Tuesday, March 13, 2007
The Libertine
On the Women about Town
Too long the wise Commons have been in debate
About money and conscience, those trifles of state,
Whilst dangerous grievances daily increase,
And the subject can’t riot in safety and peace;
Unless, as against Irish cattle before,
You now make an act to forbid Irish whore.
The coots black and white, Clanbrassill and Fox,
Invade us with impudence, beauty, and pox.
They carry a fate which no man can oppose:
The loss of his heart and the fall of his nose.
Should he dully resist, yet would each take upon her
To beseech him to do’t, and engage him in honor.
O ye merciful powers who of mortals take care,
Make the women more modest, more sound, or less fair!
Is it just that with death cruel love should conspire,
And our tarses be burnt by our hearts taking fire?
There’s an end of communion if humble believers
Must be damned in the cup like unworthy receivers.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
This poem manages to mock parliament, blaspheme, libel the wives of two prominent aristocrats and suggest that the ruling class are diseased with syphilis – which makes the kind of stuff you see nowadays in Poetry Review seem pretty tepid. It makes a heartfelt appeal for women to stop sleeping around, be free of disease or be uglier. Only this can save the ‘tarses’ (penises) of weak, vulnerable men.
It’s a very fine poem indeed. The first two lines drip with sarcasm. Cleverly, Wilmot applies the concerns of parliament to those of a libertine. When he wrote the poem (apparently in mid-March 1673) parliament had recently passed The Test Act, which excluded from civil and military office all those who did not take communion in the Anglican Church. The final two lines of the poem scandalously conflate communion and sexual intercourse. They also mock the belief that taking the Eucharist while guilty of sin brings damnation, recasting it in a scurrilous secular form. Sex with a diseased woman also results in damnation – burning pains in your penis and the crumbling of your nose.
The poem also alludes to earlier parliamentary legislation banning the import of Irish cattle into England. What is needed, perhaps, the poem suggests, is new legislation which also bans Irish whores from England. Wilmot proceeds to name two of them: ‘The coots black and white, Clanbrassill and Fox’. In other words, a brunette and blonde - Alice, wife of the second Earl of Clanbrassill and Elizabeth Fox, wife of the third baron Cornwallis.
Poems like this circulated in manuscript among members of the ruling class. Wilmot could get away with his satire because he was an Earl. It was not intended to be read by the lower orders.
The title was probably not by Wilmot. The text is taken from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Edited with an Introduction by David M. Vieth (1968).
There is no agreed canon of Rochester’s work, none of which was published in his lifetime. There is no standard edition of his poems and no reliable biography. The failings of the new Oxford edition of Rochester’s verse were dissected at some length, very persuasively, by Germaine Greer, in the London Review of Books, 16 September 1999.
It would be unwise to read this poem as autobiography. Rochester’s impulse is satirical and broad and the materials of the poem are not necessarily confessional or truthful. Its energies bubble out of a sense of comic incongruity: if you lose your heart you may also lose your nose. The moral decay of the nation reproduces itself in diseases of the flesh. However, the point of view of the poem isn’t angry but dryly amused. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. It pleads a case but it knows that the condition it registers and the solution it seeks are voiced with a scandalous, indifferent, breezy cynicism.
Too long the wise Commons have been in debate
About money and conscience, those trifles of state,
Whilst dangerous grievances daily increase,
And the subject can’t riot in safety and peace;
Unless, as against Irish cattle before,
You now make an act to forbid Irish whore.
The coots black and white, Clanbrassill and Fox,
Invade us with impudence, beauty, and pox.
They carry a fate which no man can oppose:
The loss of his heart and the fall of his nose.
Should he dully resist, yet would each take upon her
To beseech him to do’t, and engage him in honor.
O ye merciful powers who of mortals take care,
Make the women more modest, more sound, or less fair!
Is it just that with death cruel love should conspire,
And our tarses be burnt by our hearts taking fire?
There’s an end of communion if humble believers
Must be damned in the cup like unworthy receivers.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
This poem manages to mock parliament, blaspheme, libel the wives of two prominent aristocrats and suggest that the ruling class are diseased with syphilis – which makes the kind of stuff you see nowadays in Poetry Review seem pretty tepid. It makes a heartfelt appeal for women to stop sleeping around, be free of disease or be uglier. Only this can save the ‘tarses’ (penises) of weak, vulnerable men.
It’s a very fine poem indeed. The first two lines drip with sarcasm. Cleverly, Wilmot applies the concerns of parliament to those of a libertine. When he wrote the poem (apparently in mid-March 1673) parliament had recently passed The Test Act, which excluded from civil and military office all those who did not take communion in the Anglican Church. The final two lines of the poem scandalously conflate communion and sexual intercourse. They also mock the belief that taking the Eucharist while guilty of sin brings damnation, recasting it in a scurrilous secular form. Sex with a diseased woman also results in damnation – burning pains in your penis and the crumbling of your nose.
The poem also alludes to earlier parliamentary legislation banning the import of Irish cattle into England. What is needed, perhaps, the poem suggests, is new legislation which also bans Irish whores from England. Wilmot proceeds to name two of them: ‘The coots black and white, Clanbrassill and Fox’. In other words, a brunette and blonde - Alice, wife of the second Earl of Clanbrassill and Elizabeth Fox, wife of the third baron Cornwallis.
Poems like this circulated in manuscript among members of the ruling class. Wilmot could get away with his satire because he was an Earl. It was not intended to be read by the lower orders.
The title was probably not by Wilmot. The text is taken from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Edited with an Introduction by David M. Vieth (1968).
There is no agreed canon of Rochester’s work, none of which was published in his lifetime. There is no standard edition of his poems and no reliable biography. The failings of the new Oxford edition of Rochester’s verse were dissected at some length, very persuasively, by Germaine Greer, in the London Review of Books, 16 September 1999.
It would be unwise to read this poem as autobiography. Rochester’s impulse is satirical and broad and the materials of the poem are not necessarily confessional or truthful. Its energies bubble out of a sense of comic incongruity: if you lose your heart you may also lose your nose. The moral decay of the nation reproduces itself in diseases of the flesh. However, the point of view of the poem isn’t angry but dryly amused. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. It pleads a case but it knows that the condition it registers and the solution it seeks are voiced with a scandalous, indifferent, breezy cynicism.
# posted by Ellis : 8:44 AM
