[In this essay, Barley explores Rochester's treatment of “nothing” and finds that even as he appears to be advocating non-entity the poet is anxious to distance and distinguish himself from it.]

Because of its knowing exhibitionism, because of its flair, because of its mock-solemn pride in its own achievement, Rochester's poem Upon Nothing brushes aside the kind of readerly interrogation invited by similarly impressive metaphysical displays. If Donne's ‘Lecture on the Shadow’ or ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucie's Day’ or Marvell's ‘Definition of Love’, provide a recent generic pedigree for Upon Nothing, Rochester's salient improvisation on non-entity requires of its readership qualitatively less imaginative effort to succumb to its arguments and admire its paradoxes. Upon Nothing asks, supposing it asks anything of its readers, for a take-it-or-leave-it sense of delightedly amused awe. The strength of its regal negligence acts to make the poem seemingly impregnable.

The conceptual game seems everything in Upon Nothing, which ostensibly delivers an extended descriptive definition of non-entity, but which couches the absolute with which it deals in terms of the dissolutions of a vigorously playful relativism. Knowing that his subject will of itself take the breath away, Rochester's title advertises and enacts what is to prove an unremitting sequence of dextrous disintegrations. What can be constructed upon nothing? Why, nothing, of course, and with that apodictic flourish, the poem proper begins, apostrophizing Nothing as personage, attracting Nothing's attention, engaging Nothing in one-sided dialogue, lauding Nothing with priest-like compliment, taking for granted its pre-eminent dominion over the universe.

Immediately, the absolute Nothing is conceived in terms of a relativism and a negativity which instantly destabilize much, though not all, of the sense of Nothing as a supreme idealist essence. Although Nothing can have no point of origin, Nothing is here historicized. Although Nothing necessarily lacks parentage, Nothing is here familial, fraternally related to the lesser nothing, Shade. Although Nothing extends its compass throughout an atemporal domain and is therefore ‘well fixt’, Nothing is here both exclusive of Time's parabola, and contradictorily, is in a contiguous relationship with Time's eternally travelling arrow:

Nothing thou Elder Brother even to Shade
Thou hadst a being ere the world was made
And well fixt art alone of ending not afraid.

(ll. 1-3)¹

Not the father, and not the eldest, but merely the ‘elder brother’ to the shadow that Something implicitly casts, or to the shade which cloaks death, Nothing pre-exists the world's formation not as a total state but as a curiously indefinite condition, with ‘a’ being, rather than being as such. By avoiding the superlative, the poet prevents the polarization that could give the reader fixed points of reference.

Because exempt from finality, Nothing cannot fear it; because non-existent, the threat of non-existence holds no terrors, but what might have been expressed as a positive disdain for closure is given here in the unsettling negative form (‘not afraid’). In eschewing a specified opposite, the poet alludes to a vaguely circumscribed ‘other’ realm enjoying no discrete category. With similar effect, the noun-participle ‘ending’, which delays conclusion infinitely, undercuts Nothing's fearlessness by an indeterminacy which is already Nothing's own attribute. This first stanza then admits no solid ground even in commencement, the certainty of its tone establishing itself in contradiction to its ambiguously provisional sense. Such a tension holds, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout the following ten stanzas of the poem, in which Rochester rehearses his heretical cosmology and dismisses all denials of Nothing's omnipotence as pretentious.

David Vieth, in his edition of Rochester's poems, summarizes and contextualizes the poem's thesis as follows:

Orthodox Christian theology holds that God created the universe out of nothing (the usual version) or chaos (the variation adopted by Milton in Paradise Lost). Hence, according to a paradoxical tradition which developed as a corollary, this non-existent nothing is the source or unformed raw material of all things in the Creation, without which they could not exist.²

Having run the film of creation in reverse until it has spun off its reel, the poet steps back authoritatively into the absences of pre-existence, characterizing in a single disarming line the negative pre-conditions which pertained prior to substance and dimension: ‘Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not’, a statement of such necessary tautology that its bewildering resonance is offset by the persuasive force of its simple logic. The insistent combination of Time and Place, and the impossibility of imagining a time before Time and matter before Place, both governed by that seemingly artless ‘Ere’ (which, used quite unembarrassedly, demonstrates language's inability to convey non-existence), challengingly harks back of course to (Augustinian) theology's refusal to take interest in the absence ‘before’ creation, but also anticipates modern scientific myths of origin in which the problem of the ultimate anterior stubbornly remains.

