In Donne and the cavalier poets who compared the vagina to the center of the universe, vaginal fluids to cream, the clitoris to a ripe cherry,the labia minora to rosebuds, the pubic hairs to sweetbriar, and the whole pelvic region of woman to a garden, one sees an exhilarating attempt to focus on this part of the body, simultaneously giving it homage second to none that lovers had offered any part of their mistresses’ bodies or minds (see “Oral Sex: A Theme in Donne...”in this website). So it is a shock to find John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, less than a century after Donne’s floruit, focussing his play Sodom on vaginas to degrade them with imagery of the most calculated revulsion ever, to my knowledge anyway, evoked in verse.

The protagonist of the play , Bolloxinion, has taken up sodomy because the vagina of his wife, Cuntigratia, is “Clad with the filth of all her nasty whites.”(1)That is, she has leucorrhea, and her husband, incapable of excusing it as an illness, calls the flux “nasty.”But before the play even begins, in the Prologue, the playwright associates the vagina with disease, describing with scurrility the syphilitic vaginas of the prostitutes in the auditorium:

"They’ll act the same as we,(2)and let you enter

Their pocky false base cunts, Loves proper Center;

Their ulcer’d cunts by being so abus’d

And having too much Prick therein infus’d

And then not clean’d till they beginn to stink

May well be styled, Love’s nasty common sink..."(3)

Apparently conscious of the metaphysical and cavalier traditions,Rochester calls the vagina a “Center,” and, as we shall see, mentions the taste of vaginal fluids. But while the cavaliers called these fluids nectar, elixir, sweets distilled through love’s alembic, and a sovereign balm, Rochester’s word for them is gravy.In this context, it is difficult to name a substance in the gastronomic inventory of meats, drinks and sauces, more revolting.

"...perhaps you’ll find

Some of their cunts so stufft with gravy thick

That like an Irish bogg, they’ll drown your prick..."(4)

Bolloxinion denounces the vagina as monotonous, like the same meat dish served at every dinner, varied only by the sauce.

"So ‘tis with cunt’s repeated dull delights

Sometimes you’ve flowers for sauce, and sometimes whites,(5)

Or crablice which like buttered shrimps appear

And may be serv’d for garnish all the year."(6)

The best that can be said for the vagina is spoken by Bolloxinion’s court physician, Flux, who recommends it and disparages sodomy solely for medical reasons. The vagina is not precious, it is no garden of delight, only the alternative, the anus, is unhealthy:

"To love and nature all their rights restore--

Fuck women and let buggery be no more:

It doth the procreative End destroy,

Which nature gave with pleasure to enjoy.

Please her, and she’ll be kind: if you displease,

She turns into corruption and disease."(7)

After all these pejorative remarks, one expects equally strong praise exalting the penis, the anus, or boys. But little or nothing of the sort appears. Rochester dislikes his penis, whose erections interfere with his writing of poetry; as a countermeasure he masturbates, an act he sees as hostile to the penis,”taking his strength away,” “making him sick,” and freeing the poet for writing.

"...the author...

...thinking on the postures of the play

Was forc’d at last to take his strength away,

And make him sick, by friging till he spews

As, in Milton, the sex enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall expresses a true love, but after the Fall, “in Lust they burne”(IX.1015), so Rochester expresses two kinds of erotic sentiment, one of true love, and the other a crude friction with Whitehall hotties and whores in St. James’s Park; and his penis, maddeningly, serves only for the crude friction, while for the true love it disappoints with impotence.

"Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,

False to my passion, fatal to my Fame,

Through what mistaken Magick dost thou prove

So true to lewdness, so untrue to Love?

What Oyster, Cinder, Beggar, common whore,

Didst thou e’er fail in all thy Life before?

When Vice, Disease, and Scandal lead the way,

With what officious haste didst thou obey!...

