I will confess I had not heard of Rochester until I got well into my University career. In retrospect, I find this rather surprising, as I am quite sure teaching Rochester in high school would do away with poetry's unfair reputation of being boring in one fell swoop. I am not sure whether his absence is due to embarrassment on the teachers' part or a fear of irate parents accusing them of corrupting their young.

Rochester himself is said to have been corrupted at Oxford (which he started at 12 and left at 14 with an MA and a number of new and exciting interests). He belongs to the box labelled Restoration literature, and I think I should probably get into some particulars on that score before I go on.

There is a tendency, I think, to see the 20th century as a steady breaking away from the repression of the past. It starts around the fin de siècle, one might imagine, and moves via the Edwardians through the 20s, and then storms towards the finish line of total freedom from the 60s onwards. And before that, in this narrative of steady progression, the Victorians were repressed, only to be outdone by the people before them, and the people before them until you get back to the Middle Ages, when everyone wore chastity belts and prayed all the time in order to completely suppress their sinful flesh.

The error will of course be immediately apparent to anyone who has read around a bit in Medieval literature (Chaucer's ``Miller's Tale'', while arguably tending towards Renaissance, cannot be construed as terribly pious, for example). But there is another period that makes even Chaucer look pale and unassertive: the Restoration.

The Restoration of what, you say?

Those of you who have read Dumas will remember (possibly with a somewhat skewed impression of the virtue of the king) that Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland got his head cut off in 1649 after a prolonged civil war.

The man who won the war was Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the puritan, parliamentarian forces, the New Model Army. He set about repressing the general decadence of public theatres (heaven forbid), getting rid of bishops and making sure nobody worked on Sundays.

Once the king was gone, however, the many, varied factions turned on each other. Cromwell held them in tolerable order, but once he died his rather less imposing son was left with no money to pay an impossibly large standing army and no real ability to control the country. And so the Scots solved it all (or rather, General Monk did) by taking a stroll down to London and helping the remains of the royalist faction call Charles Stuart back from exile. To make things simple they decided that he had been king all along.

This is the Restoration. But the term is usually used to cover the following couple of decades. It is a period of reaction to the puritan repression. One of Charles II's first acts was to open new theatres, and this time with women on the stage (to properly drive the matter home, I suppose), and the whole period (except the obvious undercurrent of now repressed puritan writing) is characterised by a licentiousness and vitality that seems to me (not an expert on the period, by any means; only fascinated by it) to be both a celebration of the return and a deliberate kick in the direction of the now vanquished former victors. I suppose it is a classic illustration of the pendulum effect in history.

One of the expressions of this tendency is the movement generally described as ``Libertinism''. It is characterised by a tendency towards freethinkery and an emphasis on corporeality as central to life, not something to be thrown away based on the dictates of religion. If you want to read Libertine poetry (apart from Rochester) Lovelace's Love Made in the First Age. To Chloris might entertain you.

Rochester's Satyr against Reason and Mankind (rather too long to quote here, but well worth the read) is of a rather different style, but together they give a fairly good idea of what Libertinism consists of: in one, a dream of a First Age where all love (in a very carnal sense) is free and (more importantly) free of guilt (and, apparently, women are like food), coupled with a sort of grim knowledge that this vision is unattainable, all with a sort of ironic self-reflection and archness directed at their own position; in the other, a rejection of the human attempt to set itself up as something above the animal, preferring the animal guilelessness to what it sees as hypocritic human virtue:



These lines ought to give some clue as to what makes Rochester something other than simply a vulgar man who hurls obscenities at people. He has perfect form, or as close as makes no difference. If he is obscene, you know he has taken time to carefully hone the obscenity, and as a result, prudish as I am, I cannot fault him for it. But I am getting ahead of myself (oh, dear).

Rochester's life is about as shocking as his writing.

His father was one of the close supporters of Charles in exile, and so his Cavalier credentials were in order. With the exception of occasional trips to Paris, he himself grew up with his mother at home, however: a woman with distinct puritan leanings, for what I understand. I suppose that is what kept him innocent until the age of 12. He became one of the central characters of the Restoration court, however, with the exceptions of the periods he spent in exile (from court, if not the country) or locked up in the Tower as punishment for some infraction or other. One of these exiles followed his (supposedly mistakenly) giving the following poem to the king:



Another absence, this time in the Tower, followed his having kidnapped Elizabeth Mallet (an heiress the king wanted him to marry) -- they later got married.

