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| John Wilmot |
John Wilmot was an English poet and a wit of King Charles II's court. Andrew Marvell described him as "the best English satirist" and he is generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the Restoration wits. He married an heiress, Elizabeth Malet, and his mistresses included the actress Elizabeth Barry. His poetry, much of it censored during the Victorian era, began a revival from the 1920s onwards, with notable champions including Graham Greene. : Being Poet
“The Maidenhead”
Have you not in a
chimney seen
A sullen faggot wet and green,
How coyly it receives the heat,
And at both ends does fume and sweat?
So fares it with the
harmless maid
When first upon her back she’s laid;
But the well-experienced dame,
Cracks and rejoices in the flame.
Rochester
is a favourite of A-level students because he writes about sex and uses rude
words. That in itself would not make him an accomplished poet. Sex is not an
obscure subject and there are lots of words which rhyme with ‘prick’. But there
are good reasons to read Rochester. One is that he had a knack for creating
effects which we have come to associate with literary authenticity and
originality.
The
invention of what we recognise today as a modern poetic voice is impossible to
pin down. Ask a hundred literary historians who invented modern literature and
you’ll get a hundred answers ranging from Homer to whoever wins this year’s
Booker prize. One of the qualities that keeps bringing us back to the same
works is that they let each age find what they’re looking for in them. But even
if it would be pointless to call Rochester the first modern voice in English
poetry, he’s a practitioner of what has become an important artistic technique
– claiming authenticity by being deliberately shocking.
‘The
Maidenhead’ begins unremarkably (setting aside the title, which may not always
have circulated with the poem when it was new). In fact it starts like the type
of poetry popular at the start of the seventeenth century (fifty years before
Rochester was born). The first stanza is reminiscent of the metaphysical poetry
of writers like John Donne. Some sort of conceit is being introduced. A
familiar object is described – a damp bundle of wood in a fire which steams as
it dries in the flames. This is introduced through a question which draws
attention to certain aspects of it. The faggot is described as ‘wet and green’,
as coy and sweating.
Metaphysical
poetry delights in verbal gymnastics. Conceptual summersaults yoke together
apparently disparate things. The display of dexterity is itself entertaining
and familiar experiences are made less familiar. Used to this kind of poetry,
we can see that Rochester is setting us up for some sort of punch-line. The
carefully chosen qualities the first stanza focused on are going to be applied
to something completely different.
But,
although we’re ready for it, Rochester still manages to surprise us. He does so
through his usual technique of adopting a pose of shocking frankness. Many
metaphysical poems are about the same things as Rochester’s poems (Donne’s
‘Love’s Progress’ deals with oral sex). But Rochester is original in being so
explicit. Part of the point of Donne’s poem is that you have to work out what
it’s about. There’s no need for that with Rochester. In ‘The Maidenhead’,
obscene content outruns the reader’s imagination as Rochester springs the
answer to his riddle on us before we could even begin to work it out.
Rochester
does this time and time again. His poems make it perfectly clear exactly what
he’s talking about and he’s always more than happy to call a dildo a dildo. In
every case the explicitness of Rochester’s poems creates a sense that he is
talking honestly to us. Their conspicuous refusal to use euphemism, or to avoid
subject matter generally recognised as obscene, implies an unwillingness to
abide by convention or to repress instinct.
Since
Rochester’s day transgression, shock, and authenticity have become an important
measure of what we expect from new works of art. Most people who think of
themselves as serious about culture would say that they expect to be challenged,
to hear truth spoken, to see something which breaks convention when they go to
the theatre or pick up a new novel or visit Tate Modern. Some artists might
ignore some of those expectations, but few can get away with dismissing them
all (you can’t discuss Quentin Tarantino in terms of authenticity, but he
certainly sets out to shock).
Is
this still a grown-up way to approach artistic creation after four hundred
years? Better ask the A-level class.
(Austen Saunders for spectator.co.uk)