It is interesting—though inevitable—that modern, popular-scientific accounts of cosmology encounter an identical incapacity to explain other than in notional abstractions the initial configurations that led to the formation of the universe. This, for example, is Stephen Hawking in his wryly titled A Brief History of Time:

In order to predict how the universe should have started off, one needs laws that hold at the beginning of time. If the classical theory of general relativity was correct, the singularity theorems that Roger Penrose and I proved show that the beginning of time would have been a point of infinite density and infinite curvature of space-time. All the known laws of science would break down at such a point.³

(p. 133)

It was at the conference in the Vatican mentioned earlier that I first put forward the suggestion that maybe time and space together formed a surface that was infinite in size but did not have any boundary or edge.⁴

(p. 136)

According to these characteristic accounts, the occurrence itself ‘happens’ in a zone of wordlessness; there is and was no beforehand, literally nothing preceded creation. The moment of origin moreover, is literally inconceivable: to grasp experientially what is proposed in the notions of ‘a point of infinite density and curvature of space-time’, or of a finite surface without boundary, is impossible. The concept of infinity here proves as teasingly elusive as Rochester's autonomous Nothing which in that one unspecified moment of ‘When … straight begott’ Something, thus initiating Time; ‘Then all proceeded from the great united what’. The gravitas is hardly straight-faced in this second stanza where the bizarrely abrupt ‘What’—an explosive capitulation to non-sense—parodies the quiet disorientations carried by that governing preposition and those conjunctional adverbs ‘Ere’, ‘When’, and ‘Then’; ‘the known laws of science … break down’ in this mockery of linear progression. The poet's amusement is barely contained (with Rochester sneering at ‘the Something and Nothing of logicians’ and punning obscenely on ‘twat’, as Dustin Griffin⁵ suggests).

Rochester's playfulness in this first, cosmological section of the poem depends upon the promotion of a giddying sequence of mutually exclusive, but not self-cancelling, definitions of non-existence and theories of creation which the tone of self-aware panegyric winkingly pretends to find self-consistent. So Nothing features alternately as a positive and as a negative condition. The imagination has little problem picturing a positive nothing as an absence within and in opposition to which substance exists, the model for which might be that of an inverse vacuum. Negative nothing on the other hand, demands a fraction more sleight of mind in conceiving. Carl Sagan's attempt to describe such negative nothing in relation to the ‘Big Bang’ hypothesis of the origin of the universe is unsatisfying, but nonetheless helpful:

In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased. It is misleading to describe the expansion of the universe as a sort of distending bubble viewed from the outside. By definition, nothing we can ever know about was outside. It is better to think of it from the inside, perhaps with grid lines—imagined to adhere to the moving fabric of space—expanding uniformly in all directions …⁶

It is particularly in the later parts of the poem that Nothing comes increasingly to feature as pure non-entity. At the outset however, negative Nothing is as yet a shadow of that other multiple Nothing with its own ‘being’—the ‘primitive’ presence, the ‘sole original’, the ‘fruitful Emptiness’, the begetter of a ‘race’ of ‘offspring’, the dark ‘mighty power’ ruling a once ‘peaceful realm’.

In his reading of the poem, Griffin rightly notes that it proposes variant, mutually exclusive ‘stories of creation’:

(1) Nothing begot Something, and from their incestuous union all else followed (st.2); (2) Something was severed or sundered from Nothing, as Eve was sundered from Adam's side, and subsequently severed or ‘snatched’ from Nothing's hand ‘men, beasts’, etc. (sts.3-4); (3) with terms now shifted from concrete to abstract, from ‘Something’ to ‘Matter’, Matter is born of Nothing but frustrates Nothing's desire for incestuous union, fleeing from its embrace, joining in rebellion against Nothing with Form, Light, Time, and Place (sts.5-6).⁷

p. 270

By transposing Rochester's mainly active formulations (stanza 3 excepted) into his own mainly passive account, Griffin avoids the wheeling ambiguities of, for example, stanza 4, where the possible syntactical reversal confuses subject and object, and thus upsets all sense of the respective powers of Something and Nothing:

Yet Somthing did thy mighty power command
And from thy fruitfull Emptinesses hand
Snatcht, Men, Beasts, birds, fire, water, Ayre, and land.