There are so many stories, I do not know whether to believe half of them. He allegedly spent some time masquerading as a fertility doctor (treating ``barren'' women -- supposedly with some success), had a multitude of lovers of both genders and spent five years continuously drunk. Unsurprisingly, he died young (of some sort of mix of syphilis, gonorrhoea and alcoholism). I am rather saddened by the stories that he found God and repented on his death bed, but I suppose there is comfort in the idea that he was probably quite mad at that point and did not know what he was doing.

Anyway. One final poem. I always make sure I teach this to my students, and it is not all about making them blush:



Read it properly (by which I mean, don't just glance over it and giggle because it says "cunt" and is about premature ejaculation, although I will admit both points are essential to the poem).

I like the mock heroic in this poem, with its talk of "Love's lesser lightening", not to mention the "Swift orders that I should prepare to throw / The all-dissolving thunderbolt below". It is the ultimate indication of the Libertine mockery of its own Grand Vision. The inherent failure of the project can hardly be put it more explicit terms: pleasure as it should be is denied, cannot be achieved, despite the grand words on its splendidness.

That is not the be all, end all (why keep Macbeth out of it?) of the poem of course: it is also about that "duty to pleasure", which is the Libertine mantra. The speaker cursing himself (or part of himself, anyway) to the horrors of various types of venereal disease and other horrors of the age* for failing to provide said pleasure (this is actually quite interesting from a feminist perspective as well: quite often these types of poets (yes, Lovelace, I am looking at you) do not really pay much attention to the women except as something to be enjoyed -- on par with a type of delicious foodstuff, say; but Rochester, in this poem at any rate, shows an awareness of the idea of female sexuality which is quite refreshing). Although, well, one cannot help feel that ten thousand pricks might be overdoing it a bit.

There is some interesting stuff about Love in there as well -- as the saboteur of the moment, in fact. I am not quite sure what to make of that. It is a distinct virtue, I suppose (tied to honour and the fight for king and country), and so I cannot see how one could argue that Libertinism rejects the idea of Love, or reduces it to Lust alone -- certainly not here: the tenor is all wrong. But Love is most definitely to blame for the failure; although it might be the cause of the laudable attention to the debt of pleasure as well.

But what I really want you to do is read this out loud. Possibly not around your grandmothers (if they know English), but skimming through it (I firmly believe, no pun &c.) will take away from you the glory that is Rochester's alliterations: they are "equally inspired with eager fire", with arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace". I already mentioned "Love's lesser lightening", but not, I think, the "balmy brinks of bliss". You get the idea. It carries you off and has its wicked way with you.

As for "cunt" and "fuck" and "prick", which I know will have caught your attention (this is why I want it taught in high school -- they will learn poems by heart just to have the excuse to say these words and claim the alibi of Literature; and hopefully, in so doing, the meter and the rhyme and the lovely alliteration will creep in the back way to their subconscious and affect their attitude to other poets later on -- it is my evil plan. It is probably also one of the main reasons why it is not currently taught in high school), I hope you notice how they are not derogatory here. Rochester's use of them draws on Anglo-Saxon, rustic words that came to be rude words; but he does not employ them as such. I will not pretend there is no (probable) intention to shock, but they are more a rejection of euphemism than anything else. And somehow my inner prude does not object.

Finally (because I have to end at some point), I do not want you to carry off the idea that this is a product of a biographical moment. Well, I mean, he drank a lot, and we will probably never know; but this is a poem in a long, long tradition of other poems. The earliest example I have come across is from Ovid's Amores (3.7, to be exact), but there is also another (actually at one point attributed to Rochester) by Aphra Behn, called "The Disappointment", and there are others as well.

To cap this all off, leaving you to discover the rest of Rochester on your own, I want to make one final observation. It concerns the picture right at the top of this article. In fact, let me provide you with a larger one:
I know nothing of the circumstances of the painting. I don't often admit to being ignorant, but there it is. But if literature is removed from intention as it is written, surely the same is true of painting. I therefore venture the following reading: the laurel wreath, which Rochester is holding over the head of his monkey, is associate with the idea of the poet laureate. Now, the first one of these was Petrarch (during the Italian Renaissance), but Charles II made John Dryden the first official English poet laureate.

Now to the point: I cannot decide whether to read the painting as a kick towards Dryden (my monkey can do what you do) or as something along the lines of Baudelaire's Perte d'Aureole (way, way before it's time -- can you have a reaction to the Romantics before the Romantics show up? -- well, if anyone can do it, it is Rochester, I think). But I'm a greater fan of the Dryden theory.

*Those among you who have read Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver will have a very vivid image of the horrors of the stone.