Libertine Love and Inconstancy: Lovelace's "The Scrutiny" and Rochester's "Absent from Thee"

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.

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Lovelace: "The Scrutiny"

Context: The Cavalier Poets

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.