Blackwell Reference Online

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‘Theirs was the giant race, before the flood’ wrote Dryden, extolling playwrights from the pre-Civil War era so as to cast disparagement on his own contemporaries, and thereby voicing the strain of disappointment which is a keynote of late seventeenth-century writing. When asked to join in celebrating the accession of William and Mary to the throne, Aphra Behn took no joy in ‘all the Inviting Prospect’ and could only deplore ‘the Wond'rous Change … That makes me Useless and Forlorn’. For Rochester, however, disappointment was not at all so readily articulated in terms of resistance to the shifts of history, but emerges as at once more immediate and more widespread. His poem ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ opens in a frank exultation of sexual enjoyment, only to launch into an outburst of bitter rage as ecstasy is interrupted by premature ejaculation, and then the detumescent penis is berated: Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame, False to my passion. Erectile dysfunction provided Rochester with material for mock-tirades; disappointment takes a less physiological ground and a more analytic tone, as if in resignation to inevitability, when he reflects in a letter to his wife on ‘soe greate a disproportion t'wixt our desires & what [is] ordained to content them’. His most celebrated poem, his Satire against Mankind , presses to its limits this existential turn against the claims ... log in or subscribe to read full text