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The seventeenth century's political upheavals — civil war, regicide, Restoration — produced radical shifts in how poets wrote about love. Richard Lovelace and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, both wrote from positions of aristocratic privilege, but their poems about infidelity reveal strikingly different attitudes toward desire, constancy, and self-knowledge. Lovelace's "The Scrutiny" is a charming defence of sexual freedom; Rochester's "Absent from Thee" is a far darker exploration of compulsive inconstancy and self-destruction.
Richard Lovelace (1617–1657) was one of the Cavalier poets — a loose group including Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Robert Herrick, united by their royalism, their social refinement, and their celebration of love, honour, and sensual pleasure. Lovelace was imprisoned twice for his loyalty to Charles I and died in poverty after the Royalist cause collapsed.
AO3 — Context: The Cavalier poets wrote in deliberate contrast to the metaphysical complexity of Donne. Their verse valued sprezzatura — the appearance of effortless elegance. Love poetry in the Cavalier tradition tends to be lighter, wittier, and more socially polished than the metaphysical mode. "The Scrutiny" (meaning "the close examination" or "the investigation") takes the form of a man explaining to a woman why he must leave her bed and pursue other lovers.
The poem opens with disarming directness:
"Why should you swear I am forsworn, / Since thine I vowed to be? / I am not, but I must explore / More of the world than thee."
The speaker responds to an accusation of oath-breaking with cool logic. He has not broken his vow, he claims — he merely needs to "explore" others. The word "explore" frames infidelity as intellectual curiosity, even scientific inquiry (the poem's title, "The Scrutiny," reinforces this).
"Then if when I have loved my round, / And in that roaming done, / I yet can find thee constant found, / I'll settle with thee alone."
The conditional promise is breathtaking in its audacity: after he has slept with every available woman, if she has remained faithful, he will return to her. Her constancy is expected; his inconstancy is presented as natural and even admirable.
"But if in his or her embraces, / You go or come, / Then fare thee well, poor changeling, Come / And settle then at home."
The speaker applies a double standard with breezy confidence: if she is unfaithful while he roams, she is a "poor changeling" (a word implying both fickleness and fairy-tale substitution — she would become, in his eyes, not herself). The irony is that the speaker expects the very fidelity from her that he refuses to offer.
AO5 — Different Interpretations: The poem can be read as genuinely libertine — a celebration of sexual freedom that refuses to be bound by social convention. However, Earl Miner argues that Cavalier love poetry often uses libertine postures ironically, as a form of social performance. The speaker may be testing the woman's reaction rather than genuinely declaring his intentions. The poem's wit depends on the reader recognising the absurdity of its logic — and therefore recognising that the speaker, on some level, recognises it too.
The poem uses a regular stanza form (quatrains with alternating rhyme) and a light, conversational tone that makes the speaker's outrageous argument seem reasonable — even charming. This is the Cavalier mode at its most seductive: the form itself performs the ease and confidence that the speaker claims.
John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), was the most notorious figure of the Restoration court. A favourite of Charles II, Rochester was a brilliant poet, a compulsive womaniser, an alcoholic, and a philosophical provocateur who died at thirty-three after a deathbed conversion that shocked his contemporaries.
AO3 — Context: The Restoration (1660 onwards) saw a reaction against Puritan morality. Charles II's court cultivated an atmosphere of sexual licence, theatrical display, and philosophical scepticism. Rochester pushed these tendencies to their extremes. His poetry is more psychologically honest than Lovelace's — where Lovelace performs ease, Rochester exposes the misery beneath libertine freedom. Rochester was influenced by Hobbes's materialism (the idea that humans are driven by appetite and self-interest) and by the French libertine tradition associated with thinkers like Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld.
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