The Disabled Debauchee Analysis

Many of Rochester 's poems seem to drastically range in their treatment of individual topics. On one end, poems such as “The Disabled Debauchee” operate with a satirical, ironic distance, although moments of the subversive and erotic are intermittently placed throughout. Opposing that, something more akin to the lyric “Love and Life: A Song” reflects a wistful sincerity, lacking the sharp wit that characterizes his other works. In trying to reconcile this difference between the satirical and the lyric within the context of Rochester’s entire poetic canon, Katherine Mannheimer proposes “[Rochester’s poetry suggests] that human beings ought not to stay within the bounds of a single level of mentality, as it were, but rather to explore those regions

The poem begins with an extended simile about “some brave admiral, in former war / Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,”. Without any pretence, the poem’s speaker invokes the ambiguous “admiral” of the past, his place in time marked by the temporal marker of “former war.” Despite this the fact that this introduction occurs in a different time from when the speaker is, the admiral’s position is conveyed with a drastic urgency, given he is “deprived of force” yet still full of “courage.” As the admiral moves to survey the “rival fleets,” he operates in a present tense, as he “views” and “renews / His present glory and past delight;”. The admiral here distracts from the the initial arrangement of temporality that the opening lines provide, moving into his own immediate space, even able to conceptualize his own notions of the “present” and “past.” However, soon after this, the speaker interjects with “So, when my days of impotence approach,” a radical disjunct from the more serious, martial diction of the previous stanzas. We do later find out of the speaker’s past military involvement, but that information still does not necessarily account for the sudden shift between stanzas. Perhaps, Rochester implies a link between military conquest and sexual dominance, the marked end of the former reflecting on the speaker’s immediate fears of future impotence. If this is the case, sex, and by extension, love, both become intrinsically linked to time; there comes a finite point where they cannot be expressed in the same terms as before. This relationship serves to lend more meaning to the purpose of opening with the “admiral,” as the sexually virile past becomes idealized, allowing for the concerns that mark the present moment to shatter that fantasy. The nostalgic past is evoked again, as the