, the rompish camaraderie of the ‘tough Youth’, provokes a fastidious shudder (ll.37, 86):

Their rage once over, they begin to treat,
And six fresh Bottles, must the peace compleat.
I ran down Stairs, with a Vow never more
To drink Bear Glass, and hear the Hectors roar.

(ll.174-77)

The persona never dominates, seldom interjects, but rather witnesses with varying degrees of tacit fascination and contempt. There is no single adversarius, but rather a whole social group, and Timon hates himself for being unable to differentiate himself from them: ‘No means, nor hopes, appear of a retreat’ (l.42). The speaker of ‘Tunbridge Wells’ responds similarly to the ‘crowd’:

Endeavouring this irksome sight to Balke,
And a more irksome noyse, their silly talke,
I silently slunke down to th' lower walke:

(‘Tunbridge Wells’, ll.35-37)

He repeatedly attempts to absent himself from his own poem: ‘th' hearing what they said, I did myself the kindness to evade’ (ll.34-35), and ‘Tir'd with this dismall Stuffe, away I ran’ (ll.26). Even the narrator of ‘Upon His Drinking Bowl’ defines himself in terms, not of belonging to, but of separation from: ‘I'm none of those that took Mastrich, Nor Yarmouth Leaguer knew’: ‘For I am no Sir Sydrophell, Nor none of his Relations’ (ll.11-12, 15-16).

Given a masculine community as brutish and rapacious in its pleasures as one could wish (or perhaps envy), an explanation is needed of how Rochester speaks (or appears to be speaking) from a point outside this collectivity.

One tradition of feminist reading would stress the residual equality of desires: ‘When neither overcomes Loves triumph greater is’ (‘Leave this gawdy guilded Stage’, l.10). There is undoubtedly a willingness to allow independent female voices into the poems. Satiric modes are directed as (if not more) frequently against men than women; and the conventions of cavalier lyric themselves become feminized, transposable, in poems such as ‘Against Constancy’, ‘The Platonick Lady’, and ‘The Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover’. There is a complex empathy with the host's wife in ‘Timon’ (ll.49-56).

The ‘Lady’ has scarcely worn worse than Timon himself; and the passage reflects the same ambivalence towards its object as the reader feels towards its narrator. ‘Age’ is the ‘incurable disease of others beside ‘Beauty’; and the gap between ‘desire’ and ‘pow'r to please’ is famously commented upon by Rochester himself: ‘soe greate a disproportion twixt our desires and what has been ordained to content them’.³¹ ‘Fit to give love’ is almost the finest compliment that can be paid; ‘prevent despair’ is a gently unrecriminative term for sexual availability. ‘Cocks’ gives a momentary masculinity, force, not wholly retracted by ‘old bleer Eyes’, no less to be respected than the disabled debauchee; ‘smite’ has overtones of both heroic endeavour and social flirtation. There is a note of admirable defiance, ‘in despight of time’; ‘affection’ also acquires a certain dignity as a conscious role-playing. She shares her preoccupation with love with Rochester himself; and the resulting dialogue is closer to Eliot's ‘Portrait of a Lady’ than to the witches' sabbath of Pope's ‘Ghosts of Beauty’ (‘To a Lady’, l.241). Her tone is gently reproachful, unflustered, graceful, with a note of disdain towards the ‘Hair-brain'd Youth’, deemed ‘Too rotten to consummate the Intrigue’ (ll.104, 106). In perhaps the morally finest line in Rochester, and certainly the most understated epithet, she is allowed to depart undisparaged, undiminished: ‘And decently my Lady, quits the Room’ (l.110).

Wintle dismisses this persistent tactic of gender-reversal as simply offering a ‘parody of a woman’,³² but this is to underestimate the slitheriness of role-playing in Rochester. The demand for ‘mutual Love’ (‘The Advice’, l.16) precludes full appreciation of the instability, the solipsism, and the impassioned lyricism of sexual failure.

Sex is ethical, even conceptual, before it is erotic; and the key instances to be debated are not those of ecstasy and fulfilment but disappointment and inadequacy. There is a truth of the body to be found through its very humiliation, in the pursuit of a pleasure known to be insufficient beforehand.

