A Satire on Charles II
‘Love a Woman? You’re an Ass!’
A Satire Against Reason and Mankind
A Letter from Artemisia in Town to Chloe in the Country
To the Postboy
The Disabled Debauchee
Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover
Upon Nothing
An Epistolary Essay from MG to OB Upon their Mutual Poems
A Translation from Seneca’s Troades
Introduction
It comes as something of a shock to read Rochester’s verse for the first time. Four-letter words are gaily scattered about in a manner sure to offend the prudish, and the force of the sexual and scatological imagery that can be found in his writing means that initial preconceptions of what ‘poetry’ – especially Restoration poetry – ‘should’ be are challenged. Yet once the initial surprise has worn off, reading Rochester is an enormous pleasure. He writes in an accessible and straightforward fashion that, ironically enough, would have seen his work anthologised in many collections for students if it weren’t for the aforementioned eyebrow-raising details.
And yet to pigeonhole Rochester as merely smutty is to miss the point. The self-proclaimed ‘peerless peer’ was a hugely able satirist. His most notable achievement was the magnificent vituperation of ‘A Satire Against Reason And Mankind’, which simultaneously offers closely reasoned intellectual argument and witty pastiche of the high-blown bluster of the time, but his attacks on the great and the good of his age – even Charles II – are hilariously readable, the contemporary equivalent of a stand-up comedian laying into puffed-up public figures. Likewise, his love poems, such as ‘Love and Life’ and ’Twas a dispute ’twixt heaven and earth’, are by turns beautiful and artfully knowing responses to the contemporary fashion for turning all women into classical goddesses. And even his signature poems about sexual excess and debauchery present a variety of hugely different registers. The good-natured self-mockery of ‘Upon his drinking a bowl’ is so different from the near-hysterical laceration of ‘A Ramble In St James’s Park’ and the shrugging fatalism of ‘The Disabled Debauchee’ that it seems hard to imagine that the same man could have written all three poems.
The question of veracity dogs Rochester, as it has done since he died. There has never been an ‘official’ collection of his verse. The first, a pirated edition brought out shortly after his death in 1680, featured as many poems falsely attributed to him as by him. It became the vogue for virtually any obscene work to be ascribed to Rochester, and such was the popularity of these poems that one anonymous 1695 commentator sighed: ‘Let this define the nation’s character/One man reads Milton, forty, Rochester.’
Over the past three centuries, the balance has shifted. Compared to his more illustrious contemporaries – Milton, Marvell and Dryden (although the latter is more studied than read today) – Rochester has been neglected as a poet. While the spectacular and shocking events of his life have overshadowed his literary career, his writing has been underrated, even as the likes of T. S. Eliot and William Hazlitt (who called his work ‘the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure’, saying ‘his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds’) have offered heartfelt appreciations of him as a great figure in English literature.
This selection of Rochester’s work showcases his enormously varied talent. Whether it’s the dramatic deathbed laments of ‘To The Postboy’ and his translation of Seneca’s Troades, his hilariously graphic account of male sexuality in ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ or the beautifully affecting and elegiac ‘Love And Life’, Rochester adopts a kaleidoscopic whirl of poetic personae and voices that make his work by turns funny, affecting, surprising and jolting. One thing that it never is – just as its author never was – is predictable. I hope that you enjoy the introduction to his writing that this small sampling of Rochester’s poems offers. If it remains all too fleeting a pleasure, it’s worth bearing in mind his words from ‘A Very Heroical Epistle In Answer To Ephelia’ – ‘No glorious thing was ever made to stay/My Blazing-Star but visits, and away’.
ALEX LARMAN
The Discovery
Celia, that faithful servant you disown,
Would in obedience keep his love unknown:
But bright ideas, such as you inspire,
We can no more conceal, than not admire.
My heart at home in my own breast did dwell,
Like humble hermit in a peaceful cell;
Unknown and undisturbed it rested there,
Stranger alike to hope and to despair.
Now love with a tumultuous train invades
The sacred quiet of those hollowed shades.
His fatal flames shine out to every eye,
Like blazing comets in a winter sky.
How can my passion merit your offence,
That challenges so little recompense?
For I am one, born only to admire;
Too humble e’er to hope, scarce to desire.
A thing whose bliss depends upon your will,
Who would be proud you’d deign to use him ill.
Then give me leave to glory in my chain,
My fruitless sighs, and my unpitied pain.
Let me but ever love, and ever be
Th’ example of your power and cruelty.
Since so much scorn does in your breast reside,
Be more indulgent to its mother, pride.
Kill all you strike, and trample on their Graves;
But own the fates of your neglected slaves:
When in the crowd yours undistinguished lies,
You give away the triumph of your eyes.
Perhaps (obtaining this) you’ll think I find
More mercy than your anger has designed:
But love has carefully designed for me,
The last perfection of misery.
For to my state the hopes of common peace,
Which every wretch enjoys in death, must cease:
My worst of fates attend me in my grave,
Since, dying, I must be no more your slave.
