A Song (Absent from Thee)

John Wilmot

AO3

• Restoration period

  • Hedonism comes about

  • the pendulum of England’s morality swings from repression to license free

  • Comedic theatre very popular

• Known for bawdy, carpe diem nature

  • ‘Wild behaviour’ ‘Wickedest man in England’

  • Satirist credited by Marvell

  • One of Charles II’s women, Nell Gwyn, was a mistress of Rochester’s

• song

  • Common form of court entertainment

  • cannot be read too seriously

• fool

  • Character in classic theatre

  • role in court

• fall on some base heart

  • The fall of man and original sin

  • connotations of temptation around his infidelity and connotations of God around the woman he is trying to convince

AO4

• Infidelity

  • Non sum qualis

• Unattainable Love, barriers to love

  • Garden of love

• Gatsby

  • ‘The straying Fool’

  • ‘once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself’

  • ‘Absent from thee I languish still’

  • ‘he had thrown himself into it with a creative passion’

  • ‘lose my everlasting rest’

  • ‘only the dead dream fought on’

AO5

• ‘The relationship between the speaker and his addressee resembles the one between an errant sinner and God’

AO5

• Thormahalen

  • ‘His mind possesses no power to keep him off certain misery and it is obviously unlikely to ever gain such strength; in other words, only death can stop his straying’