In ‘The Women about Town’, ‘a Fate which noe man can oppose; The losse of his heart and the fall of his Nose’ (‘Lampoone’, ll.9-10) does not merely refer to possible infection, but extends to a whole betrayal by the body. It is not ‘just’ but nevertheless inevitable that ‘our Tarses be burnt by our hearts taking fire’ (ll.15-16). There is no specific guilt or punishment for indulgence beyond the acceleration of an inevitable decline. There is little or nothing of the poète maudit in Rochester, seeking transgression as an end in itself. Despite ultimate conversion, there is similarly little sense of blasphemy as an inverted mode of belief. Physical corruption is not the correlative of sin; and, as previously noted, there is no sense of the disgusting in itself arousing. Instead there is a certain stoic dignity in conscious acceptance, even pursuit, of this corporeal transformation.

The disabled debauchee boasts of the ‘Honourable scars, Which my too forward valour did procure’; and in ‘To the Post Boy’ even the more graphic ‘Sear cloaths and ulcers from the top to toe’ remain ‘Heroick scars’ (ll.8-9). The couplet, ‘So charming Oyntments, made an Old Witch flie, And bear a Crippled Carcass through the Skie’ (‘A Satyr against Reason’, ll.86-87) also has something of this last-standness. There is a stark pathos to ‘Old’, an unsparing naturalism but no disgusted recoil in ‘Carcass’, and an immense respect for the refusal of the ‘Witch’ to capitulate to the state of ‘Crippled’. The ‘Oyntments’ are ‘charming’ because they are casting a spell, but also felicitous, because they are successful in doing so when there is no alternative but to inculcate an illusion.

Trembling, confus'd, despairing, limber dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I ly.
This Dart of Love, whose piercing point oft try'd,
With Virgin blood, Ten thousand Maids has dy'd;
Which Nature still directed with such Art,
That through it ev'ry Cunt, reacht ev'ry Heart.
Stiffly resolv'd, twou'd carelessly invade,
Woman or Man, nor ought its fury staid,
Where e're it pierc'd, a Cunt it found or made.
Now languid lies, in this unhappy hour,
Shrunk up, and Sapless, like a wither'd Flow'r.
Thou treacherous, base, deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my Fame;
Through what mistaken Magick dost thou prove,
So true to lewdness, so untrue to Love?

(ll.35-49)

The ‘Satire on Charles II’ is concerned with the obvious political dimension to virility in terms of the royal succession, but what is striking is his more universal masculine ungainliness: ‘Yett his dull graceless Ballocks hang an arse’ (l.27). There is no political respect, but a biological empathy. A displaced self-loathing and curious solicitation are directed towards the bodily imperatives of the ageing debauchee: clapped out in every sense. This extends to Mistress Willis, who, like Charles, represents a persona to be occupied. She ‘Rails and Scolds when she sits down, And Curses when she Spends’ (ll.15-16), terms with both a generic and psychological appositeness to Rochester and Restoration satire in general, with its close conjunction of arousal and abuse. Further points of connection are the odd poignancy of ‘And yet with no man Friends’; in what might be seen as a highly apposite summation of Rochester's own style, ‘Bawdy in Thoughts, precise in Words’; and even perhaps an oblique glance at the poet's constipation, the ‘Belly’ which is ‘a Bagg of Turds’ (ll.13-14, 17, 19-20).

In the rivalry between Count Cazzo and Signior Dildo, there is only one winner: the substitute clearly surpasses the original, a situation which ‘Flesh and Blood cou'd not bear’ (l.80). Witnessing the subsequent ambush and pursuit by ‘A Rabble of Pricks’ (l.83):

The good Lady Sandys, burst into a Laughter
To see how their Ballocks came wobbling after,
And had not their weight retarded the Fo
Indeed't had gone hard with Signior Dildo.

(ll.89-92)

‘Retarded’ is delayed, but also rendered imbecilic; and ‘gone hard’ merely reinforces the superiority of the intruder, and the dispensability of the original. Harold Weber astutely notes how the poem demonstrates that ‘from the female point of view the male body provides an essentially comic spectacle’. ‘Reducing men to their pricks’ makes them ‘objects of derision’, and there is unsparing indictment of the ‘anatomical insufficiency of the male body’, in particular, the ballocks as ‘the male body's betrayal of itself’.³³ As Weber points out, the inadequacy of feminist models built around the unitary phallus becomes immediately apparent when confronted with the testicles, in all their queasy dangling vulnerability. But he fails to follow through this insight, instead reverting to ascribing to Rochester a ‘conventional misogynous understanding of hierarchical relations between the sexes’ (1992; p. 115).³⁴

The poems represent, Weber claims, ‘an attempt to transform the penis into the phallus, to recapture an endemic wholeness which would banish death’. It is ‘their inability to effect this transformation’ which ‘generates the rate and anxiety that so often disfigure the verse, marking the moment when the male will discovers the limits of its own power and authority’ (1992; p. 110).³⁵ Like Robinson, Weber is reluctant to acknowledge that ‘rage and anxiety’ might be what we read for. That which ‘disfigures the verse’ might be what produces it in the first place.