(ll. 10-12)

If a God-like Something commands Nothing's ‘mighty power’, equally, Nothing's ‘mighty power’ commands Something, which proceeds thenceforth to its hyper-Promethean mission, purloining from Nothing not only fire, but every other component of being. Nonetheless, Griffin's inventory of the poet's tales of creation illuminates what the poem pretends to obscure, and the critic is persuasive in suspecting both that Rochester is parodying ‘the double account of man's creation in Genesis’ and is intentionally deploying ‘discrepancies and uncertainties in order to mock the process of explaining origins’.

The jumbled, anti-linear catalogue which ends the stanza quoted above, blasphemously jibes at the divine ordering related in Genesis I, its repeated commas refuting hierarchy and suggesting a chaotic equality. Moreover stanzas 3-6 tease not only Cowley's ‘Hymn to Light’, but also, and more obviously, the Miltonic gospel's narrative of Satan's rebellion in Paradise Lost:

Somthing, the generall Attribute of all
Severed from thee its sole Originall,
Into thy boundless selfe must undistinguished fall.

(ll. 7-9)

Matter, the Wickedst offspring of thy Race
By forme assisted flew from thy Embrace
And Rebell-Light obscured thy Reverend dusky face.
With forme and Matter, Time and Place did joyne
Body thy foe with these did Leagues combine
To spoyle thy Peaceful Realme and Ruine all thy Line.

(ll. 13-18)

The luck of history and social status precluded the imposition of any Protestant fatwah on the writer of these Satanic Verses. Something's predicted ‘undistinguished fall’ into a ‘boundless’ future oblivion (Nothing's ‘self’) distends and twists the Angel Satan's celebrated descent. Severed from the a-Deity Nothing, which alone had particularity (as ‘sole originall’), Something is merely ‘the generall attribute of all’, hence ‘undistinguished’ from the outset. The mass rebellion of the alliance of the implicitly God-given abstractions, qualities, components and conditions of existence turns the world of Miltonic morality and the Biblical ‘good’ upside down. The revolt provides a compendium of all possible modes of immoral and unnatural challenge to rightful, established authority: the ungrateful ‘Wickedst’ betrayal of a loved child (‘Matter’), the cowardly treachery of that ‘offspring’ in accepting the assistance of an outsider (‘Form’) and ignominiously fleeing the parental ‘Embrace’, the deliberate, murderous deceit of ‘Rebell-Light’ in obliterating Nothing's ‘Reverend dusky face’. In the obscurity provided by Light, the confederacy of Form, Matter, Time, Place and Body hatch a military conspiracy, motivated it seems, by nothing more than envy: ‘To spoyle thy Peaceful Realme and Ruine all thy Line’ (l.18).

The fact that Nothing's ‘Line’ comprises none other than the aforementioned confederates makes for a very quiet irony that passes almost unnoticed. But the following stanza (7) underscores the joke as, when all seems quite lost for Nothing, Nothing finds the decisive counter-stroke:

But Turncote-time assists the foe in vayne
And brib'd by thee destroyes their short liv'd Reign
And to thy hungry wombe drives back thy slaves again.

(ll.19-21)

Nothing's victory in this epic conflict is soon assured—not only because one of the conspirators is the inevitable ‘Turncote’, but because utterly malleable, Nothing can outdo its enemies in policy, bribing Time to destroy their brief tenure on power, reenslaving this would-be independence movement in the ‘hungry womb’ of a new female Nothing which begat it in the first place. Once masculine, now feminine, the munificent womb greedily ingests and absorbs; the once creative space becomes a place of constriction and retention.

