Disproportion: A study in the Work of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Abstract

“Give me to Day, and take thou to Morrow,” writes the biographer David Lloyd, “is both the Courtier and the Christian's Language.” And so in a sense John Wilmot never changed his tune. The need for present, sensuous apprehension shapes the lyrics into cynical admonition “Phillis, be gentler, I advise; Make up for time mis-spent, When Beauty on its Death-bed lies, 'Tis high time to repent.”—and emerges, strangely altered, in the troubled accents of the penitent: “Bid them make haste, for ye night cometh, when no man can work.” The change is important, but it is a change in direction rather than in the texture of emotion. Rochester was all his life, as Hugo shrewdly perceived, “tantôt Ezéchiel et tantôt Scaramouche,” and the elements of prophet and jester were not mutually exclusive. Early cynicism-the self-conscious flouting of emotion by reason—is as much a testimony of Rochester's intellectual and spiritual torments as his dramatic conversion. The knowledge which comes, at the end, in conventional religious terminology—“sin is like the Angeles Book in the Revelations; it is sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly”—runs like spilt acid, across the worldliness of the courtier.