THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Charles’s court was characterized by what Clarendon calls ‘gravity and reverence in all mention of religion’, the
second Charles’s was, despite its cloak of Anglican conformity, far more inclined to accept and enjoy sexual,
religious, and verbal licence. The restored King, who had been schooled in a certain kind of elegant cynicism by his
years in exile, set the tone of a cultured but libidinous court. The marked change of mood was evident not simply in
the contrast between the personalities of two kings or between two types of court poetry but also in the reaction of
certain influential patrons and writers against two older fashions: the dense, intellectual quirkiness of the school of
Donne and the humourless, moral seriousness of Puritan writing and Puritan mores. The new ethos was one where
sexual innuendo flourished. It was also one which stimulated and fostered the stricter disciplines of poetic satire, a
satire which fed on the contradictions, the ironies, and the hypocrisies of society. Most of the verse written by Marvell
after the Restoration, the verse that was most admired by his later contemporaries, was of a political or satirical
character. ‘Sharpness of wit’, spiced with a degree of profanity or ribaldry, was as much to Charles II’s taste as were
cultivated indolence, ministerially abetted chicanery, and the distractions of his mistresses. One of his most prominent
courtiers, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), is famously said to have reacted to the King’s announcement
that he would tolerate a relaxed frankness amongst his intimates with the impromptu quatrain: ‘We have a pritty witty
king | Whose word no man relys on: | He never said a foolish thing, | And never did a wise one.’ Unabashed, the King
replied that though his words were his own it was his ministers who were responsible for his actions.
Rochester is the most subtle, brilliant, and scurrilous of the Restoration heirs to the poetry of Lovelace, Suckling,
and Carew. In his work, and in that of less vitally intelligent poets such as Sir Charles Sedley (?1639-1701) and
Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1638-1706), Cavalier gallantry is rearticulated through the exercise of an indulgent
world-weariness. As both his letters to his wife and the poems reveal, Rochester was capable of adjusting and
interfusing the seeming anomalies of tenderness and cynicism, domesticity and debauchery, quick wit and meditative
seriousness in his nature. Some of his periods of provincial exile from court were occasioned by his having
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overstepped the limits of royal tolerance (as when he satirically assaulted the King with such couplets as ‘Nor are his
high desires above his strength: | His sceptre and his prick are of a length’ and ‘Restless he rolls about from Whore to
Whore, | A Merry Monarch scandalous and poor’); others were elective interludes of recuperation, study, and
meditation. ‘He loved to talk and write of speculative matters’, wrote Bishop Burnet, the man who brought him to a
death-bed reconciliation with Christianity, but as much of his poetry suggests, Rochester also delighted in the
pleasures that dulled and unperplexed thought. In ‘Upon Drinking in a Bowl’ he proclaims Cupid and Bacchus his
patron saints, washes his cares with wine, and turns to Love again. The songs ‘An Age in her Embraces past’,
‘Absent from thee I languish still’, and ‘All my past Life is mine no more’ hedonistically announce that soul is sense
and attempt to hold on to what ‘the present Moment’ offers. A more distinctly speculative, but no less wittily
sceptical, poet emerges in his address to the ‘Great Negative’, ‘Upon Nothing’. It is a poem which plays with the
theological concept of a Nothing from which Something emerges, but it is also haunted by a sense of futility and
universal human hypocrisy and it finally sees Nothing as an unholy trinity of ‘the great Man’s Gratitude to his best
Friend, | King’s Promises Whores Vows’. Rochester’s finest exercise in the satirical mode, ‘A Satyr against Mankind’
(1675), returns to the idea of the basic falseness of all human pretension to honesty, virtue, wisdom, and valour, but it
opens with a devastating undercutting of the great panjandrum of the age, human reason:
Reason, an Ignis fatuus of the Mind,
Which leaves the Light of Nature, Sense, behind.
Pathless, and dangerous, wand’ring ways it takes,
Through Errour’s fenny Bogs, and thorny Brakes ...
The deluded victim of this presumption to rationality first stumbles into doubts, is temporarily buoyed up by
philosophy, and then finally and painfully recognizes the terrible error into which he has fallen:
Then old Age, and Experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to Death, and make him understand,
After a Search so painful, and so long,
That all his Life he has been in the wrong.
The poem presents human life as a jungle in which creatures prey on one another and in which fear is the dominant
stimulus to action (‘Meerly for safety, after Fame they thirst; | For all Men would be Cowards if they durst’).
Unsurprisingly, Rochester seems to have felt a special affinity with his pet monkey. His portrait, now in the National
Portrait Gallery in London, shows him crowning this monkey with a poet’s laurels. In response, the monkey offers its