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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.
This lesson belongs to AQA A-Level English Literature A (7712), Paper 1, Love Through the Ages: poetry (pre-1900), in which poems are read comparatively across the ages. These two libertine lyrics sit either side of the Restoration and let you trace how a single attitude — the refusal of constancy — is treated first as breezy social play and then as existential torment. The AOs you exercise:
Flagging the dominant AOs: This pairing turns on AO2 and AO4 — the comparison is impossible without showing how Lovelace's polished quatrains perform ease while Rochester's religious register exposes anguish, and how each poet's historical moment shapes that difference (AO3 as the lever).
"Libertine" in the seventeenth century carried two linked senses: a freethinker who rejected received moral and religious authority, and a person of unrestrained sexual conduct. The two meet in the figure of the aristocratic male who treats both God's law and society's codes as constraints to be flouted. But libertinism is not monolithic, and these two poems mark its range. Lovelace writes in the Cavalier mode — the verse of the courtly royalists who fought (and largely lost) for Charles I. Its prized quality is sprezzatura, the Renaissance ideal (from Castiglione's The Courtier) of studied nonchalance: difficult things made to look effortless. Cavalier love poetry is therefore typically light, polished, gallant and a little detached, valuing wit and ease over metaphysical agonising.
Rochester, writing a generation later in the Restoration court of Charles II, inherits the libertine posture but strips away its ease. His libertinism is philosophical and self-lacerating, shaped by Thomas Hobbes's materialist account of human beings as driven by appetite and self-interest — a vision in which the will is enslaved to desire. The crucial analytical concept for comparing the two is register: the level and colouring of diction. Lovelace's register is conversational, social, faintly ironic; Rochester's is devotional, drawing on the vocabulary of sin, heaven, damnation and "everlasting rest." Tracking that shift in register is the surest route into the AO2 and AO4 of this pairing.
It also helps to understand why the Restoration produced such poetry. The court of Charles II, restored in 1660 after the Puritan Commonwealth had closed the theatres and policed pleasure, defined itself partly against that earlier austerity: wit, display, sexual licence and a fashionable scepticism about religion became markers of the in-group. Rochester is the extreme case — courtier, rake, satirist — but his writing is unusual in turning the libertine ethos into an object of analysis rather than mere celebration. Where a lesser Restoration wit would simply boast, Rochester anatomises the boast and finds misery underneath. This is the difference that the comparison with Lovelace is designed to expose: between libertinism as a confident social style (Cavalier) and libertinism as a diagnosed condition of the will (Restoration, post-Hobbes).
A note on sound and form, since both poems use it expressively. Lovelace's stanzas tighten as they go — the longer opening lines giving way to short, clipped ones ("You go or come," "And settle then at home") — so that the verse keeps snapping shut on neat, dismissive conclusions, a formal echo of the speaker's breezy finality. Rochester's tetrameter, by contrast, accumulates: his sentences run across the lines, piling clause on clause ("Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven, / And lose my everlasting rest"), so that the verse seems unable to stop, just as the speaker cannot stop straying. Form, in both, performs character.
Key terms to deploy: dramatic monologue / lyric address (a speaker addressing an implied listener); double standard (one rule for him, another for her); register (diction's level and colouring); religious / devotional register; irony; the libertine; consonance (repetition of consonant sounds, as in Rochester's hissed f-sounds).
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 title is a piece of deadpan wit worth dwelling on for AO2. "The Scrutiny" — a word suggesting careful, even scientific, examination — is applied to the least scrupulous of intentions: serial seduction. The mismatch between the rigorous-sounding title and the frivolous content is the poem's first joke, framing infidelity as a programme of empirical "research."
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), and the reduction of the beloved to "the world than thee" quietly diminishes her: she is one region of a continent he intends to survey. The opening question-and-answer structure casts the poem as a rebuttal, so we hear the woman's reproach only as the speaker bats it away — she is present as an accusation, absent as a voice.
