Rochester notes PDF

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Notes on a lecture on Rochester's poetry, focussing on critical attitudes....

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That second bottle, Nicholas Fisher Paul Hammond - Rochester's homoeroticism 'Homosexual' - a 19th century coinage - anachronistic to 17th century. "Sodomy" and "SodomitE" refer to an act Homoeroticism "denotes a desire for, or an erotic appreciation of, the male body which remains at the level of seeing, longing and representing, rather than of acting: it applies to the glance rather than the touch" Homosocial - intense male friendships often with an erotic aspect. Love to A woman - rejects erotic involvement with women in favour of the homosocial pleasures of all male drinking session and sexual pleasures provided by the page: "Farewel Woman, I intend, Henceforth, evry night to sit, With my lewd well naturd friend, Drinking, to engender wit. Then give me health, wealth, mirth and wine, And if busie love intrenches, There's a sweer soft page of mine, Does the trick worth Forty Wenches" This version is 1680 - which most critics agree to be closest to Rochester's original (52) BUT 1685 revised version by A Thorncome removes much of the explicit language and eradicaates any homosexual mention: "Then give me health, wealth, mirth and wine, And if busie love intrenches, Theere's a sweet soft Love of mine Does the trick worth forty wnches" 

This change places the poem securely within the boundaries of homosocial companionship, putting any homosexual interests beyond the poem. Transforms it into the idea that the engendering of wit is the only form of procreation for a sensible man, rather than the suggestion that sex w a page is the only form of sexual pleasure for a sensib le man.

Textual instability around homosexual reference - The Disabled Debauchee "When each the well look'd link boy strove t'enjoy / And the best kiss, was the deciding Lot / Whether the boy us'd you, or I the boy." 55 - 3 mamuscrikpts omit the word strove for sought, making the sexually motivated combat less vigorous/ 1680 maniuscript - not known fo rbeing overly coy, but two manuscripts use "fucked" instead of "us'd" - it uses fucked and fucking for heterosexual encounters, butnot here. Ironically though, the imprecision of us'd ranges a wider range of sexual possibilities than fuck'd \ Imperfect enjoyment - in 1680 "Stiffly resolv'd, twou'd carelessly invade, Woman or Boy nor ought its fure staid, Where e're it pierc;d a Cunt it found or madE" - 2 other manuscripts say "Woman or man" - 55 changing the way in which sex between men is imagined - between to adults or adult and boy. 1685 changes more drastically to "where it essay'd, nor ought its fury staid". - The poem isn't particularly

about or interested in sexual relations between men, it's a cursory, passing reference and the casual phrasing suggests the gender of partner is not so important - though later reference to the cunt suggests the male body is not a substitute for the female. "Rochester's poetry generally, and his reputation, hnave been purged of any homoeroticism through the thoroughly conventional insistence on wine and women."

Marianne Thormahlen, Dissolver of reason Something paradoxical about poems which dwell so insistently on erotic activity while saying so little about what it is really like and why it matters in the first place - 22 Some of Rochester's lyrics adhere so closelt ro readitional patterns in love poetry that one may safely speak of deliberate exploratiosn and subversions of familiar attitude. Amorous servitude in the Petrarchist mode, the fruition versus anti fruition antithesis.

Lord Rochester's moneky, keith walker Bentley, 1692 - "all things are at first created and are continually order'd for thyeBest and that principally for the benefit and pleasure of man:" - Rochesters view is almost the opposite, animals trust their instincts and do not rely on reason,a nd for this they are perhaps wiser than men. Against reason and mankind - He laments being :One of those strange prodigious creatures Man: 0 he'd rather be a dog a monky or a bear

The complete poems of Rochester, David M Veith intro "Upon his leaving his Mistress" - three intersecting planes of expereince: Masuline "heroic" honour in war, requiring the conquest of thousands of victims;feminine honour in love which Is more discriminating and defensive ; the fertility of nature, of which the human is and is not a part. "The male speakers can be ranged in a spectrum of identities" - The transparent, unindividuated spokesman of the love lyrics, the individualised, satirical speaker in "an allusion to Hnorace", idealised man about town in "Timon", the strident hedonist in "A satire against reason and mankind"

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Germaine Greer The firmness of the heroic couplets of the poem "To Celia". 39 "The speaker in these amorous addresses assumes the conventional posture of the enslaved and unrequited lover, only to exaggerate it by subtle shifts until the lady's cruely appears overdone and th elover's submission no less so"  Rochester's governing idea - of the an unmanned by love. A sudden irruption of the urge to lay hold of the woman into the language of extreme deference offered to the lady brings homr with a bump the awareness of infatiation as dying in its own too much.  "This is a lover who knows what it is to take a woman, even if she wants him to, because of the intensity of his own emotion."

