Selected Works by Earl of Rochester

Author:Earl of Rochester [Wilmot, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141915838
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

The title is ironical. What the lady advocates is not platonic love, ‘free from sensual desire’(OED), but coitus reservatus (Sanskrit karezza), in which ‘by a technique of deliberate control [i.e. ‘the art of love’ (1. 6)] … orgasm is avoided and copulation thereby prolonged’ (OED, s.v. coitus).

7 enjoyment: ejaculation, which ‘Converts the owner to a drone’ (1. 12).

11–12 sting … gone … drone: cf. ‘If once he lose his sting, he grows a Drone’

(Cowley, Against Fruition (1668), 32).

17what: penis.

23–4Let’s practise then and we shall prove | These are the only sweets of love: Possibly a parody of Marlowe’s ‘Come live with mee and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove’ (The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), sig. D5) (Rochester 1953, 228).

Song (As Cloris full of harmless thought)

23 the lucky minute: cf. ‘Twelve is my appointed lucky Minute, when all the Blessings that my Soul could wish Shall be resign’d to me’ (Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance (1686?; 1687), 58); ‘Lovers that … in the lucky Minute want the Pow’r’ (Samuel Garth, The Dispensary (1699), POAS, Yale, VI 735). Treglown isolates a lucky Minute/happy Time/Shepherd’s Hour sub-genre of seventeenth-century erotic lyric and cites examples including Sir Carr Scrope’s song in The Man of Mode (1676) (cf. headnote above), John Glanvill’s The Shepherd’s Hour (1686), and Dryden’s song in Amphitryon (1690), IV i: A Pastoral Dialogue betwixt Thyrsis and Iris (Treglown 1982, 86–7). ‘The Lucky Minute’ also became a popular tune title (Simpson 1966, 106).

Song to Cloris (Fair Cloris in a pigsty lay)

8 ivory pails: the rarity and expensiveness of ivory (£167 per hundredweight in 1905) makes these ivory swill buckets a refinement of mock-epic proportions, like the ivory gate through which Cloris’s false dream reaches her (Odyssey, XIX 562; Aeneid, VI 895).

15 Flora’s cave: the cave in which the Greek nymph Chloris is raped by Zephyrus, the west wind, and from which she emerges as Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and spring (Ovid, Fasti, V 195). The cave is Ovid’s and the hymeneal gate may be Shakespeare’s (The Winter’s Tale (1609–10; 1623), I ii 196–8), but the phallic pig appears to be Rochester’s.

31 piercèd: one reader wishes that this dream of rape had been a real rape ‘perhaps’ (Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate (1972), 62); zone: literally ‘any encircling band’ (OED, citing Francis Quarles, Emblemes (1635), 274: ‘untie / The sacred Zone of thy Virginity’), cf. Aphrodite’s zone which creates ‘the lucky minute’ (21.223) for anyone wearing it (Iliad, XIV 214-16, trans. Richmond Lattimore, ‘the elaborate, pattern-pieced / zone … [the] passion of sex is there’); figuratively that part of the body around which a girdle is fastened; cf. pelvic girdle.

39 legs: the moral disorder is reflected in a rhyming disorder, ‘frigs … pigs … legs’, that is unique in the poem.

40 innocent and pleased: virgo intacta and sexually satisfied.

To Corinna (What cruel pains Corinna takes)

7 the silly art: coyness, ‘Affected rules of honour’ (I. 12).

9 tyrant: virtue.

13 she: Corinna.

Song (Phillis, be gentler, I advise)

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