"Satyr [Against Reason and Mankind]"
By John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

author_John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, was born to Anne St. John, Countess of Rochester and Henry Wilmot, first earl of Rochester on April 1st, 1647, in Oxfordshire, England. In 1658, at age eleven, John Wilmot succeeded his fathers’ Earldom. Just three years later, Wilmot received an M.A. from Wadham College, Oxford. Charles II, King of Great Britain and Ireland at the time, appointed Rochester a tutor to be mentored by. Rochester and his tutor, Sir Andrew Balfour travelled through France and Italy until 1664 when Rochester returned to Charles’ court. In his time at court, Wilmot became one of the most famous poets and controversial satirists of the Restoration period. In the collection The Poems of John Wilmot, editor Keith Walker notes that Rochester’s raucous lifestyle and many vices--some characteristics of his libertinism--often garnered contempt from the king’s court. Though he was a notable poet, Rochester acted as a patron to many playwrights including John Dryden and John Fletcher. The latter part of the 1670s saw Rochester contribute more seriously to the affairs of the state. On his deathbed, Rochester is said to have called upon his close friend, the bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, to recant his past libertinism and convert to Christianity. Rochester died on July 26th, 1680, in Oxfordshire, at the age of thirty-three. The image included here (NPG 804), licensed under Creative Commons, is a portrait in oil on canvas of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester by an unknown artist (c.1665-1670), via the National Portrait Gallery, UK. As the notes to the portrait point out, "This portrait has a satirical message almost certainly of Rochester's devising. It portrays him, manuscript in hand, bestowing the poet's laurels on a jabbering monkey who is tearing out the pages of a book and handing them crumpled to the poet."

Antwerp_ 'Antwerp’ is a false imprint. James Thorpe discusses this interesting detail in The Earliest Editions of Rochester’s Poems" noting that the printings were “unlicensed books printed in London” where the false imprint was used for “simple subterfuge presumably intended to attract the lovers of racy literature or distract prosecution”.

gross_In this sense, gross refers to materiality as distinct from ethereality or spirituality. See OED adj III.8.c: describes "things material or perceptible to the senses, as contrasted with what is spiritual, ethereal, or impalpable."

ignus-fatuus_From the Latin meaning, literally, "foolish fire," an ignis fatuus is a will-o'the-wisp, a flitting phosphorescent light that led travelers astray in marshy areas like the "Fenny Bogs and Thorny Brakes" (15) Rochester describes below (OED, "ignis fatuus, n.").

wrong_Lines 29-36 explain how, from Rochester's perspective, this approach to life that prizes reason is "in the wrong."

reason_The "reasoning Enging" is the mind--here, Rochester notes that the mind is "huddled in [the] dirt" of the physical body. The body and the mind are intertwined, rather than separate.

bubbles_Here used as a noun, "bubbles" in this sense refers to those who have been fooled or cheated (OED, n.2b).

wits_ During the Restoration period in England, Charles II would often be found in the company of young intellectuals or "wits." In The Court Wits of the Restoration, John Harold Wilson writes that “the label Wit was attached only to one who made some real pretense to distinction as a poet, critic, translator, raconteur, or a man of learning" (6). Among the so-called "court wits" were Rochester, Sir John Suckling, Edmund Waller, and others. [add paraphrase from page 5 of Tilmouth: https://books.google.com/books?id=DipmhwkFfQMC

pleasure_As Jeremy Webster argues in Performing Libertinism in Charles II’s Court, “[l]ibertines...performed traditionally secretive acts— excessive drinking, carnality, sodomy, sedition, assault, and sacrilege—in the public sphere in a variety of ways” (2). Here, Rochester is talking in part about sexual pleasure that, once enjoyed, brings causes the enjoyer to fear or hate that pleasure. This fear is in part existential or philosophical--pleasure brings with it "dang'rous" (41) questions about the value of social order founded on reason--but it is also material, as in the fear of sexually transmitted infection, from which Rochester sufferred. The "succeeding pains" (40) to which he refers encapsulate both kinds of fears.

fops_In "Fops and Some Versions of Foppery," Robert B. Heilman discusses this term, noting that as a “general, all-purpose carrier of disapproval, fop works much like fool" (364).

band_According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "band" refers to an eighteenth-century neck piece traditionally worn by clergy members, scholars, and those in the legal profession (n.2.4b). In this portrait by Benjamin Wilson (c.1750) of James Bradley, third Astronomer Royal from 1742 to 1762, the band at his neck indicates his academic profession. Via the Royal Museums Greenwich online collections, this Wilson's portrait of Bradley is housed in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. )

libertinism_For Margaret Ezell, who writes about the performative quality of Restoration libertinism, Rochester's libertinism was a deliberate assertion of privilege designed to cultivate power in the court ("Enacting Libertinism: Court Performance and Literary Culture" in The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. V.). Rochester's poem is a response to the question being asked here by a hypothetical clergyman (the "formal band and beard"). Here, he is performing the persona of the pedantic, prudish curate ultimately to mock him and his moral philosophy, thereby cultivating a witty superiority.

rage_The clergyman describes Rochester's mind as "degen[e]rate," and his way of thinking, deviant. Rochester’s poem is a “Satire against Reason and Mankind”; it is fundamentally skeptical of the ability--or desirability--of reason and law to ameliorate baser human interests.