"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. "Loved my round" treats love as a circuit to be completed, a social round of visits — the metaphor domesticates promiscuity into something as routine as paying calls. There is also a sly pseudo-scientific colouring consistent with the title: to "love my round" and then check whether he "can find thee constant found" is the language of an experiment with a control variable. The speaker casts himself as the inquiring mind and the woman as the object of study, her fidelity a hypothesis to be tested at his leisure. The whole gallant edifice rests on this asymmetry — he reserves agency, motion and judgement entirely to himself, and assigns her only the passive virtue of waiting.
The argument is, of course, logically self-cancelling, and Lovelace surely knows it: a man who demands constancy as the price of his own inconstancy has no coherent principle at all, only a preference dressed as a philosophy. This is where the ironic-performance reading earns its keep. The poem is too neatly absurd to be a sincere manifesto; it is a display of wit, a party-piece whose charm lies precisely in our seeing through it. Yet — and this is the point a strong candidate makes — seeing through it does not undo its assumptions. The joke still takes for granted that a man's freedom and a woman's fidelity are the natural order; the wit decorates the double standard without dismantling it.
"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. The condescension of "poor" is the giveaway: he pities her in advance for a failing that exactly mirrors his own boast.
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, in his study of the Cavalier mode, argues that such poetry frequently uses libertine postures as a form of social performance and play, so the speaker may be displaying wit for an audience rather than baldly declaring intent. On this reading the poem's effect depends on the reader recognising the absurdity of its logic — and therefore recognising that the speaker, on some level, recognises it too. A feminist reading, by contrast, takes the double standard at face value as the poem's real content: the wit is the sugar on a thoroughly proprietary attitude to women.
The poem uses a regular stanza form (quatrains with alternating rhyme, the lines tightening into shorter measures) 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. The smooth metre and neat rhymes enact sprezzatura — the argument glides so elegantly that we are tempted to overlook how outrageous it is. Form, here, is complicit in the seduction.
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 broader European libertine and sceptical traditions associated with thinkers such as Montaigne.
This Hobbesian backdrop matters for AO2. If, as Hobbes argued, human beings are mechanisms driven by appetite, then the speaker's inability to stay with the beloved is not weakness of character but the operation of a law of his own nature — which is exactly why the poem reads his "straying" as compulsion rather than choice. The philosophy is in the grammar of the verse.
The poem is addressed to a woman — possibly Rochester's wife, Elizabeth Malet, to whom he was, by contemporary accounts, attached even as he was chronically unfaithful.
"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."
The opening establishes a paradox that the whole poem will turn on: the speaker suffers when he is away from the beloved, yet he cannot stay. He calls himself a "straying fool" — unlike Lovelace's confident explorer, Rochester's speaker knows that his inconstancy is self-destructive. "Languish" and "mourn" are words of genuine suffering, not Cavalier playfulness, and the doubling "all day, all night" stretches the suffering across the whole clock. Where Lovelace's speaker explores, Rochester's strays — the difference between the two verbs is the difference between the poems: one is purposeful adventure, the other aimless, self-harming drift.
The poem's deepest structural irony is that it is built as a logical petition — "let me fly... that... that..." — addressed to the very person it proposes to abandon. The speaker asks the beloved's permission to betray her, and frames the betrayal as something done for her sake (so that his "tears" be "not... shed so much in vain"). This is the libertine's logic turned inside out: where Lovelace argues himself a right to roam, Rochester begs to be released into a roaming he experiences as a sentence. The grammar of request — petitioning, conditional, supplicating — reveals a will that has lost command of itself and can only ask to be let go where it is helplessly bound to go anyway. It is one of the strangest and most honest speech-acts in seventeenth-century love poetry: a man asking to be excused from his own faithfulness.
"Dear! from thine arms then let me fly, / That my fantastic mind may prove / The torments it deserves to try; / That tears, which now are spent in vain, / May not be shed so much in vain."
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