My rating: 4 stars.

An excellent read of a book my honey gave me for the holidays! I’m always a fan of poetry and have a fondness for many pieces from the 17th - 19th centuries. Rochester’s criticisms and satirical pieces presage, and likely influenced, Pope in the 18th and Byron in the 19th centuries: such cutting wit delivered in verse! The introduction and notes to this volume live up to Oxford World’s Classics standard: useful, insightful, and sometimes a pain to flip to the back to read!

I particularly liked “Song (Fair Chloris in a pig-sty lay)”, “The Fall”, “Could I but make my wishes insolent”, “What vain unnecessary things are men,” and “The Disabled Debauchee”. Of his translations and imitations, I enjoyed “Seneca’s Troas. Act 2 Chorus”, “An Allusion to Horace. The Tenth Satire of the First Book”, and “An Allusion to Tacitus. De Vita Agricolae”. His satires were amazing and the three that stood out to me were “The Imperfect Enjoyment”, “A Ramble in St. James’s Park”, and, of course, “A Satire against Reason and Mankind”. From this last piece, I especially enjoyed this snippet from the opening: “A spirit free to choose for my own share / What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear, / I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear; / Or any thing but that vain animal / Who is so proud of being rational. / The sense are too gross, and he’ll contrive / A sixth to contradict the other five, / And before certain instinct will prefer / Reason, which fifty times for one does err.” (p. 52).

The opening lines of “Tunbridge Wells” totally reminded me of the opening of Homer’s Iliad Book 11. Rochester wrote “At five this morn, when Phoebus raised his head / From Thetis' lap, I raised my self from bed” (p. 65). I had read about this in Paul Davis’s introduction, though I’d forgotten it by the time I read the poem. Davis had written “The only one of Rochester’s major poems set in the country is ‘Tunbridge Well’, and its engagement with nature extends no further than an introductory line and a half of mock-Homeric description of the sunrise” (p. xxx). The line of Homer (which I dearly love) is: “Dawn from her bed arose by the side of good Tithonos, to bring light of day to deathless gods and mortal men” (Iliad, 11.1-2, Caroline Alexander, transl.).