Worst part of me and henceforth hated most,

Through all the Town the common rubbing-post

On whom each wretch relieves her lustful want

As Hogs on Goats do rub themselves and grunt..."(9)

Homosexuality seems only to be something neutral, not as bad as vaginal coitus but not especially good either. In the poem just quoted,as Rochester surveys the misdeeds of his detested penis, he finds this:

"Stiffly resolv’d, ‘twould carelessly invade

Woman or man, nor aught its fury stay’d..."(10)

Between the women with their sickening vaginas and the men, the odds are so slight that the decision is made carelessly; both are invaded not with love but with a fury of lust.

In what is supposedly a homosexual poem, Rochester writes:

"Let the Porter, and the Groom,

Things design’d for dirty Slaves,

Drudge in fair Aurelia’s womb,

To get supplies for Age and Graves.

Farewell, Woman, I intend

Henceforth every night to sit

With my lewd well-natured Friend

Drinking to engender Wit."

The rhetorical sequence makes the reader expect an antithesis in the later stanza: let the porter and groom drudge in Aurelia’s vagina; I shall revel in Gito’s rectum, or the like. Instead wine and wit shall replace the vaginal drudgery, an inconsequential idea as there is nothing to keep one from having all three. Homosexuality seems to lead nowhere.

In all this poetry one notices an energy of persuasion, of Rochester earnestly laboring to make us see his perverse viewpoint as the only correct one. His funeral orator compares him to one of Christ’s apostles:

"He seem’d to affect something singular and paradoxical in his impieties,as well as in his Writings, above the reach and thought of other men; taking as much pains to draw others in, and to pervert the right ways of virtue, as the Apostles and primitive Saints, to save their own souls, and them that heard them. For this was the heightening and amazing circumstance of his sins,that he was so diligent and industrious to recommend and propagate them...framing Arguments for Sin, making Proselytes to it, and writing Panegyricks upon Vice..."(12)

Some ascetic Christian traditions make it plausible that an apostle of Christ should lavish abuse on the genitals. Pope Innocent III, for example, wrote “Man is formed...from the filthiest sperm (de spurcissimo spermate). He is conceived in the heat of desire, in the fervor of the flesh,in the stench of lust: what is more, in the blemish of sin.... a mass of horrible putridness that always stinks and is filthy.”(13)

I shall pursue the connection of Rochester’s abuse of the genitals with Christianity through three topics:(1)Christian interpretations of Adam and Eve’s attempt to hide their genitals, Gen. 3:7; (2) Renaissance distortions of classical lore on the subject; (3) Rochester’s deathbed repentance.

The third chapter of Genesis informs us:

"...she took of the fruit...and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves aprons" (vv. 6-7, KJV).

Why should this pudicity concern the genitals, or them only? Adam and Eve had not committed a sexual sin. Gen. 3:6-7 is one of the passages commonly cited to show that the story of Adam, Eve and the serpent is clumsily spliced from several originals. In times when that explanation was impermissible, Clement of Alexandria solved the puzzle by supposing that in fact Adam and Eve had sinned sexually, that the Tree of Knowledge was only an allegory of coitus, and that after God had made plans to marry the two, they had anticipated the ceremony. “Perhaps... the first-formed humans anticipated the appropriate moment, coveted the grace of marriage before time,and so committed sin, since ‘everyone who looks at a woman with an eye to lust has already committed adultery with her,’ in not waiting for the right moment of rational will.”(14)

Augustine held that unfallen sex was meant to be as calm and detached as artificial insemination, so that it would not interfere with the concentration and focus of the human pair’s love for God; that, all the same, they never experienced it, because they ate the forbidden fruit and fell from grace a few hours after their creation; that, being suddenly subject to death, like the animals, they accordingly felt the drive that is implanted into the animals to replace the dead by reproduction; and the association of this drive with rebellion against God made them ashamed of the body parts in which they felt it, and hence the need to cover these up. This explanation of the fig-leaf aprons, for its psychological subtlety, commands respect.

