From ‘Nothing’ to ‘Silence’: Rochester and Pope

Summary

In 1739 Alexander Pope, during the course of a ‘ramble’, stayed for one night at the Duke of Argyle's house at Adderbury. The house had belonged to the Earl of Rochester, and the legend is that Pope was given Rochester's bed. The occasion was celebrated in a poem ascribed to Pope and printed in three monthly magazines in August and September.

With no poetick ardors fir'd,

I press the bed where Wilmot lay:

That here he lov'd or here expir'd,

Begets no numbers grave or gay.

What it begot instead was a rather starchy compliment to the patriotism and familial benevolence of his host—truly a father of his country. Rochester's famous bedroom prowess, and his still more spectacular deathbed repentance, are not the stuff of ‘poetick ardors’ for the mature and respectable poet, and Rochester is cited as a potential poetic forbear only to be effaced by a moral and political one.

Not all Pope's references to Rochester are so strait laced; there are a few approving citations in the poems, some fairly even criticism in anecdotes to Spence, some conscious reworking of lines from Rochester's poems and a number of echoes and memories. But Pope's biggest gesture towards the earlier poet was to publish (and continue publishing) ‘On Silence’, a juvenile imitation of Rochester's ‘Upon Nothing’. Insisting on the youthfulness of the piece, Pope presented Rochester's influence as formative, even fatherly.