Valentine’s Day Special: Restoration & Augustan Impotence Poetry

Many of us, when we are young and impressionable, are taught that poetry is language made beautiful, or, conversely, beauty rendered into words. In the English-speaking world, one of the earliest rhymes we learn is that saccharine Valentine chant:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

And so are you!

For this reason, among many others, I enjoy breaking the poetic stereotype forcefully and with vigor (pardon the pun) by introducing my students to Restoration and Augustan Age impotence poetry. Impotence poetry of this time period, written in the heroic couplet form that dominated the poetry of the time, fuses together what we often think of as “poetic” language with the very “poetic” topics of love and passion and the rather “unpoetic” topic of impotence.

Pastoral scenes were popular in artworks

of the time period as well, 

such as this one, Arcadia by Frans Francken II.

Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” draws on the language and imagery of the pastoral (a common move in impotence poetry, alluding to its Ovidian origins), presenting us with the shepherd Lisander and his lover Cloris who meet in “a Thicket, made for love.” After overcoming Cloris’s fears of losing her virginity and therefore her honor and virtue, the lovers “extend themselves upon the moss” in preparation for the final “sacrifice” on the altar of love. However, we soon learn that poor Lisander, after seeing Cloris’s lovely bosom “rising” and “bare” is now “o’er ravished” and “unable to perform the sacrifice.” In the end, Cloris runs off, her virtue still intact while Lisander remains behind, blaming the innocent Cloris and her charms, “whose soft bewitching influence/ had damned him to the Hell of Impotence.”

By contrast, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who wrote many sexually-explicit poems about his penchant for “swiving,” has only himself to blame in “The Imperfect Enjoyment.” Written in the first person, a little more crass and vulgar than Behn’s refined, poetic language, “The Imperfect Enjoyment” details the bedroom amours of the narrator and his Corinna (another pastoral name). Still, despite being a little more explicit about the sexual act, the language of Rochester’s poem delights with its romance-novel euphemisms: “My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,/ hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.”

Yet, when the unfortunate lover comes too soon, he finds himself unable to perform a second time. Soon the narrator is “the most forlorn, lost man alive….I sigh, Alas! and kiss but cannot swive.” Rather than blame his lovely partner, Rochester blames himself, or, rather, his “prick”: “Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame/ False to my passion, fatal to my fame.” In the end, Rochester damns his own penis to “chancres” and “stranguary” while “a thousand abler pricks agree/ to do the wronged Corinna right for thee.” In Rochester’s poem, it is love, not lust, that renders him impotent: his penis being “so true to lewdness, so untrue to love.”

As a pair, these two poems illustrate two different approaches to the impotence poem: Rochester’s serves as a comic indictment of the libertine lifestyle while Behn’s, as beautifully-written as it is, illustrates the unjust fate of women who, like Cloris, can be both prey to sexual assault as well as damnable prudes who “bewitch” men into losing their virility and manhood. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poetic response to Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” illustrates another approach to the impotence poem: the impotence poem as poetic revenge. In Swift’s poem, he portrays in disgusting detail the inside of Celia’s dressing room. With meticulous attention to the abject and the disgusting, Swift’s Strephon “took a strict survey/ of all the litter as it lay.” Included in the survey are “various combs for various uses/ filled up with…/…A paste of composition rare/ Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair” as well as “puppy water”, a basin full of “the scrapings of her teeth and gums”, towels “begummed, bemmattered, and beslimed/ with dirt and sweat and earwax grimed”—not to mention her chamber pot! Montagu read Swift’s poem and apparently thought it a perfect illustration of a small-minded and vain little man (of course, she hated Swift for his politics too).

A lady at her toilette.

As a response to the poem, Montagu published her poem, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room.” In her version, Strephon is obviously Swift, and Celia is no better and no worse than a prostitute whom Swift tries to gain admittance to with “gallantry and wit” but who, in the end, must pay his four pounds for Betty’s charms. (In Montagu’s version, the poetic Celia is an everyday Betty.) Once inside Betty’s room, “the reverend lover with surprise/ peeps in her bubbies and her eyes/ and kisses both and tries—and tries.” Montagu’s Swift/Strephon is nothing but a “Fumbler”, as Betty calls him, whose “sixty odd” years have taken a toll on his sexual abilities. She refuses to return his money, even after he exclaims that the fault is not in him, but rather in the state of her chamber: “Your damned close stool so near my nose/ Your dirty smock and stinking toes” would make even a Hercules lose his mojo, he claims. Montagu further jests at Swift’s expense, writing that the “disappointed dean” of the poem proclaims he will write a poem that describes Betty’s mess in such detail, “the very Irish shall not come.” Betty’s delightful reply, which finishes out the poem, is “I’m glad you’ll write/ You’ll furnish paper when I shite.”

Restoration and eighteenth-century writers were fascinated with exploring sexual politics in their poetry, and the growing number of female writers at this time meant that women could bring their own views on sex and desire into the conversation. While poetry that concerns itself with love, relationships, longing, and lost love often dominates what we think of as poetry, the sub-genre of impotence poetry can be, in some ways, more revealing about social attitudes towards the body, failure, and the human condition even as it changes our idea of what poetry can be and what it should be. Lastly, for those of us working on the history of sexuality, impotence poetry puts the body and notions of embodiment front and center in ways that are fascinating and humorous.