Notice that Augustine presupposes that the animals in Eden were subject to death even before man’s fall, a circumstance denied by other commentators and by Milton in Paradise Lost.

Clement’s account of Adam and Eve’s sin rates a jeer from Augustine: “...maybe the bride had to be given away by her father, and they had to wait for the solemn pronouncing of vows,the celebration of the wedding banquet, the appraisal of the dowry, and the signing of the contract! This is ridiculous...”(15)

Chaucer’s Wife of Bath must labor to establish that the genitals are formed for coitus and to facilitate conception (ese of engendrure), against the clergy who say they are solely for urination and to distinguish two genders; to avert the clergy’s wrath, she concedes that they exist for all these purposes.(16)

Analyzing the fig-leaf aprons, Luther employs the concept that the worst is produced by the degradation of the best (corruptio optimi est pessimus), as Satan, for example, was before his fall nearly the brightest, or absolutely the brightest, angel.Adam and Eve’s genitals were created not as the most shameful but as the most honored parts of their bodies:

"Adam and Eve... made girdles for themselves for the purpose of covering, as though it were something most shameful, that part of the body which by its nature was most honorable and noble. What in all nature is nobler than the work of procreation? This work was assigned by God neither to the eyes nor to the mouth, which we regard as the more honorable parts of the body, but to that part which sin has taught us to call the pudendum [shameful] and to cover, lest it be seen... after sin the leprosy of lust has made its way into this part of the body. Hence those who live outside the married state burn most shamefully. And unless those who live in the married state restrain their passions... they encounter all sorts of temptations."(17)

It was, then, man's will that changed the most honorable part of the body into a thing leprous with lust and shamefully burning the unmarried. God meant that the genitals should be as noble as their procreative function.

The interpretations offered by Clement, Augustine, Chaucer and Luther all confront the same dilemma: if Adam and Eve covered their genitals for a reason, God made these organs in some way shameful, notwithstanding Genesis 1:31,"And God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good." If God made the genitals good, Adam and Eve had no reason to cover them. Nor have we.

We come now to the bold solution of Calvin, which I present in exactly the format in which I found it in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org/).

"In short, the cold and faint knowledge of sin, which is inherent in the minds of men, is here described by Moses, in order that they may be rendered inexcusable. Quaeri tamen potest, si tota natura peccati sordibus infecta est, cur tantum una in parte corporis deformitas appareat. Neque enim faciam vel pectus operiunt Adam et Heva: sed tantum pudenda quae vocamus. Hac occasione factum esse arbitror ut vulgo non aliam vit corruptelam agnoscerent quam in libidine venerea. At qui expendere debebant, non minorem fuisse in oculis et auribus verecundiae causam, quam inquinassent Adam et Heva, et diabolo quasi arma praebuissent. Sed Deo fuit satis, extare in corpore humano aliquam pudendam notam, quae nos peccati communefaciat. Then (as we have already said) Adam and his wife were as yet ignorant of their own vileness, since with a covering so light they attempted to hide themselves from the presence of God." (18)

The cause why five sentences of this are in Latin, in an otherwise English website, has a blunt name: censorship. Calvin's beliefs about the exact nature of the genitals are so shocking and so against the grain of neo-Christianity that CCEL evidently decided merely to go through the motions of publishing them. But, courtesy of The Atheist Seventeenth - Century Website, here they are:

"It may be asked why, if the entire nature of man is infected with the filth of sin,the deformity should appear in but one part of the body. For Adam and Eve did not cover their faces or breasts, but rather those parts we call pudenda. This was done, in my opinion, that by this circumstance Adam and Eve might openly demonstrate that they found no cause of corruption in themselves apart from lustful desire. They should have reflected that there was no less cause for shamefastness in their eyes and ears than in their genitals, since they had defiled their eyes and ears and had offered them as weapons to be used by the devil. But to God it was enough that there should stand out on the human body some mark of shame which should make it clear to all that we had sinned."