In Rochester, however, there is not a failed attempt to ‘transform the penis into the phallus’, but often a strikingly literal dramatization of the reverse process: what is sought is not power, but powerlessness. If, as Timon insists, he ‘never Rhym'd, but for my Pintles sake’, this may imply not self-aggrandizement but self-deprecation. ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ offers the most complex display of what Claude Rawson called Rochester's ‘machismo of sexual debility’ (1985; p. 335).³⁶ Weber argues that ‘the failure to control desire, to overcome the gap between the mind and the body, transforms a genuinely erotic moment into a bitter litany of foul complaints’ (1992; p. 103).³⁷ A more productive way of looking at the poem is that it exposes this ‘gap’. The genuinely erotic' cannot be simply opposed to the ‘bitter litany’: the one is implicit within and generated out of the other. The speaker's inability to respond to his mistress's desires with ‘wisht Obedience’, what ‘The Advice’ dubs ‘the Freedom to Obey’ (l.12), prompts the final outburst of ‘Rage’ (l.25).

The speaker appears not merely to address but actually to become his penis. The vain-glorious boast of previous exploits is delivered from the point of minimum performance, leading to the suspicion that they are purely verbal and compensatory. Yet it should be stressed that erotic failure is the condition rather than the cessation of this indiscriminate assault, which, as in ‘Mock Song’, subjects an infinitely penetrable body to a random incision that verges on the sadistic and grotesque. It is noteworthy that the previous description of ejaculation might easily be transposed into female orgasm: ‘In liquid Raptures, I dissolve all o're, Melt into Sperme, and spend at ev'ry Pore’ (ll.15-16). ‘Stiffly resolv'd’ reverses the relation of conscious purpose to sexual arousal from one of prohibition and restraint. The ‘All-dissolving Thunderbolt’ (l.10) becomes a display of authority, the antithesis of the yielding assimilation of the ‘wishing, weak, unmoving lump’. Yet this state is broadly continuous with the ideal of protective enclosure prevalent elsewhere. An obvious parallel may be found in the masturbatory passivity of Bloom's ‘languid floating flower’,³⁸ suggesting that the ‘wither'd Flow'r’ that ‘languid lies’ might be truer ‘to love’ than the rampaging virility with which it is contrasted.

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.
May'st thou to rav'nous Shankers, be a Prey,
Or in consuming Weepings waste away.
May Strangury, and Stone, thy Days attend,
May'st thou ne're 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 wrong'd Corinna right for thee.

(ll.62-72)

Abuse of the penis seems a more than adequate substitute for utilization of it. A dismemberment of his own body is performed through a series of violently repudiatory apostrophes; a making present of that which, as it were, had been gouged out of himself.

Rancour is drained away from all other possible targets: the unqualified intimacy of the opening lines paradoxically presupposes this eventual outlet. There is, as Treglown points out (1982; p. 85),³⁹ a disconcerting urbanity to the pun on ‘depend’ and on the previous ‘confirm me impotent’ (l.28), ushering in a final compliment to the ‘wrong'd Corinna’. The ‘Worst part’ is not so much expelled as expanded to fill the narrative present of the poem. It is then denounced for precisely what it is manifestly failing to do: provide ‘a common Fucking Post’. The ferocity of invective is thus displaced from the state of powerlessness onto the state of potency, apparently only invoked as a negative contrast. The punishment becomes a jubilant kind of release: not from the ‘drudgery’ of heterosexual intercourse, but from the necessity to ‘agree’ with, conform to, the hallucinatory array of ‘abler Pricks’. Belief, opinion, scandal, are all set aside in favour of a reiteration of common physical limitation, whose buoyant explicitness refuses the grotesque or macabre. The ‘Consuming Weepings’ of venereal sores might be seen as Rochester's version of ‘lacrimae rerum’; and, in their more restricted fashion, as partaking of some of the grandeur of the Virgilian pathos.

