POETS Day! John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

I started POETS Day with the Idea that there’s a roguishness to poets that pairs well with the modern end of workweek encouragement to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I see them as day seizers.

They aren’t all outwardly roguish. It’s hard to imagine T.S. Eliot or Christina Rossetti so much as swiping a cookie, but I’m sure they had a mischievous side. Even poet by night and brisk morning walk to work/insurance agency vice president by day, Wallace Stevens, got rambunctious enough for Hemingway to punch, and he lived in Connecticut. They all have shades of misbehavior in them.

I think of them as blends, taking on, to degrees of little or lots depending on the poet, traits of three archetypes.

The first is the Wastrel Gifted by the Muse. Dylan Thomas comes to mind; stuck on a big thought beyond his ability to resolve, always broke and drifting, prone to whisky-driven comic highlights like eating a vase of daisies with Roy Campbell but otherwise pathetically drunk. All his thieving sins are forgiven when you hear the song.

Next is the Byronic Hero, surprisingly not represented in my mind by Byron – too obvious. This is a man of action blessed with shrewdness. He’s the Odysseus of whatever conflict he finds himself in. This is Kit Marlowe, serving the Queen on clandestine missions between play openings and getting stabbed in the eye by nefarious forces. Only cool guys named Christopher get to be called Kit.

Finally, we have the Rake. This is where Byron fits in. He’s the boy who never grew up, who’s id is driving. He’s an earnest lover but a poor timekeeper. Those poems pledging adoration are heartfelt, but momentarily so. There are so many sonnets to her and then her and then another dozen hers that he invariably ends up confusing modern graduate students because at least four of them are named Jane. They die young, probably from exhaustion. Too much introspection and the Rake becomes Anne Sexton.

These are the three extremes, at least as they exist in my menagerie. Poets are created with a modicum, a pinch, and a healthy dose from A, B, and C as necessary. I don’t know what to think about this week’s poet. It seems like he’s the result of an overzealous chemist or a lab accident.

As a Wastrel, John Wilmot, 2^nd Earl Rochester, famously stayed drunk for five years. He made claim to Hero in two naval engagements, once commandeering a rowboat to weave without cover between warring ships, delivering communications as other means had broken down. As a Rake, well… If presented with a list of female servants, courtiers, and Ladies of the court of Charles II, I’d say “probably.”

Here he is by way of introduction.

Rochester Extempore

And after singing psalme the 12th
He layd his booke uppon the shelfe,
And lookd much simply like himselfe;
With eyes turn’d up as white as ghost
He cryd ah lard, ah lard of Hosts!
I am a rascall, that thou know’st.

Actually as a Rake, he did things that, like the ending of Revenge of the Nerds, may slip by as boyishly funny but are in fact criminal. In 1676 he set up shop on Tower Street in London under the name Dr. Alexander Bendo, a physician specializing in curing infertility. You can imagine his treatments. He went so far as to put out a brochure. I can’t find a copy online, but Peter Campion excerpts this bit in his article “Rochester’s honesty” (The New Criterion, April 2005.)

“I have … the knowledge of a great secret to cure barrenness … which I have made use of for many years with great success, especially this last year wherein I have cured one woman that had been married twenty years, and another that had been married one and twenty years, and two women that had been three times married, as I can make appear by the testimony of several person in London, Westminister, and other places thereabout.“

He’d “box about the ears” one of the King’s friends, get banished from court and later get invited back. He once drunkenly shouted “What … doest thou stand here to fuck time?” and then destroyed the gnomen of the King’s favorite sundial. He was banished from court and later invited back. He had a thing for Elizabeth Malet, though her parents disapproved. He met her coach with a small contingent of armed men and made off with her. The King tossed him in the Tower for that, but let him go three weeks later.

He invented an alter ego and entertained merchants at parties with true tales about the scandals at court. Banished, invited back. He and some friends rented an entire inn and pretended to be innkeepers for a while to see how many commoners a courtly gent could carouse with. Provoked duels, satirized the King as a sex fiend in verse, banished and invited back. In fact, the King kept giving him titles and allowances. How?

He was an affront. Alter egos aside, his sins were there for all to see. He was that way in his poetry as well. Here he is at his most subtle, which is to say he takes the trouble to allude to sex rather than coming right out with all the words that women say they hate. It’s brilliant.

Letter from Mistress Price to Lord Chesterfield

My Lord These are the Gloves that I did mention
Last night, and t’was with the intention
That you should give mee thanks and wear them
For I most willingly can spare them.
When you this Packet first doe see
Dam mee, crie you shee has writ to mee
I had better be at Bretby still
Than troubled with love against my will.
Besides this is not all my sorrow
Shee writ to day, shee’l come to morrow.
Then you consider the adventure
And think you never shall content her,
But when you doe the inside see
You’l find things are but as they should be
And that tis neither love nor passion
But only for your recreation.

He got away with all his courtly mischief because of his father. In 1651 the Royalists got stomped by Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester. The man who would become Charles II was on the run, hiding in oak trees, moving from estate to estate, and even posing as a common laborer (though he probably spelled it “labourer” to complete the disguise.) Running interference and acting as the future king’s bodyguard from Worcester to the Welsh border to France was Henry Wilmot, made 1^st Earl of Rochester for his service.

