Rochester's "The Imperfect Enjoyment"

The incredibly explicit and crude language in this poem was rather shocking to me. Most of the sexual descriptions, if you pay attention, are either really disgusting or just bluntly explicit. My favorite couplet near the end of the poem was, "On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt/As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt" (63-64). Not that I really enjoyed those lines, but they were just so utterly explicit, creating this terrible image that was probably pretty accruate to what Rochester was describing, and it really stuck with me. He pretty much gets his point across, which partly is that whores are basically completely and totally disgusting.

I think a lot is said through the fact that this poem is written in to heroic couplet form. It really does a lot for both the flow and pace of the way the lines are read. I think because Dryden writes such sexually explicit poems with a lot of inappropriate imagery, he wants the pace to go much faster. All of the other poets we've studied used the same type of techniques to create a certain flow, but Dryden's different content is what really seperates his from the others. I think the shocking parts of the poem really need to come through at a quick pace so that readers won't linger on the lines as long as one might in a love sonnet, which usually reads much slower. Otherwise people will get put off and not continue. But the fast pace and flowing rhymes really makes you want to continue even if you really'd prefer otherwise.

Another reason for this fast paced choice of poetic form could be a way to relate with the subject matter. That is, if I'm not mistaken, pre-mature ejaculation. This speaker of the poem is so caught up in the beauty of this women whom he apparently is so in love with, that he cannot hold himself together. Several lines make this clear: "In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er...A touch from any part of her had done't:/Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt" (14, 16-17). Here even the language gets very explicit. I've also noticed that Dryden uses blazon twice in this poem. Once in the line above, and also in the first part of the poem when Dryden describes the foreplay going on between him and his lover, "With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace" (4). I think it gives a loving element to the poem because it's describing what a typical sonnet writer may include in one of his works. And this is something important to Dryden because the speaker wants his lover to know that all the other whores mean nothing to him, and that love making with her is something special. So I guess the "imperfect enjoyment" Dryden is referring to nust be the speaker's pre-ejaculatory error. This event taints the love supposed to be experienced between these two people and reminds us that love making is not always as perfect as the romantic writers illustrate it, even when it should be.