If God willed that the genitals should be our mark of shame, then Adam and Eve had reason to cover them even before eating the forbidden fruit, though they did not know it; the mark was prepared while as yet the conduct which should deserve it, and of which it was the symbol, was only an idea in the mind of God. Fantastic as this notion may seem---and unsupported by the text--- it consists with the supralapsarian concept, that God needed Adam's Fall as presupposed by the Atonement, and so decreed it from eternity (see "John Milton: Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians..." in this website). If Adam and Eve were ashamed of their genitals, that too was decreed, as part of the larger decree that mankind should bear, in that particular anatomical location, the insignia of its wickedness.

As Calvin's supralapsarianism conduces to the shameful-mark or pudenda-nota theory of the genitals, so Milton's sublapsarianism conduces to a violent reaction against it, an assertion that the genitals are indecent only to a mind darkened by sin. Milton, in his initial description of Adam and Eve, launches an apostrophe to denounce the idea that any part of them is uncomely:

Nor those mysterious parts were then conceald,

Then was not guiltie shame,dishonest shame

Of natures works, honor dishonorable,

Sin-bred, how have ye troubl'd all mankind

With shews instead, meer shews of seeming pure,

And banisht from mans life his happiest life,

Simplicitie and spotless innocence (PL IV, 312-18).

After eating the fruit, briskly having sex, sleeping, and awaking "destitute and bare Of all thir vertue" the pair seek

Some tree whose broad smooth leaves together sewed

And girded on our loyns, may cover round

Those middle parts, that this new comer, Shame,

There sit not, and reproach us as unclean (IX. 1095-98).

The middle parts show no change; only a newcomer, Shame, now intrudes between them and the human pair, and he makes them feel unclean. Calvin's shame is according to Locke: something exterior to the self causes it as a perception. Milton's shame is according to Berkeley: it exists because it is perceived. If Calvin is right, it was a failure of perception that made Adam and Eve neglect before the Fall to cover their loins; if Milton is right, a failure of perception caused both the Fall and the cover-up, which in fact was part of it.

Publius Ovidius Naso, better known as Ovid, wished success to everyone who applied the precepts of his Ars Amatoria, but in case these led a man to nothing better than a hopeless passion for a woman who cared nothing for him, he offered a series of methods of overcoming one's own desire, titled Remedia Amoris (The Cures of Love).

Many of these cures are common-sense counsels that could be, and doubtless have been, given and profitably followed in every age. Repress the feeling of love at the outset, before it grows strong (line 80). Shun leisure; distract yourself by keeping busy (l.144). Go on a long journey (ll. 213-244).

But, about line 315, the poem veers off at a surprising angle from the line of common-sense exposition. Ovid explains how one can arrange a rendezvous with the cruel mistress and then deliberately sabotage it, or spy on her during her less attractive moments. One should think about her faults of body and mind, including the ones she doesn't have; short legs, misshapen arms, small stature (ll. 315-321). Force her to act beneath herself: if she has no voice make her sing, if she is uncoordinated make her dance; if she has an awkward gait take her for a walk (ll.331-337). Arrange to catch her of a morning before she has begun her toilet. Jewels, cosmetics and haute couture are so important that "the girl is the smallest part of herself" (pars minima est ipsa puella sui, l.344). More surprisingly, a sexual act itself can and should be sabotaged in order to douse the passion that causes it. Have sex with a third party before the crucial rendezvous to make the latter anticlimactic (l.402). Select the least convenient and most unbecoming sexual posture (l.408).Open the windows so that ugly limbs will be plainly visible (l.412).