The two comparatively restrained stanzas which ensue (8-9) function almost in parenthesis as a kind of unintended ruminative digression. They show the poem beginning to stray a little into a less ambiguous modest and serious mode, where for once the wit serves a subordinate role, very nearly integrated with the thought—until now suppressed—that Nothing's ‘truth’ is a mystery:

Though Misteries are barr'd from Laick Eyes
And the Divine alone with warrant pries
Into thy Bosome, where thy truth in private lyes.
Yet this of thee the wise may truly say
Thou from the virtuous Nothing doest delay
And to be part of thee the wicked wisely pray.

(ll.22-27)

The voice here is unassuming. The extended play on the right of the divine to pry into Nothing's privacy to find ‘the truth’ which ‘lies’, for once does not dominate, and if it causes a double-take on the reader's part, the result is not more than a smile, which does not detract from the reader's straightforward assent with the primary sense of Nothing's inviolable mystery. Similarly with stanza 9. Nothing takes nothing away from the virtuous, Nothing delays the final end of the virtuous which is to become nothing; in contrast, the wish for oblivion is the wise prayer of the wicked.

If stanzas 8 and 9 arise unexpectedly, and in a different key, as though another more subdued and solemn-wise meditation might be emerging in counterpoint, they also serve to mark the poem's place of transition from cosmological philosophy to social satire. Stoic wisdom, the judicious acknowledgement of the limitations of human knowledge, and of its paltry pretensions, is the transitional theme. The wicked may be wise but the wise are less wicked than laughably pathetic: ‘Great Negative’ (the tone of ironical assurance returns):

          how vainly would the wise
Enquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise,
Didst Thou not stand to poynt their blind Phylosophies.

(ll.28-30)

Here the irony is engagingly obvious. Being blind, the wise do in fact see nothing, do ‘vainly … Enquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise’ despite Nothing's standing point, pricking all such bubbles of pretension. And again obviously, the catalogue of the vanities of the wise erases in dismissive self-parody the entire preceding science of Nothing which the poem has until now so sympathetically recorded.

Why is Rochester writing Upon Nothing—and which of the poem's two main perspectives interests him more: the dazzling, all-embracing maze of cosmology we have so far been led (by the nose) through, or the gleefully contemptuous assault against a civilization in which every element of social dignity, social achievement and social virtue is shown to have as much substance as the new clothes of the fairytale Emperor? Does the poem's process enact a diminution, as has been suggested, or is that first part an extended, delaying prelude to a position which finds more excitement in the real absurdities of social organization than in mythological speculation? So well balanced is the poem that to suggest an answer favouring either of these alternatives might well seem inappropriate. Indeed, it practically becomes a matter of taste as to whether or not the pyrotechnic brilliance of the first half's epic metaphysics seems of greater moment than the second half's slow-growing crescendo of satirical invective. Yet the very extent of the shift of attention in the poem keeps such questions naggingly alive.

When the metaphysics of cosmology are to all intents and purposes done with, the substantial world of social (mis)behaviour remains. And here experience can be pinned down and named for what it is. Exaggerated political, national and sexual stereotypes mask their basis in the truths such clichés typically inscribe. This grimly funny, utterly enjoyable humour tells the world's whole story from the perspective of the satirist so persuasively as to gainsay all and any challenge to it, all and any detraction or contradiction or qualification:

Is or is not, the two great Ends of ffate
And true or false the Subject of debate
That perfect or destroy the vast designes of State—
When they have wrackt the Politicians Brest
Within thy Bosome most Securely rest
And when reduc't to thee are least unsafe and best
But (Nothing) why does Something still permitt
That Sacred Monarchs should at Councell sitt
With persons highly thought, at best for nothing fitt,
Whilst weighty Somthing modestly abstaynes
ffrom Princes Coffers and from Statesmens braines
And nothing there like Stately nothing reignes?
Nothing who dwell'st with fooles in grave disguise
ffor whom they Reverend Shapes and formes devise
Lawn-sleeves and ffurs and Gowns, when they like thee looke wise:
ffrench Truth, Dutch Prowess, Brittish policy
Hibernian Learning, Scotch Civility
Spaniards Dispatch, Danes witt, are Mainly seen in thee;
The Great mans Gratitude to his best freind
Kings promises, Whors vowes towards thee they bend
fflow Swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.