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Such sophistication in understanding the valleities of sexual feeling is what the Restoration love lyric strove to demonstrate  Ovid's Amores - Marlowe's translation burnt by bishops "the drama in the Amores is not played out between a man and his beloved but between a man and his sexuality ; the putative hearer is not the lady but a man like himself." - Rochester may have tried to translate them.m "For I am one born only to admire / Too humble e'er to hope, scarce to desire" - To celia/ discovery  Amores - his Corinna is Ovid's Corinna, rambling in St James' partk or pawning her mantua gown for half a crown. - the theme of sexual impotence is in Amores 3:7  'The Imperfect Enjoyment' demonstrates the extent to which he uses a classical precedent to explore a different situation and sensibility - Ovid's is ynable to produce an erection, Rochester ejaculates prematurely. Ovid's lover fails, not with his lover Corinna but with a stranger; Rochester's lover is where he longed to be. "He puts to his sexuality a question Ovid would not have thought to ask" 41:  Through what mistaken magoc dost thou prove / So true to lewdness, so untrue to love? "Worst part of me and henceforth hated most / To all the town a common fucking post / on whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt" - hatred of his own body but also women. Artemisa to Cloe - "love the most generous passion of the mind, / The softest refuge innocence can find." ---- The interdependenc of the adorable and the repellent: love but also sex rectified to each other - a young lady to her ancient lover, st James park - transformed by Rochester's "Christian moral sensibility""42 Rochester knew that mortal creatures are not organised for bliss and that true love is known by increase not of pleasure but of pain" "Kind jealous doubts, tormenting fears, / And anxious cares when past, / Prove our hearts' treasure fixed and dear, / And make us blest at last." (An age in her embraces past)  Paradox: Fools cannot love, but love makes fools of men of wit. The mistress Religion - he is made immortal by love (which is like God who is love), he creates and maintains his soul. When love is absent his soul becomes shade - an unredeemed pre-Christiansoul condemned for eternity to exist in a realm outside heaven. St James park 44 - "The poem creates St JP known to all to be a place of promiscuous sexual encounter, as a pallic landscape sollipsistically constructed in the imagination of the questioning male, who interprets every event within it as an analogue of erection and orgasm," - then Corinna comes in; he watches as she is courted by 3 men with better chances than him - he recounts how he was ridiculed for his inadequacies and rejected by her "the poem ends with his curse condemning her to insatiable nymphomania and a lifetime of perseccution bu him, until she is: "Loathed and despised, kicked out of town Into some dirty hole alone, To chew the cud of misery, And know she owes it all to me. And may no woman better thrive Who dares profane the cunt I swive" 161 - 6 ==== Ot's not about her, but the vengeful, inadequate, ludicrous and dangerous figure of the rejected male. She is only glimpsed from a distance 45 - "nowadays few male poets would dare to adopt a female voice" - writing in like the 70s lol

For Rochester "adopting a female persona seems to have permitted a kind of paradoxicality in his thinking that was not accessible to masuline authority" - classical precedent in Ovid's Heroides - he impersonates the most famous heroinesin history. Many of them are victims - in Valentinian, she asks her lover to "invent some gentle way to let [her] go" But some are aggressors "/ forward - to her ancient lover "From his ice shall be released: And soothed by my reviving hand/ in former warmth and vigour stand" Platonic lady" - she seeks her own pleasure "I'd give him liberty to toy / And play with me and count it joy." Stranger, authenitc - Rochester's holograph - "What vaine and unnecessary things are men / How well we do with out 'em." 48 "there is little doubt that while Rochester disappointed his mother, his wife, his mistress and his daughters, he was obsessed and fascinated by women" The dying R supposedly asked " I grant you the poets call the nine muses by the names of women, but whu so? Not bevause the sex has anything to do with Poetry, but because in the sex theyre much fitter for prostitution" - Usually seen to reflect on women but GG says "they actually reflect on poetry|" R's epilogue to Circe - "Poets and women have an equal right / To hate the dull, who dead to all delight, Feel pain alone and have no joy but spite …. Since therefore the the women it appears / That all these enemies of wit are theirs / Our poet the dull herd no longer fears". Rochester brings forth Artemisa, virgin poet and wit. What Artemisa write s to Cloe is a horation epistle in a low style - she disparages herself, as horace does, by invoking an implicit standard of right feeling and common sense which she herself cannot claim to have. Rochester constantly got himself into trouble by showing off through his poetry - so does Artemisa gender is not the crucial factor, it's the immodesty "Poor creature who, unheard of, as a fly / In some dark hole must all the winter lie, / that for one month she tawdry may appear" - The scorn here is the fine ladys bit the pity comes from Rochester 51 - It's truer to atual circumstances of a woman of wit like Aphra Behn, who R knew.