Shakespeare inherited the notion that light is anaphrodisiac, at least during rape:"...he puts his foot upon the light/For light and lust are deadly enemies" (The Rape of Lucrece,ll. 673-74), and see Helena's overcoming of Bertram's loathing for her by meeting him in a dark room. Bertram himself, repressing any affection he may feel for Helena, enacts the program of The Cures of Love in great detail, even mentally concentrating on deformities she doesn't have:

...at first

I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heart

Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue:

Where the impression of mine eye infixing,

Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me

Which warp'd the line of every other favour;

Scorn'd a fair colour, or express'd it stolen;

Extended or contracted all proportions

To a most hideous object... (All's Well that Ends Well, V, iii, 45-52)

To resume Ovid's anaphrodisiac therapy. In the weary aftermath of coitus, when appetite is dead, study your mistress's physical blemishes (ll. 415-18). Tastes vary, and with them, the things that may possibly extinguish love. In one case, a lover suddenly stopped loving because he got a good look at his mistress's crotch.

Ille quod obscaenas in aperto corpore partes

Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, haesit amor (ll.429-430).

That love which beheld, in her denuded body, her indecent parts,

Though it had rushed forward, now stopped in its tracks.

Ovid narrates this as a case history, a thing that, to his knowledge, happened only once. More importantly, he adds this caveat; whoever successfully applies this remedy was never really in love in the first place.

Luditis, o si quos potuerunt ista movere:

Adflarent tepidae pectora vestra faces (ll.433-34).

You were not serious, you who could be moved by such things as these;

Feeble flames burned in your breasts.

Lines 429-430 were, in the Renaissance, subjected to an ordeal of subtractional misrepresentation (see the page so titled in this website). The phrase Ille...amor...in cursu qui fuit, haesit ("that case of love, though it had rushed forward, stopped") whose meaning is specific,was read generally: "The passion of love itself, though it rushes forward, stops, if and when it sees any woman's indecent parts."

Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond, trying in the interests of skepticism to rank the mental powers of human beings with those of beasts, or even below them, extracts from Ovid support for the idea that, alone among sentient beings, humans find their own reproductive processes unpleasant, and hence that,instead of being a little lower than the angels, we are lower than cats and dogs.

"Let us observe, moreover, that we are the only animals whose natural defects give offense to our own fellows, and the only ones who in our natural actions have to steal away from our own kind. Really, it is also a fact worthy of consideration that masters in the art [sc. Ovid] prescribe as a remedy for amorous passion the full and free view of the body that a man desires; that, to cool his ardor, one has only to look freely at what he loves;

Ille quod obscaenas in aperto corpore partes

Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, haesit amor.

And although this remedy may perhaps proceed from a somewhat fastidious and frigid humour, yet it is an amazing sign of our imperfection that use and acquaintance should disgust us with one another." (19)

Note these wrenchings of Ovid's text:

1. It was not a "free view of the body" that ended love, but a view of certain parts of it, the "indecent parts."

3. Though Ovid says that those for whom this remedy works were never in love in the first place, Montaigne reduces this qualification to a "perhaps" backed by a "somewhat":"this remedy may perhaps proceed from a somewhat fastidious and frigid humour."

Robert Burton, quoting in his treatise of love-melancholy the old Ovidian chestnut, supplies an English translation in the generalized and prescriptive sense I have indicated. The vagina simply "should not appear":

"Some are of opinion that to see a woman naked is able of itself to alter his affection; and it is worthy of consideration, saith Montaigne the Frenchman in his Essays, that the skilfulest masters of amorous dalliance [Ovid is now thoroughly pluralized--DR] appoint for a remedy of venerous passions a full survey of the body; which the poet insinuates:

Ille quod obscaenas in aperto corpore partes

The love stood still, that ran in full career,

When once it saw those parts should not appear." (20)

Considered as a psychiatric cure of love, Ovid's remedy has other drawbacks besides working only for those who do not need it. Though it can be imagined occurring once in a couple's shared life, by accident or a male's dirty trick, the lay pelvic examination could never be a regular therapeutic procedure in the practice of a physician. So Bernard Gordon or Gordonius devised a surrogate playing on several misogynistic stereotypes but specially horror of menstrual blood:

"Let an old woman, of loathsome appearance, with filthy and vile clothes, be found, and let her carry between her legs [subtus gremium,"hidden under her lap,"] a menstrual cloth, and let her tell him [the patient] that his mistress is drunk, wets the bed, is epileptic and shameless; that her body has abnormal swellings, that her breath is foul, and other abnormalities that the other woman will have learned by rote; if all this will not move him, let her suddenly draw forth the menstrual cloth, brandishing it in his face, crying "Such is your mistress!" If this does not make him yield, he is no man, but an incarnate devil." (21)

And indeed, who cares whether a devil is cured of love or not?

Gordon's cure of love, so much less plausible than Ovid's, offends more by forgetting all the esthetic and ethical values that Ovid brings into play: the distractions of work and travel, bodily proportions, skill in dance and song, a graceful gait, jewels, cosmetics, fashionable clothes, coital postures, light on the bed. Ovid mentions almost as many factors that hinder love as the kaleidoscopic Kama Sutra does aids to it. But in Gordon there is nothing but disease (epilepsy, halitosis, abnormal swellings), and when the trump card is played, nothing but genitals-- that set of organs that Ovid treated as insignificant either as a cause or a cure of love. Sixteen hundred years of Christianity, with what William Empson called its "sex horror" had reduced the doctor to this.

In June, 1679, Gilbert Burnet, an Anglican bishop, a Cambridge Platonist and a Latitudinarian, that is, an adherent of the group that sought to do for Anglicanism what the Jesuits had done for Catholicism--find flexible doctrinal formulas under which dissenters and libertines could be brought back into the fold--engaged Rochester in dialogues designed to reclaim the notorious rake for Christianity. The two ranged over heaven and earth, and something that might or might not be hell, but never (so far as we know) mentioned the poems abusing the genitals. These seemed to be no problem to a repentant libertine or a latitudinarian bishop. Nor were Rochester's debauches, which were never mentioned. A debate on morals took place as if between two philosophers, one deistic and one agnostic.Burnet later wrote:

"he confessed he had no remorse for his past Actions, as Offenses against God, but only as Injuries to himself and to Mankind.... For Morality, He confessed, he saw the necessity of it, both for the Government of the World, and for the preservation of Health, Life, and Friendship; and was very much ashamed of his former Practices, rather because he had made himself a Beast and brought pain and sickness on his Body, and had suffered much in his Reputation, than from any deep sense of a Supream being or another State..."(22)

The priceless quality of this dialogue results mainly from the understatements the two men made and Burnet complacently wrote down. To say that the author of Sodom"suffered much in his Reputation" is tantamount to saying that Caligula added but little to the luster of the Roman imperial throne.

Rochester complained that "the restraining of a man from the use of Women, Except in the way of Marriage, and denying the remedy of Divorce [were] unreasonable impositions on the Freedom of Mankind..."(23) Burnet retorted that "men have a property in their Wives and Daughters, so that to defile the one, or corrupt the other, is an unjust and injurious thing..."(Farley-Hills, p. 75). Freedom versus property, that is all; it's a problem of political economy.The bond of love that might make a man and woman choose fidelity to each other as a thing desirable in itself goes unmentioned by both the bishop and the libertine.

The concept of sexual relations--"the use of Women"--in these conversations between Burnet and Wilmot is not ennobled by the religious context, but seemingly debased by it. Married to Elizabeth Malet and, according to his poetry, seeking refuge in her bosom as a place where love, peace, and truth flowed, he nevertheless left their home at Ditchley and spent long periods among the Whitehall ladies and the whores who relieved their tingling cunts on him.He explained that he needed these distractions to point the contrast between the two loves, one heavenly, the other unblessed, faithless, false, unforgiven.

Absent from thee, I languish still;

Then ask me not, When I return?