(ll.31-51)

Four stanzas (11-14) attend quasi-discreetly to the state and government, indicting the hollowness of political programmes and social administration in alternately objective, delicate and quizzical tones, but with an increasingly venomous off-handedness and a noticeable increase in acceleration. They are followed by three driving stanzas of uncompromisingly overt invective, one speedily ridiculing and dismissing the clergy, the next reeling off scornfully a varied handful of national inadequacies (15-16), the last, an abruptly halted coda (17), that is a chilling judgement on what is promised, owed and delivered in relationships between people: this being the only stanza of the poem to broach the subject of personal interaction—or rather its absence. The momentum of the second part of Upon Nothing suddenly brakes in this concluding stanza, and the poem stops short—and dead.

It takes only a moment of reflection to realize that Rochester is attaching precious little weight to the observations which make up his social critique, notwithstanding the validity of many of those self-same observations. The poet entertains no thought whatsoever of political or ecclesiastical reform, indulges no wish to remedy deficiencies in ‘national character’: any impulse towards correction would instance yet another of Nothing's gestures. At the same time, the inevitability of a state of affairs in which ‘the vast designs of state’ reduce to nothing, because treasuries are always empty and counsellors always empty-headed, is matter merely for perennial enjoyment. The ironical anger which underpins this whole section does not come from a stance of unheeded, malcontent worldly-wisdom, nor is it actually directed against its ostensible targets which are merely butts for the sparkling, mischievous humour overlying that anger. The bathos of stanzas 11 and 12 in which questions of Fate and Truth are the context for the ‘vast designes of State’ over which politicians ‘wrack’ their breasts (!) teases without griping, without outrage, while the puzzled-pained confusions of 13 and 14 do likewise, with the joke depending throughout on those simple-sarcastic qualifiers: ‘highly thought, at best’, ‘weighty’, ‘modestly’, ‘stately’.

To be sure, all trace of the jovial seems instantly to vanish in the explosive scorn of stanza 15 where Nothing is found at home with clerical ‘fooles in grave disguise’ who flatter and mimic it, appearing ‘wise’ by devising and donning an amorphous array of ‘reverend’ paraphernalia which both expresses and cloaks their folly. But here too, the dismissive contempt acts as if in excess of its stated referent, as though it were either a gratuitous outburst, or had been transferred from some other unnamed source. This same feeling is induced in the brilliant, and lighter, penultimate stanza which rapidly counts off and discounts ‘ffrench Truth, Brittish policy, Hibernian Learning’ and the rest in an apparently self-generating list. Again, the unsettling combination of show-off playfulness and antagonism jars on, as much as it excites, the reader, suggesting that the poet's game has an ulterior function, one that is actually careless of national fallibilities. One suspects that the more wide-rangingly Rochester the sportsman pursues this Nothing, the more his quarry is actually hounding him.

It is the final stanza which perhaps provides a psychological key to the discrepancy between the tone of the assumed voice of Upon Nothing and the oddly disturbing effect the poem intermittently produces. The suspicion that there is an individual identity present at some remove from the poetic persona periodically arises, and never more so than in this concluding stanza. The notion that the poem comprises a masterly set-piece exercise, is a demonstration of the playful possibilities inherent in the paradoxes of the conventional topos ‘nothing’, is one which the poet would like to have us believe yet does not ever quite believe himself: the satisfactions of closure are withheld or unattained. A sense of personal disappointment and personal hurt dominates the last stanza in those masochistically selected instances of unfulfilled expectation and betrayal. ‘The great mans Gratitude to his best friend, / Kings promises, Whors vowes’. The very occlusion of the personal, the child-like transference of hurt onto blamed hurtful others who thereby represent an entire world of failed personal interaction (already defensively mediated by obstructive incompatibilities of status and role: ‘great man’, ‘King’, ‘Whors’), suggests that the experience of emptiness is here Rochester's own, and that the moments of anger in the poem express the flip-side of the poet's own hurt. The indefinite nature of the poem's sudden closing thought, in which gratitude, promises and vows bend towards nothing, flow swiftly into nothing, and ever end in nothing, confirms this feeling—the on-going tendency towards nothingness in all such arrested interpersonal transactions inscribes a pathetic, rueful condition, despite the formal adroitness of these final lines.