Rochester may be seen as the great articulator of the malfunctioning body, a typology superimposed upon its most flagrant and ostentatious debaucheries. In the context of my original concern, misogyny, it is possible to offer a provisional conclusion. The generic continuities with anti-feminist satire, and inventive, occasionally horrifying, results of generic inversion of lyric, are of little consequence compared to the foregrounding and evocation of masculinity as a cultural bond. The continual recourse to a negative testimony of the body represents a kind of obdurate refusal of a culturally endorsed mastery, and it is in this precarious movement, I believe, that we may discover and applaud the generosity of Rochester's poetry.

Notes

1. The Professional Amateur', in Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester's Wit, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford, 1982), pp. 58-74.

2. Carole Fabricant, ‘Rochester's World of Imperfect Enjoyment’, Journal of English and German Philology, (1974), pp. 338-50. Reba Wilcoxon ‘Rochester's Sexual Politics’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (1979), pp. 137-49 reprinted in John Wilmot: Earl of Rochester: Critical Essays, ed. David M. Vieth (New York, 1988), pp. 113-26; Sarah Wintle ‘Libertinism and Sexual Politics’, in Treglown, pp. 133-65; and Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires Upon Women, 1660-1750, (Lexington, 1984), pp. 57-60.

3. All quotations from The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1984). The Dorset quotations are taken from ‘Colon’, ll.44-45 and ‘A Faithful Catalogue of our most Eminent Ninnies’, ll.112-13, in The Poems of Charles Sackville Sixth Earl of Dorset, ed. Brice Harris (New York and London, 1979), pp. 125-26, 140.

4. ‘Rochester and the “Holiday Writers”’, in Rochester and Court Poetry, ed. Alan Roper (Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 33-66.

5. ‘The Sense of Nothing’, in Treglown, ll.1-41.

6. ‘As they conceiv'd lewdly, so they wrote in plain English, and took no care to cover up the worst of their thoughts in clean Linnen’, Daniel Defoe, in The Works of Sir Charles Sedley (1722 for 1721), i ll.8-9; cited in Rochester: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Farley-Hills (London, 1972), p. 192.

7. ‘The Deformed Mistress’, in The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford, 1971), p. 34, ll.27-28.

8. Farley-Hills, Rochester's Poetry, (London, 1978), p. 45.

9. ‘See the exhaustive commentary by Stephen Booth in Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, 1977), pp. 525-26.

10. ‘A Satyr upon a woman, who by her falshood and scorn was the death of his friend’, The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford, 1987), p. 82. Compare also Robert Gould, ‘Nor are their consciences (which can betray / Where e're they're sworn to love) less large than they’, in Love Given O're: Or, a Satyr against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy etc. of Women (London, 1682). Reprinted in Satires on Women (Augustan Reprint Society no. 180, intro. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Los Angeles, 1977).

11. Rochester's Sodom, ed. L. S. A. M. von Romer (H. Welter: Paris and Amsterdam, 1904, 1905). For discussion of the problem of attribution, see J. W. Johnson, ‘Did Lord Rochester write Sodom?’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1987), pp. 119-53. Wolsey's comment comes in ‘Preface to Valentinian’ (1685), in Rochester: the critical heritage ed. D. Farley-Hills, p. 155.

12. ‘Valentinian: a tragedy: as 'tis altered by the late Earl of Rochester (London, 1685), 5ii, 61.

13. Sarah Wintle, ‘Libertinism and Sexual Politics’, in Treglown, p. 155.

14. Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 253.

15. Sarah Wintle, ‘Libertinism and Sexual Politics’, in Treglown, p. 134.

16. ‘Donne after Love’, Literature and the Body, ed. Elaine Scary (Baltimore, 1988), pp. 33-69.

17. ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ also stresses the ‘busie hand’ and the ‘fair hand, which might bid heat return / To frozen Age’ (p. 13, ll.31-32).