‘’Twas A Dispute ’Twixt Heaven and Earth’
’Twas a dispute ’twixt heaven and Earth
Which had produced the nobler birth:
For heaven appeared Cynthia, with all her train,
Till you came forth,
More glorious and more worth,
Than she with all those trembling imps of light
With which this envious queen of night
Had proudly decked her conquered self in vain.
I must have perished in that first surprise
Had I beheld your eyes.
Love, like Apollo when he would inspire
Some holy breast, laid all his glories by.
Else the god, clothed in his heavenly fire
Would have possesed too powerfully,
And making of his priest a sacrifice
Had so returned unhallowed to the skies.
‘Fair Chloris in a Pigsty Lay’
I.
Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay,
Her tender herd lay by her:
She slept, in murmuring gruntlings they,
Complaining of the scorching day,
Her slumbers thus inspire.
II.
She dreamt, while she with careful pains,
Her snowy arms employed,
In ivory pails to fill out grains,
One of her love-convicted swains,
Thus hastening to her cried:
III.
Fly, nymph, oh! fly, e’re ’tis too late,
A dear-loved life to save:
Rescue your bosom pig from fate,
Who now expires, hung in the gate
That leads to yonder cave.
IV.
My self had tried to set him free,
Rather than brought the news:
But I am so abhorred by thee,
That even thy darling’s life from me,
I know thou wouldst refuse.
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V.
Struck with the news, as quick she flies
As blushes to her face:
Not the bright lightning from the skies,
Nor love, shot from her brighter eyes,
Move half so swift a pace.
VI.
This plot, it seems, the lustful slave
Had laid against her honour:
Which not one God took care to save,
For he pursues her to the cave,
And throws himself upon her.
VII.
Now pierced is her virgin zone,
She feels the foe within it;
She hears a broken amorous groan,
The panting lover’s fainting moan,
Just in the happy minute.
VIII.
Frighted she wakes, and waking frigs,
Nature thus kindly eased,
In dreams raised by her murmuring pigs,
And her own thumb between her legs,
She’s innocent and pleased.
The Imperfect Enjoyment
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
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 lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.
My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,
Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.
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.
Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys,
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er
My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?”
She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?”
But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
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.
Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore
Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before?
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;
Ev’n so thy brutal valour 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.
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 do rub themselves on gates and grunt,
May’st 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 did 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.
Against Constancy
Tell me no more of constancy,
The frivolous pretense
Of cold age, narrow jealousy,
Disease, and want of sense.
Let duller fools, on whom kind chance
Some easy heart has thrown,
Despairing higher to advance,
Be kind to one alone.
Old men and weak, whose idle flame
Their own defects discovers,
Since changing can but spread their shame,
Ought to be constant lovers.
But we, whose hearts do justly swell
With no vainglorious pride,
Who know how we in love excel,
Long to be often tried.
Then bring my bath, and strew my bed,
As each kind night returns;
I’ll change a mistress till I’m dead—
And fate change me to worms.
A Ramble in St James’s Park
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St. James’s Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th’ honor on ’t,
’Tis consecrate to prick and cunt.
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother’s face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove
Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,
Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.
Along these hallowed walks it was
That I beheld Corinna pass.
Whoever had been by to see
The proud disdain she cast on me
Through charming eyes, he would have swore
She dropped from heaven that very hour,
Forsaking the divine abode
In scorn of some despairing god.
But mark what creatures women are:
How infinitely vile, when fair!
Three knights o’ the’ elbow and the slur
With wriggling tails made up to her.
The first was of your Whitehall blades,
Near kin to the Mother of the Maids;
Graced by whose favor he was able
To bring a friend to the waiters’ table,
Where he had heard Sir Edward Sutton
Say how the King loved Banstead mutton;
Since when he’d ne’er be brought to eat
By his good will any other meat.
In this, as well as all the rest,
He ventures to do like the best,
But wanting common sense, the ingredient
In choosing well not least expedient,
Converts abortive imitation
To universal affectation.
Thus he not only eats and talks
But feels and smells, sits down and walks,
Nay looks, and lives, and loves by rote,
In an old tawdry birthday coat.
The second was a Grays Inn wit,
A great inhabiter of the pit,
Where critic-like he sits and squints,
Steals pocket handkerchiefs, and hints
From ‘s neighbor, and the comedy,
To court, and pay, his landlady.
The third, a lady’s eldest son
Within few years of twenty-one
Who hopes from his propitious fate,
Against he comes to his estate,
By these two worthies to be made
A most accomplished tearing blade.
One, in a strain ’twixt tune and nonsense,
Cries, “Madam, I have loved you long since.
Permit me your fair hand to kiss”;
When at her mouth her cunt cries, “Yes!”
In short, without much more ado,
Joyful and pleased, away she flew,
And with these three confounded asses
From park to hackney coach she passes.
So a proud bitch does lead about
Of humble curs the amorous rout,
Who most obsequiously do hunt
The savory scent of salt-swol’n cunt.
Some power more patient now relate
The sense of this surprising fate.
Gods! that a thing admired by me
Should fall to so much infamy.
Had she picked out, to rub her arse on,
Some stiff-pricked clown or well-hung parson,
Each job of whose spermatic sluice
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