The straying Fool 'twill plainly kill,

To wish all Day, all Night to mourn.

Dear: from thine Arms then let me flie,

That my fantastick Mind may prove

The Torments it deserves to try,

That tears my fix'd heart from my Love.

When wearied with a world of Woe

To thy safe Bosom I retire,

Where Love, and Peace, and Truth doth flow,

May I contented there expire.

Lest once more wand'ring from that heav'n,

I fall on some base heart unblest;

Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,

And lose my everlasting Rest. (24)

Thus, in Rochester's lyrics we find two loves, one in a base heart, unblessed, unforgiven,bringing torment; another in Elizabeth's bosom, his retirement from a world of woe, where he hopes to die so as to be sure of his everlasting rest, whether that is union with Elizabeth or the Christian heaven. Talking with Burnet, he forgets all this and speaks of "the use of Women" as if they were all alike.

On the main topic of God, Rochester agreed with Burnet that atheism seemed untenable, if only because everyone seemed to have some concept of God. "Yet when he explained his Notion of this Being, it amounted to no more than a vast power, that had none of the Attributes of Goodness or Justice we ascribe to the Deity..."(25)

Burnet,the Cambridge Platonist, was unaware of encountering orthodox Calvinism, suitable to a man whose boyhood had been dominated by a mother enthusiastically Calvinistic, backing the Puritan cause in the Civil War. In Calvinism God is a vast power, not at all limited by human notions of goodness and justice. He plunges nine-tenths of the human race into hell and spares the remainder, without finding anything bad in the first group or good in the second, as Burns puts it with energy and succinctness:

Oh thou, wha' in the heavens dost dwell,

Wha', as it pleasest best thysel',

Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell,

A' for thy glory,

And no fo any guid or ill

They've done afore thee!(26)

The theological discussions between Rochester and Burnet began as the lord lay in his rooms in Whitehall Palace, ill with the symptoms of terminal syphilis. These did not prostrate him, and his pain was not extreme. And, as I have noted, the discussions were markedly devoid of Christianity. But in June, 1680, Rochester's illness took a sudden turn for the worse. He attempted to ride at top speed from Ditchley to Elizabeth's estates in Somersetshire, and the exertion "did so inflame an Ulcer, that was in his Bladder, that it raised a very great pain in those Parts." He was taken to his house in Woodstock Forest where "the Ulcer broke, and vast quantities of purulent matter past with his Urine." (27)

Then came self-loathing, earnest prayer, not merely to a vast power but to a God who could be moved by repentance, rejoicings of his mother and wife to find him so reformed, commands to burn obscene writings and pictures in the house, attentive listening to a passage of Isaiah read aloud by a chaplain, sudden illumination of the mind, as by rays or beams, resulting from this (still in the month of June), and when Burnet expressed fears that things were moving fast for a real case of repentance, Rochester's assurances that "though Horrour had given him his first Awaking, yet that was now grown up to a settled Faith and Conversion."(28) That it had grown up, Burnet could hardly doubt; for on the very day of his Adoption (that being what the Isaiah-passage experience presumably was), Rochester witnessed for his faith like Calvin or Knox to his unregenerate friend and former companion in debauch, William Fanshaw:

"Fanshaw, think of a God, let me advise you; & repent you of your former life, and amend your ways. Believe what I say to you; there is a God, a powerful God, & he is a terrible God to unrepenting sinners; the time draws near, that he will come to judgment, with great terrour to the wicked; therefore delay not your repentance; his displeasure will thunder against you, if you do. You & I have been long acquainted, done ill together. I love the man and speak to him out of conscience, for the good of his soul."(29)

The last sentence, abruptly referring to Fanshaw in the third person instead of addressing him in the second, is probably explained by a bystander asking Rochester how he could talk like this to a friend and a guest. As, before Rochester's conversion, his God was only a "vast power,"so in the tirade all God's attributes amount to power: "powerful God...terrible God...great terrour...thunder." Fanshaw, perhaps thinking to himself,"You seem to be doing all right on a delayed repentance,"left the room without speaking a word,and Rochester grimly surmised that his friend had suffered hardening of heart (the Calvinist catch-phrase for being past hope of salvation). In London after the death of Rochester, Fanshaw said he had died mad, and Burnet vigorously disputed this.