English poetry of the 17th century, Parfitt 166 - "Obsessiveness n Rochester suggests two features above all else, obscenity and the reduction of the human to the animal" - although btoh are common in satire - he can write non - obscene satire (Ipon Nothing) - and so it is imoortant to see that this obscenity is purposeful. 

Especially about people he knows "On Mrs Willis" reduces her brutally to elementals "Bawdy in thoguhts, precise in words Ill natured though a whore, Her belly is a bag of turds And her cunt a common shore" 17-20

Subcerts common Petrarchan tradition of focussing on body parts. Fantasy of endless violatioln "This dart of love, whose piercing point oft tried, with virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed."

166 "satire is based on the conviction or pretence that society is degenerate and the satirist's mask necessarily, then includes a sense of disillusionment" "Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay" -- contrasts between pastoralism and reality "Frightened she wakes, and waking frigs. Nature thus kindly eased In dreams raised by her murmuring pigs, And hner own thumb between her legs Shes innocent and pleased" 36-40 Her fream is of rape, her masturbation is seen as a mixture of innocence and pleasure. "Not only are his Cloris and Corinna reduced to their secual parts, but so are the real women listed in 'Signor Dildo'" beneath the trappings of the pastoral lyrics, Chloris' thumb is active, while beneath the titles of such as Barbara Palmer the dildo operates.167 The Rochester world is dominated by a sexual itch which inflames even as it mollifies becoming a world of unsatisfiable desires reminiscent of the revengers tragedy. He questions then operation of reason in human behaviour but also defines it as dependent on the senses - "That reason which distinguishes by sense/ and gives us rules of goof and ill from thence" "your reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy, / Renewing appetites yours would destroy." 1665-1680 - coincides with much of the reign of Charles II. Pepys' diary reveals both a pride in the possibilities of mercantile efficiency and hedonism and an awareness of the ubiquity of corruption" "Though safety, law, religion, life lay on't Twould break through allto make its way to cunt"

Hogarth painted two versions of these scenes, one depicting the lovers indoors and one outdoors. The first was commissioned by John Thomson, who fled to France before the paintings were finished, after being charged with fraud and theft in the 1731 Charitable Corporation scandal. The man in the scene has been identified as Sir John Willes, Walpole Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and a notorious womanizer. Hogarth fills the prints with sexual innuendo, such as the framed cupid preparing to shoot his rocket before and smiling contentedly as the rocket returns to earth after. Although she hesitates, the woman is not completely virtuous. On her vanity is a book of erotic poems by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) and in the drawer is another volume labeled simply “novels.” After sex, the man dresses quickly while the woman entices him to stay. On the floor, a book is open to a quotation from Aristotle: “Omne Animal Post Coitum Triste” (Every animal is sad after intercourse). The diptych sold wel If one looks closely there are hints at what is to come: rosy apples tumble from the girl's apron, the young man's knee is suggestively placed - is that a bulge in his trousers that

catches the light? But it is superficially all rather polite and the physical realities of sex are discreetly hidden. After turns all this on its head. Here the protagonists' clothing is in disarray and their faces flushed. The expressions that Hogarth gives the pair are superbly telling: the girl seems anxious and seeks reassurance from her beau, who stares into the middle distance, his face a mask of post-coital bewilderment. Is there a moral here? Is the girl in After, with her apples spread over the floor, to be seen as a fallen woman, a new Eve? Are we, as viewers, supposed to lament this hasty, opportunistic coupling? Or are we simply meant to be amused? To enjoy a witty subversion of a popular genre? Or even just a slightly smutty belly laugh? There is no internal evidence in either painting to suggest that the couple's lovemaking will have any lasting consequence. Once they have got their breath back and rearranged their clothes, there is no reason to believe that either will suffer as a result of what has happened. But contemporary anxieties about the the vulnerability of young women were on Hogarth's mind in the early 1730s, when he was developing what he called the 'modern moral subject.' In 1732 he completed The Harlot's Progress a series of paintings, later to become hugely popular prints, in which an innocent country girl is utterly ruined by the predatory attentions of London men.

