The overall character of the Restoration court (1660–1685) of Charles II (1630–1685) may have been something like an after-the-fact Mardi Gras. And John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), was the one who gave poetic voice to its most dissipated extremes. If Charles — father to no legitimate heirs but to at least fourteen illegitimate ones by various mistresses — was every Commonwealth puritan’s nightmare, it was Rochester who set down in writing precisely and graphically what life behind that court’s closed doors was like.

Unsurprisingly, while he lived, the bulk of his poems passed privately from hand to hand. Only a pair of satires appeared for public consumption in his lifetime. The relatively chaste “Poems on Several Occasions” (beloved of Barbara Pym’s daydreamy fictional spinster, Belinda Bede) was published in 1580, shortly after his death. Nobody has ever for one minute wondered at his dying of venereal disease at thirty-three. Nobody particularly wonders why it took more than three centuries for his works to be compiled. The Victorians, for all that went on behind their own closed doors, weren’t about to publish a Collected Rochester. 

Yet at his death, his fellow poets praised him, and not for his bawdiness. He was eulogized and quoted by the likes of Andrew Marvell (whose “The Mower to the Glow-Worms” has run as the Sun’s Poem of the Day), by Aphra Benn, and by Daniel Defoe. His reputation had crossed the English Channel as well. Voltaire spoke of him as “the man of genius,” whose satires breathed “energy and fire.” 

In today’s poem, we find that “man of genius” in a turn of mind that recalls the Elizabethans: Chidiock Tichborne, for example, the Tudor Catholic whose “Elegy,” the Sun’s Poem of the Day last August, was composed in the shadow of the headsman’s upraised ax. Here, too, in three five-line stanzas with an abaab rhyme scheme — tetrameter in the a lines, trimeter in the b — a young man recalls his vanished life as a transitory dream. Yet even on his deathbed, he winks at his mistress. As he has only this all-too-fleeting now at his disposal, he might as well devote it, with every appearance of fidelity, to her. 

Life and Love: A Song
by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

All my past life is mine no more,
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams giv’n o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

The time that is to come is not;
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot;
And that, as fast as it is got,
Phyllis, is only thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows;
If I, by miracle, can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
’Tis all that Heav’n allows.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.