In short, the deathbed repentance, in light of the poetry, suggests that what was superficial in Rochester was not his Calvinism but his libertinism. In his libertine years he systematically spoiled his own pleasures, telling his wife and himself that his sojourns in brothels were "Torments," so that he could renounce these pleasures wholeheartedly when the time came. From his boyhood as a Calvinist catechumen through his libertine youth to his pious deathbed, two Calvinist ideas sustained him: that God is a vast power beyond good and evil, and that the vagina and penis are the only organs of the human body that visibly display deformitas peccati sordibus( the deformity of the filth of sin).

(1)Sodom: The Quintessence of Debauchery,Brandon House: North Hollywood, Calif., n.d.,p. 60.Anthony Wood vehemently denied that Rochester wrote Sodom,but he had a motive for dissociating the Oxford alumnus from the notorious play; as the title of Athenae Oxonienses implies, he was glorifying the university in her sons' works.Richard Elias in "Political Satire in Sodom,"Studies in English Literature, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer, 1978), pp. 423-38, argues convincingly that the play is by Rochester and is an attack on the court and policies of Charles II.

(2) That is, as the cast will play roles, the prostitutes will make a vain pretense of enjoying their coitus with their customers.

(3) Page 48.

(4) Pages 48-49.

(5) Menstrual blood or leucorrhea.

(6) Page 94.

(7) Page 113.

(8) Pages 50-51.

(9) "The Imperfect Enjoyment," ll. 46-65, in Rochester, Collected Works, ed. John Hayward, Nonesuch Press, London, 1926: p. 72. For ll.63-65 an Internet version gives:

Through all the town a common fucking post

On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt

As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt...

The Internet version seems better as the equation of whore/post=hog/gate seems better than wretch/post=hog/goat, and cunt rhymes more exactly with grunt than does want. Hayward may have been working from bowdlerized sources; his collected works do not collect Sodom.

(10) Lines 41-42.

(11)Collected Works,p.19.

(12) Robert Parsons, A Sermon preached at the Earl of Rochester's Funeral(1680), in David Farley-Hills, Ed., Rochester: The Critical Heritage, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972), p.46.

(13) De Miseria Condicionis Humanae, ed.Robert E. Lewis, U. of Georgia Press, Athens, 1978: p.94.

(14)Stromateis, Books One to Three, tr. John Ferguson, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1991: p.315.

(15) The Literal Meaning of Genesis,tr. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., Newman Press, N.Y., 1982: II, 174.

(16) F. N. Robinson, ed.,The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed., Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1957: p. 77, cols. 1-2.

(17) Jaroslav Pelikan, ed., Luther's Works, Concordia Publishing House, Saint Louis, 1958,Vol.I, pp. 167-68.

(18)Commentary on Genesis, 3.7, tr. John King, 1847, Internet.

(19)Essays tr. Jacob Zeitlin, Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., 1935, II.143.

(20) The Anatomy of Melancholy,ed. A.R. Shilleto, Modern Library, New York, n.d., III.208.

(21) Anatomy, III.202.

(22)David Farley-Hills,ed.,Rochester:The Critical Heritage,New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972, p. 56.

(23) Page 72.

(24) Vivian de Sola Pinto, Rochester: Portrait of a Restoration Poet, Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, N.Y., 1971:p. 71.

(25) Farley-Hills, p. 53.

(26)Holy Willie's Prayer.

(27) De Sola Pinto, p.245.

(28) Page 254.

(29) Pages 250-51.