What I am suggesting here is that Upon Nothing consists of a series of defensive strategies through which the poet tentatively touches upon his own sense of non-identity. The external nothings of the poem are projections of a feared internal non-entity. The pressure exerted by a feeling of personal non-being occasions the poem but the poem itself seeks to resist that pressure by any means that it can find at its disposal. Neither the parodic philosophical game of the first half, nor the tongue-in-cheek social satire of the second encapsulates the dominant interest since the choice of subject matter and its treatment throughout the poem are primarily functional.

To protect himself from Nothing, the poet begins by juggling with the notional components of an external (idealist, original, ultimate) Nothing, ventriloquising the languages we use in the ultimately fruitless attempt to comprehend what is (apparently) outside of experience. Rochester assumes the existence of no positive absolute, no secure ontological frame or fabric which might effectively combat the Nothing which Being impotently interrupts. The perception of non-being that seems external proves continually to threaten the real world of experience and, more than that, to invade it. Thus, even while it is affecting to speak directly to Nothing, or to be speaking on Nothing's behalf, the poetic voice is unable to maintain completely its assurance. For all that the poet-persona takes pride in, and enjoys, the easy skill of rhetorical argument, the conceptual virtuosity, the witty humour, the capriciousness, these cannot be sustained, and the assured tone is finally a posture, a temporary stand against the overwhelming sense of negation.

In the first part of the poem the moments of slippage where the mask of the speaker, Nothing's eulogist, is slyly allowed to drop while Rochester draws attention to his own ingenuity, act to confirm the poet's self-confidence. In such moments the reader is let in on the parodic in-jokes and is tantalized with a sense of shared participation, with being offered the possibility of identification with the poet. But at the same time, the poet maintains the comedian's distance by fluidly re-emerging with his persona, refusing full identification, denying the reader security, and thereby manages temporarily to bolster his own sense of stability.

In the heady world of metaphysics, such defense mechanisms can work for a time but the process of the poem cannot put off for ever the need to attend to the real world, and Nothing's presence therein. So the social, and the personal which the social implicitly forms, come to dominate the later stages, thus offering insight into the poem's private motive. The humour is deeper, more assimilated here, and the reader has no effort to make in recognizing the truth of the poet's knowing social critique. But the changes in tome during the poem's final movement are more marked, and the coy, inflated, sweeping, knowing, jibing, inventively abandoned social observations which appear with such cavalier effortlessness throughout the resolution hint at an anarchic flair symptomatic of near breakdown. The posture of careless flourish fails to withstand the unlocated anger beneath it; the stubborn residue of what seem specific past frustrations and disappointments suggest a feared loss of control on the poet's part, with potential exhausted collapse just an arm's length away.

Upon Nothing is not about Death, or the fear of death unlike Rochester's other (later) foray onto that thematic terrain—his translation of the Chorus of Act II of Seneca's Troades:

After Death, nothing is, and nothing, Death,
The utmost Limit of a gaspe of Breath;

(ll. 1-2)

From beginning to end, Rochester's version is concerned with common-sense deflation and demystification, adopting an attitude which is level-headedly pedagogic. As nothing, death should hold no terrors whatsoever, any dread of non-existence is invented, is fantasy. ‘Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World’, nothing more, and if ‘Devouring tyme swallows us whole’ we should simply accept that ‘impartial’ fate:

                    For Hell, and the foule Fiend that Rules
                    Gods everlasting fiery Jayles
                    (Devis'd by Rogues, dreaded by Fooles),
With his grim, griezly Dogg, that keepes the Doore,
                    Are senselesse Storyes, idle Tales,
                              Dreames, Whimseys, and noe more.