p_Simon Patrick, Bishop of Ely (1626-1707) was an English theologian and, eventually, bishop; his book The Parable of the Pilgrim (1663/4) is referenced here. Patrick's Pilgrim is an allegory along the same lines of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Patrick’s first assignment after graduating from Queen's College, Cambridge, was as a domestic chaplain to Sir Walter St. John, John Wilmot’s uncle (Dictionary of National Biography)>

s_Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), was a popular Puritan theologian, minister, and writer, in the affective tradition with intellectual connections to Calvinism. He is most well known for a work called The Bruised Reed, but Rochester here references a work this editor has not been able to trace. Other editions of the poem replace "replies" with "soliloquies," possibly suggesting a different work, Richard Bayne's Holy Soliloquies (1637)--Sibbes wa very influenced by Bayne. Regardless, all of these references are to popular theologians during the 17th century. . He, too, studied at Cambridge, but his Puritanism caused him to lose a lectureship there (Dictionary of National Biography).

bedlam_Bedlam is the colloquial term for the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, an asylum for the mentally ill first established in 1676. It was often used as a broader term for any location of perceived insanity.

sot_A sot is a stupid person, usually someone who is "stupified" with liquor or habitually drunk (OED).

comparison_Rochester compares the inflated ideology of the pedantic curate--whose "business" is "Nonsense" and "impossibilities" (86)--with the superstitions that give witches the power of flight.

power_Rochester refers here to reason as the falsely "exalted pow'r." The remainder of the poem will lay out why the poet thinks so.

tub_The word tub has a lot of meanings during this period. Proverbially,
 it is used to refer to a fiction, or a made-up story; but it also specifically
 refers to the pulpit from which a non-conformist preacher spoke. Nonconformity
 refers to any religious faith not strictly Anglican. It also has another meaning that
 Rochester would have known about--a "sweating-tub" or a sort of barrel encasing the
 body used specifically to treat venereal disease. See the OED.

action_Rochester became identified with philosophical and sexual libertinism of the Restoration, which was characterized by the public, even performative pursuit of pleasure and a vivid, almost nihilistic sexuality. Libertinism was underpinned by a selective reading of Thomas Hobbes' theory of human nature. Hobbes, according to Christopher Tilmouth, "declar[ed] that the passions, not reason, constituted the proper, primary determinants of human conduct" and "posited...a new ideal of happiness, equating felicity with a constant motion of the self from the satisfaction of one appetite to the next, and he accorded fear and the lust for power critical roles in this kinetic process" (Tilmouth 4-5). Hobbes characterized humankind in nature as in a permanent state of conflict and struggle, governed by their appetites and their passions, and to avoid this chaotic, violent state of nature, human societies contract with strong leaders to bring order to passion and law to desire: "it is manifest that, during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man" (Leviathan, XIII, para. 8). Rochester positions his libertinism as a moral freedom beyond the civil codes of contractual law. For more on Restoration libertinism, see James Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London, especially chapter 6; and Diane Maybank'sarticle for the British Library about libertinism on the Restoration stage.

reasons_Rochester compares his materialist sense of reason--reason that rightly "distinguishes by sense [perception]"--to the flawed or "false" reason of the pedantic curate, that starts with the "beyond" (97).

jowler_A common name for a dog.

m-M-- is Henry More, a rationalist Cartesian theologian who argues that God orders the world infallibly and always according to the best ends ("the best of all possible worlds"). He wrote several books, including On the Immortality of the Soul, where he sought to counter the Hobbesian view of life outside of society as "nasty, brutish, and short" and instead to prove "the exsitence of immaterial substance, or spirit, and therefore God" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy); he is most well known for his idea of the Spirit of Nature, which connected the material world to the spiritual. Like other Platonists of the 17th century, he believed that the immortality of the soul proved an afterlife, characterized by damnation or salvation. Rochester disagreed with this perspective.

beasts_In the following lines, Rochester sets up an extended comparison between the nature of violence in the animal kingdom and in the human world.

square_"To play upon the square" means to play fairly (or "fair and square," in current colloquial terms). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this expression was "[v]ery common from c1670, frequently with reference to...gaming" ("square," adj., III.12.b).

nature_In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argued that humans are completely driven by the primary drives of appetite and aversion; people are selfish at their root. In the state of nature, which is a state of war, “there is no place for industry...; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Paragraph 9, Chapter 13, Leviathan).

slaves_Rochester suggests that "the pretending part of the proud World" (175) use their supposed spiritual superiority to weild tyrranical power over other people, not recognizing that everyone is a "Slave."

court_Court here, as elsewhere, refers to the court of nobles and other people of power surrounding King Charles II (or whomever was monarch at the time). Court culture, in the Restoration, was often characterized both by stringent absolutism and a permissiveness that distinguished those of privilege. To read more about Restoration court culture, see Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660-1685, by Matthew Jenkinson.

aureal_Readers may be more familiar with the noun form ("aura") of this obsolete adjective. "Aureal Bribes" are bribes that are gilded or golden (OED).

b_Other versions of Rochester's poem replace the initial with "bishops."

fourscoreA unit of measurement, usually of time. A "score" is twenty; so, four score is four times twenty, or eighty.

if_Rochester here makes an IF/THEN logical statement. If such "[in]conceiv[ably]" (218) "meek humble M[e]n, of modest sense" (215) can be revealed, he'll "recant" (220) this poetic statement.

rabble_"Rabble" here is used as a derogatory term to refer to the masses or the common people--and "their Laws" (222)--from which mob Rochester distances himself through his libertinism. See the OED "rabble," n.1 and adj., particularly sense 3.