Empty Sex in an Empty World

I’m have just finished teaching Lord Rochester and, as always, it has been an adventure.   I sometimes think I get more embarrassed than the students by his explicit sexual language.   My women students (they’re all women in this class) are more tolerant of his diatribes against their gender than I am.  Note Allie’s response to his poem “Against Constancy” (I quote first the poem and then her response).  “Against Constancy” is an argument against demands that he be faithful in love:

Tell me no more of constancy,

The frivolous pretense

Of old age, narrow jealousy,

Disease, and want of sense.

Let duller fools on whom kind chance

Some easy heart has thrown,

Despairing higher to advance,

Be kind to one alone.

Old men and weak, whose idle flame,

Their own defects discovers,

Since changing can but spread their shame,

Ought to be constant lovers,

But we, whose hearts do justly swell

With no vainglorious pride,

Who know how we in love excel,

Long to be often tried.

Then bring my bath and strew my bed,

As each kind night returns:

I’ll change a mistress till I’m dead,

And fate change me for worms.

Here’s what Allie writes:

“Against Constancy” mocks the idea of fidelity, while providing a platform for Rochester to boast of his own promiscuity and sexual prowess.  He attacks the monogamous as “weak” “fools,” while promoting his lifestyle as more enlightened and glamorous.  Throughout the poem, however, his reasoning appears to stem from fear.  He is afraid to be seen as vulnerable; hence his affected braggadocio. Rochester refers to fidelity as a “frivolous pretense,” assuming from the start that men and women are incapable of true monogamy. He fears entering into a monogamous relationship due to his conviction that his partner would not remain faithful to him.  Rochester’s critique of fidelity is not so much an offensive attack as a defensive maneuver. He attempts to shield himself from the pain of becoming the victim of his partner’s inconstancy, if he were to so invest himself in a relationship.”

We used Allie’s comments to talk about how people have to be interpreted as poems need to be interpreted: what they seem to say is not everything they mean.  So the class (“Couples Comedy in the British Restoration and 18th Century”) has become a study in reading the contortions that men and women go through as they negotiate relationships.

The kicker for me in “Against Constancy” is the final line.  In one way, it is an echo of the creepiest image in another famous carpe diem poem: “Then worms shall try/That long preserved virginity.”  This is the argument by the speaker in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” on why she should have sex with him now: “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace.”  

In both poems, the urbane wit hides an underlying desperation.  Here it’s as though Rochester is acknowledging that he engages in sex to hold off death and that ultimately his efforts will be futile.  His seemingly casual reference to his inevitable fate may be another instance of braggadocio.  With manly stoicism, he claims to accept the situation: if there’s nothing but material reality and carnal sensation, then stop worrying but enjoy life while you can.

But that reality calls into question the act of sex itself.  What’s the point?

Rochester lived in a cynical age that cared more about image than it did about substance.  I think his response to his time provides a warning for us today. If life is nothing more than material sensation, if we sacrifice the future for our current needs and desires, if we vote in only politicians who demand no sacrifices of us (no new taxes, the environment sacrificed for present day convenience, borrowing from our children to pay for our own high standard of living), then we will become prone to Rochester’s despair.

 This poet’s empty sex, in other words, is of a piece with his empty vision of the world.  Rochester was a sensitive man who felt the emptiness, experienced its inadequacy, sought relief in material pleasure, and railed eloquently against it.  Maybe he engaged in decadent living to drown out his despair.  But because he did not believe in anything higher, he could not offer an alternative.  He was a symptom, not a solution.  We can learn from him as we search for our own solutions, however.

Here’s a poem to end on, a lyrical vision of the nothingness that follows death, along with an attack on churchmen and others who claim (for their own purposes) that there’s something there.  Next time you feel tempted to retreat into cynicism, remember that this is the vision that attends it:

 A Fragment of Seneca Translated

After Death nothing is, and nothing, death,
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear
Nor be concerned which way nor where
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring time swallows us whole.
Impartial death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God’s everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more.