(ll. 13-18)

The tone of the piece is completely self-consistent; no fractures or fissures interrupt it. Whether pagan or Christian, all ‘devised’ myths of post mortem retribution should be discounted en masse. Straightforward, unshakeable conviction is the keynote here, the assurance is real and unassailable but in no way dogmatic or strained—there is no need to insist. Rather amused by all the fuss, the speaking voice simply sets the record to rights.

The comparative complexities of Upon Nothing might well lead to the deduction that without Seneca's guidance, Rochester is far less sanguine about reaching ‘The utmost limit’ of the last ‘gasp of breath’. In his Self and Others, the psychiatrist R. D. Laing addresses the pathology initially associated with the fear of non-entity in terms of the following:

Tillich (1952) speaks of the possibilities of non-being in the three directions of ultimate meaninglessness, ultimate condemnation, and ultimate annihilation in death. In those three directions man as a spiritual being, as a moral being, as a biological being, faces the possibility of his own annihilation, or non-being.⁸

Yet it is not the apprehension of these three ‘ultimate’ possibilities which is disturbing in Rochester's poem. The future as such occupies little of the poet's attention, the awareness is not of awaiting the eventual arrival of self-annihilation. The anxiety expressed in Upon Nothing is already contained in, and centred in, the immediacies of the present.

Referring to his earlier study The Divided Self, Laing advances a supplementary category of disintegration experienced by the individual:

The ontological insecurity described in The Divided Self is a fourth possibility. Here, man as a person, encounters non-being, in a preliminary form, as a partial loss of the synthetic unity of self, concurrently with a partial loss of relatedness with the other, and in an ultimate form, in the hypothetical state of chaotic nonentity, total loss of relatedness with self and other.

It is this fourth possibility which applies most nearly to Rochester's composition. The strategies employed by the poet to erect and fortify a structure of personal security in the face of what seems a total loss of relatedness with the world outside the self are compellingly desperate. The witty playfulness, the poised elusiveness, together with all the varied voices and changing perspectives displayed in Upon Nothing, indicate the poet at some deep level operating neurotically against that invasive chaos of non-entity which mirrors his own internal sense of imminent disintegration from within.

Perhaps it is significant that the extreme expression of contempt in the poem occurs in stanza 15, the stanza which attacks the clergy, but more important in this context, the stanza which deals most explicitly with the pretences of deception and disguise. A case of both transference and projection, one might think. Rochester feels he knows inside out what is crucially at stake in the adoption of disguises, or of personae. In his Introduction to The Complete Poems, Vieth makes especial note of the fact that the ‘male speakers in Rochester's poems can be ranged on a spectrum of identities’ (Introduction, xli), and he goes a step further in exploring the attendant implications by drawing attention to the poet's ‘real-life’ predilection for varying his own identities:

Augmenting this multiplication of identities was the real-life Rochester's practice of disguises. As Burnet relates,

He took pleasure to disguise himself, as a Porter, or as a Beggar; sometimes to follow some mean Amours, which, for the variety of them, he affected; At other times, meerly for diversion, he would go about in odd shapes, in which he acted his part so naturally, that even those who were on the secret, and saw him in these shapes, could perceive nothing by which he might be discovered.

The outstanding instance, of course, was the affair of Alexander Bendo, in which ‘he disguised himself, so that his nearest Friends could not have known him …’

(Introduction, xlii)

Upon Nothing affects to be just such a pleasurable diversion but its dependence upon changing identities, acted so naturally, betrays anxious compulsion underlying its play. Disguised as Nothing's friendly advocate, Rochester seeks to distance and distinguish himself from non-entity; with the poem's concluding stanza this operation finally proves to fail.

Notes

1. Quotations from ‘Upon Nothing’ are from Keith Walker's edition: The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford, 1984), pp. 62-64.

2. David M. Vieth's edition: The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (New Haven and London, 1974), p. 118.

3. Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes (London, 1988), p. 133.

4. Ibid., p. 136.

5. Dustin H. Griffin, Satires Against Man: the Poems of Rochester, (Berkeley, 1973), p. 271.

6. Carl Sagan, Cosmos: the story of cosmic evolution, science and civilisation (London, 1983), p. 279.

7. Griffin, op.cit., p. 270.

8. R. D. Laing, Self and Others (rev. edition Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 51.