"With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join ..." Photograph: AP
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is remembered today chiefly for his sexually frank, refreshingly unromantic erotic poems. This week's poem, however, reminds us about the sharpness of his social criticism and reveals an interesting vein of philosophical nihilism.
Rochester was born in 1647 and died in 1680 at the age of 33 - not surprisingly, given his rakish life-style. His mother, Anne St John, was a devout puritan. His father, Henry Wilmot, was a Cavalier who served as a brave and popular military commander under Charles I. The editor of the Yale edition of Rochester's Collected Poems (1968), David Vieth, comments that this marriage "mirrored the political and religious forces that were tearing England apart". Perhaps it also adumbrated conflicting forces in the young poet's psyche.
Charles II became his patron while the teenaged earl was still at Oxford. Rochester swiftly established himself as a leading light of the circle of court wits. Having been imprisoned in the Tower for the abduction of an heiress, Elizabeth Malet, he later married her and restored his reputation by acts of valour during the Dutch war. His marriage was a happy one, by all accounts, despite a busy parallel sex-life. He had many mistresses and, some commentators suggest, homosexual partners too. According to Samuel Johnson, he "blazed out his life in lavish voluptuousness". He notoriously claimed to have gone for five years without once being sober.
As a poet, he was considered second only to Dryden. He wrote satires, dramatic pieces and imitations of the classics. A contemporary of Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, he was a rationalist who, like the king himself, dabbled in chemistry, and notwithstanding a turn to piety on his deathbed, he was a religious sceptic. In "Upon Nothing" we meet this sardonic sceptic, and perhaps feel a hint of some profound desire for personal oblivion.
Rochester's creation myth contains a certain amount of worldly allegory, with Form, Matter, Time, etc behaving like typical courtiers, struggling for power and stooping to treachery. The poet enjoys punning on the word "nothing", constantly letting "Great Nothing" mutate into mere emptiness. Perhaps some of his conclusions are not so different from those of traditional religion: he clearly has no illusions about the lawn-sleeved bishops, brainless statesmen and the hollow paraphernalia of worldly power. The monarch himself does not escape his courtier's cold eye. There is no fawning in Rochester: in his curlicued Restoration style, he is one of the great honest poets, a true forebear of William Blake and (at his "less-deceived" best) Philip Larkin.
Vieth's note serves as a useful introduction to the poem's cod creationist argument: "Orthodox Christian theology holds that God created the universe out of nothing (the usual version) or Chaos (the variation adopted by Milton in Paradise Lost). Hence, according to a paradoxical tradition which developed as a corollary, this nonexistent nothing is the source or unformed raw material of all things in the Creation, without which they would not exist."
Upon Nothing
Nothing! Thou elder brother even to Shade: Thou hads't a being ere the world was made, And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid.
Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not, When primitive Nothing Something straight begot; Then all proceeded from the great united What.
Something, the general attribute of all, Severed from thee, its sole original, Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall;
Yet something did thy mighty power command, And from thy fruitful Emptiness's hand Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, water, air and land.
Matter, the wicked'st offspring of thy race, By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace, And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.
With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join; Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line;
But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain, And bribed by thee, destroys the short-lived reign, And to thy hungry womb drives back the slaves again.
Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes, And the divine alone with warrant pries Into thy bosom, where the truth in private lies,
Yet this of thee the wise may truly say: Thou from the virtuous nothing does delay, And to be part of thee the wicked wisely pray.
Great Negative, how vainly would the wise Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise, Didst thou not stand to point their blind philosophies!
Is or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate, And True or False, the subject of debate, That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state -
When they have racked the politician's breast, Within thy bosom most securely rest, And when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best.
But Nothing, why does Something still permit That sacred monarchs should in council sit With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit,
While weighty Something modestly abstains From princes' coffers, and from statesmen's brains, And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns?
Nothing! Who dwells with fools in grave disguise, For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise, Lawn sleeves and furs and gowns, when they like thee look wise:
French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy, Hibernian learning, Scotch civility, Spaniards' dispatch, Danes' wit are mainly seen in thee;
The great man's gratitude to his best friend, Kings' promises, whores' vows - towards thee they bend, Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.