18. Endymion III, pp. 567-68, in the Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford, 1970), p. 119.

19. Everett, ‘The Sense of Nothing’, in Treglown, p. 17.

20. The most graphic illustration comes in Sedley's ‘In the Fields of Lincoln Inn’, published in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1680), p. 57. Phillis, faced with two gallants, acts decisively: ‘Coridon's Aspiring Tarse, she fitted / To her less frequented Arse’ while Strephon ‘into her Cunt she thrust: Now for Civil Wars prepare, / Rais'd by fierce intestine Bustle. / When these Heroes meeting Justle / In the Bowels of the Fair’. ‘Nature had 'twixt Cunt and Arse / Wisely plac'd firm separation, / God knows else what desolation / Had insu'd from warring Tarse’. Compare Gloria, in The Devil in Miss Jones, similarly circumstanced: ‘can you feel his cock against yours, can you feel it’. Cited in Anne McClintock, ‘Gonad and the Barbarian and the Venus Flytrap: Portraying the female and the male orgasm’, Sex Exposed: sexuality in the pornography debate (London, 1992), pp. 111-31.

21. Everett, ‘The Sense of Nothing’, in Treglown, pp. 25, 27.

22. Compare ‘Dialogue’ (ll.33-40): ‘the Show'rs that fall / Quench the fire, and quiet all;’ and ‘The Advice’ (ll.23-24): ‘for even streams have desires, / Cool as they are, they feel Love's powerful fires’.

23. Compare Sodom, where Flux comments: ‘Men's Pricks are eaten of the secret parts / Of Women’ (l.51).

24. From a host of examples: ‘To betray, and engage, and inflame my Desire’ (‘The Submission’, l.6); ‘employ that Art / Which first betray'd, to ease my heart’ (‘Dialogue’, ll.6-7); ‘my unfaithfull eyes / Betray a kinder story’ (‘Song’, ll.7-8); and ‘But Virgins Eyes their hearts betray, / And give their Tongues the lie’ (‘Song’, ll.19-20). In ‘A Satyr against Reason’, ‘But Savage Man alone, does Man Betray’ (l.130), allows, by the logic of its own argument, that the primitive impulses are superior because they are closer to the spontaneous behaviour of the animal kingdom.

25. Everett, ‘The Sense of Nothing’, in Treglown, p. 19.

26. ‘The Good Morrow’, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1965), p. 70.

27. ‘Rochester: the Body Political and the Body Private’, in The Author in his Work: Essays on a problem in criticism, ed. Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams (New Haven and London, 1978), pp. 103-21; reprinted in Vieth, 1988, pp. 45-67. See also Robert Holton ‘Sexuality and Social Hierarchy in Sidney and Rochester’, Mosaic, 24:1 (1991), pp. 47-65.

28. The Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al. (New Haven and London, 1939-1969), vol. 4, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt, III 108, 203; to Sir Edmund Harley, 1677; The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1972; 2nd edition, 1981), p. 329; Dryden, ‘Preface to “All for Love”’ (1678), cited in Rochester: The Critical Heritage, ed. Farley-Hills, p. 32.

29. ‘Mr Etherege's Answer’ (to ‘Another Letter by the Lord Buckhurst to Mr Etherege’), in Poems of Dorset (ll.34-35), p. 115.

30. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Must we burn Sade?’ Introduction to Marquis de Sade, ‘One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom’ (London: Arrow, 1989), pp. 3-64; Angela Carter, The Sadean Woman: an exercise in cultural history (London, 1979), p. 90.

31. The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford, 1980), pp. 241-42. Compare Dorset's ‘The Antiquated Coquette’: ‘Desire's asleep and cannot wake / When women such advances make: / Both time and charms thus Philis Wastes, / Since each must surfeit ere he tastes. / Nothing escapes her wand'ring eyes, / No one she thinks too mean a prize’ (pp. 39-45).

32. Sarah Wintle, ‘Libertinism and Sexual Politics’, in Treglown, p. 151.

33. Harold Weber, ‘Drudging in fair Aurelia's Womb: Constructing Homosexual Economies in Rochester's Poetry’, The Eighteenth Century, 33:2 (1992), pp. 99-117, 110, 108.

34. Ibid., p. 115.

35. Ibid., p. 110.

36. Claude Rawson, ‘Systems of Excess’, Times Literary Supplement, 29 March (1985), pp. 335-36.

37. ‘Drudging In Fair Aurelia's Womb: Constructing Homosexual Economics in Rochester's Poetry’, op. cit., p. 103.

38. Ulysses, 3 vols, ed. Hans W. Gabler (New York, 1984), 1:175.

39. Treglown, p. 85.