Rochester, Lady Betty and the Post-Boy

Summary

An early pastoral finds Rochester in transition between fluency in a received language and an abrupt acknowledgement of his more personal concerns. The conventional language of love seems at first to spin itself out without any focused emotional reference.

Alex. There sighs not on the Plain

So lost a swain as I;

Scorcht'd up with Love, frozen with Disdain,

Of killing sweetness I complain

Streph. If'tis Corinna, die.

(A Pastoral Dialogue Between Alexis and Strephon, 11.1–5)

But when Strephon says that ‘Like ruin'd Birds, rob'd of their Young,/Lamenting, frighted, and alone,/I fly from place to place’ (11.8–10), we receive an albeit miniaturized image of a vulnerability to a sense of death as felt loss, and of an aimless and evasive movement consequent on this, which seems typical of later, more ambitious poems. The loose improvisatory feel of even the most carefully worked of these—their abruptness of beginning and end, the provisionality of statement in poems that rethink themselves as they go—suggests that if despair or pain must be acknowledged, writing's business is to keep in flight. ‘Absent from thee I languish still …’ but a return to ‘thee’ can only be projected and deferred when that return is also to an ‘everlasting rest’. Such poems move away from even the possibility of dialogue, shifting from the often confrontational stance—mocking, flirtatious or accusing—of earlier lyrics, to a writing that describes absence and is poised at a point of withdrawal.