This narrative painting describes the moments before a seduction. A young man in red breeches attempts to pull a young woman onto a bed. Struggling, she tries to push him away, dragging her dressing table down with her. Ironically, an open drawer reveals a book on the rules of courtship. Below, a small dog barks, alarmed by the commotion. In the Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, published in 1785, John Nichols wrote that a "certain vicious nobleman," the Duke of Montague, supposedly commissioned this painting and its companion, After. According to an old tradition, the protagonist was said to have been Sir John Willes, later Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas.

With the harlot and the rake, Hogarth had selected two social archetypes, whose interwoven ‘professions’ and habitual environments were sleazy, perverse and thus fascinating to a wide social spectrum and, of course, rich with satirical possibilities. In creating his storylines, Hogarth not only made use of popular narrative formulas and identifiable locations within the city, but incorporated real-life characters and events that featured in London newspapers. Such references gave both topicality and an air of authenticity to Hogarth’s observations on the seedier side of London life.

uring the 1730s Hogarth produced three versions of an image showing a young couple before and after a sexual encounter. All three are displayed here. The first series, in an outdoor setting, represents a light-hearted lampoon of fashionable French contemporary art. The ‘before and after’ format took a cynical turn, however, in the subsequent two series. Set in a lady’s bedchamber, the woman is cast as a reluctant prey and the man as a heartless predator. Importantly the woman is as modestly dressed as Moll Hackabout at the beginning of A Harlot’s Progress and Sarah Young, Tom Rakewell’s abandoned lover in A Rake’s Progress. Indeed we can imagine this brutal seduction scenario taking place between Plate 1 and Plate 2 of A Harlot’s Progress, when Moll is transformed – by

implication, by Colonel Charteris, the infamous rake and convicted rapist – from a naïve country girl into a kept mistress. The moral message of Hogarth’s Before and After series is underlined by the book positioned at the man’s feet in the After print. This refers to Aristotle’s dictum ‘Omne Animal Post Coitum Triste’ (every animal is sad after sex). While people might satisfy their sexual itch, Hogarth suggests, such sensual fulfilment is ultimately no fulfilment at all. Unlike the first versions of Before and After , displayed nearby, these violent images appear to represent a rape. In Before, all pretence at elegant “persuasion” has gone, as the man roughly pulls the woman towards the bed. The scampering dog in the foreground represents awakened desire and the falling dressing table and broken mirror denote the woman’s lost virginity and subsequent ‘fall’. In After , the man stares blankly into the distance as he pulls up his breeches. The sleeping dog indicates that his sexual appetite has been satisfied. Dishevelled after her ordeal, the woman seems to be appealing to him, perhaps for his discretion. In After, the laughing cupid gestures at the same rocket, now spent. The books seen on the falling dressing table probably symbolize innocence or virtue being corrupted. One refers to the Earl of Rochester, a notorious seventeenth-century rake, wit and poet, whose work was renowned for its blunt references to sexual subjects, including seductions. Another, The Practice of Piety , was a highlyrespected Christian treatise, first published in 1601. The man in the scene has been identified as Sir John Willes, Walpole Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and a notorious womanizer. Hogarth fills the prints with sexual innuendo, such as the framed cupid preparing to shoot his rocket before and smiling contentedly as the rocket returns to earth after. Although she hesitates, the woman is not completely virtuous. On her vanity is a book of erotic poems by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) and in the drawer is another volume labeled simply “novels.” After sex, the man dresses quickly while the woman entices him to stay. On the floor, a book is open to a quotation from Aristotle: “Omne Animal Post Coitum Triste” (Every animal is sad after intercourse). The way Rochester was seen – Sex and politics become linked in Rochester's Satyre on Charles II. Again, a comparison with Waller's On St James's Park As Lately Improve...