His father saved the King, but it looks like John Wilmot eventually killed him.

The roguish 2^nd Earl also acted as the King’s de facto pimp about court. I’m sure that bought him a few indulgences.

Here’s an excerpt one of the poems with those words that women say they hate.

from A Ramble in Saint James’s Parke

Much wine had past with grave discourse
Of who Fucks who and who does worse,
Such as you usually doe hear
From those that diet at the Beare,
When I who still take care to see
Drunkenness Reliev’d by Leachery
Went out into Saint James’s Park
To coole my head and fire my heart.
But tho’ St James has the Honor on’t
T’is Consecrate to Prick and Cunt.
There by a most incestuous Birth
Strange woods spring from the Teeming Earth
For they Relate how heretofore,
When auncient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his Assignation,
Jylting it seems was then in fashion,
Poor pensive Lover in this place
Wou’d frigg upon his Mothers face;
Whence Rowes of Mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd Topps Fuckt the very Skies.
Each imitative branch does twine
In some lov’d fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are Buggeries, Rapes, and Incests made:
Unto this all-sin-sheltring Grove
Whores of the Bulk, and the Alcove,
Great Ladies, Chamber Mayds, and Drudges,
The Ragg picker, and Heiress Trudges
Carrmen, Divines, Great Lords, and Taylors,
Prentices, Poets, Pimps, and Gaolers,
Footmen, Fine Fopps, doe here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.

Reading his poems and knowing that he sat in favor of the King makes me feel as though I’m conspiring in a minor but welcome abandonment of social responsibility. It’s like being at a black-tie wedding and sneaking off with a few groomsmen who found the game on in the janitor’s breakroom. Wilmot was not a trustworthy person, but there’s honesty when he speaks of Great Lords and Taylors gathering with clergy to indulge themselves. He knows that side of us and more to our requirements, he knows how to put it forth believably.

He ran off with the girl he kidnapped again. This time he and Elizabeth Malet eloped and lived tolerably briefly after. Together they had four children, three of whom survived them. John died of syphilis in 1680 at the age of thirty-three. Elizabeth followed him thirteen months later, stricken by the same.

He got his longtime mistress too. Nell Gwyn is said to have died of apoplexy brought on by syphilis. It’s because of her that I get to write, oracle like, of the king, “but it looks like John Wilmot eventually killed him.”

After her time with John, Nell would take up with His Majesty and become one of his seven known mistresses. Charles II is said to have died from apoplexy too. He’s a king, so rather than icky sex infections we’re told his apoplexy was likely due to mercury poisoning but what’s deadly to the apoplectic goose is deadly to the apoplectic gander as mercury was the treatment of choice among British movers and shakers with syphilis from the 14^th to 19^th centuries. All the chic syphilitics were taking it.

The king’s infection could have come from another source, but as far as I can tell, the other seven royal mistresses made it to an older age or died from non-carnal causes. So, while it wasn’t Brutus et al. on the Senate floor, it looks like John Wilmot’s oft written of prick may have been the thing that snuffed the consciousness of the king.

Of Marriage

Out of Stark Love, and arrant Devotion, downright,
Of Marriage I’ll give thee this gallopping Notion.
’Tis the bane of all bus’ness, the end of all pleasure,
The consumption of Wit, Youth, Virtue, and Treasure,
’Tis the Rack of our thoughts, Night-mare of our sleep,
That calls us to work before the day peep,
Commands us make Brick without Stubble or Straw,
A C — has no sence of Conscience or Law.
If you needs must have flesh, take the way that is noble;
In a gen’rous Wench there’s nothing of trouble
You come on, you come off, say, do what you please,
The worst you can fear is but a disease;
And Diseases, you know, will admit of a cure;
But the Hell-fire of Marriage the Damn’d do endure.

My father brought up Wilmot in an email earlier this week. That’s what got me reading him. He was watching an episode of Morse and Wilmot figured into the mystery. Dad called him “A debauched reprobate who converted on death bed.” That conversion is interesting in itself. There are doubts, claims, and counter claims. Andrew Marvell called Rochester “the best English satirist.” I mention the conversion and satire because there is more to the poet than sex, sex, and sex but when you sit and read his work in sequence, you get overwhelmed. It’s like dipping your toe in depravity with a guide who knows the waters and can be kept safely at arm’s length. It’s compelling, well written stuff.

To show he had more than lust in him, I’ll leave you with his most lauded poem, a brilliant satire in the style of Juvenal. His critics have found a new weapon to bring to bear, claiming that he likely plagiarized a good bit of it from Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, but plagiarism is all the rage now, so put that aside and enjoy.

from A Satyre Against Reason and Mankind;
or, A Satyr Against Mankind
John Wilmot, 2^nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)

Perhaps my Muse were fitter for this part,
For, I profess, I can be very smart
On witt, which I abhor with all my heart.
I long to lash it in some sharp essay,
But your grand indiscretion bids me stay,
And turn my tide of Ink another way.
What rage foments in your degenerate mind,
To make you rail at Reason and Mankind?
Blest glorious Man! to whom alone kind Heaven
An Everlasting Soul hath freely given:
Whom his great Maker took such care to make,
That from himself he did the Image take:
And this fair frame in shining reason drest,
To dignify his Nature above Beast.