The Full Text of “Absent from thee (A Song)”
1Absent from thee I languish still;
2Then ask me not when I return.
3The straying fool 'twill plainly kill
4To wish all day, all night to mourn.
5Dear! from thine arms then let me fly,
6That my fantastic mind may prove
7The torments it deserves to try
8That tears my fixed heart from my love.
9When wearied with a world of woe
10To thy safe bosom I retire,
11Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
12May I contented there expire,
13Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
14I fall on some base heart unblest,
15Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,
16And lose my everlasting rest.
The Full Text of “Absent from thee (A Song)”
1Absent from thee I languish still;
2Then ask me not when I return.
3The straying fool 'twill plainly kill
4To wish all day, all night to mourn.
5Dear! from thine arms then let me fly,
6That my fantastic mind may prove
7The torments it deserves to try
8That tears my fixed heart from my love.
9When wearied with a world of woe
10To thy safe bosom I retire,
11Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
12May I contented there expire,
13Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
14I fall on some base heart unblest,
15Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,
16And lose my everlasting rest.
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“Absent from thee (A Song)” Introduction
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"Absent from thee" is one of many poems that John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) only shared with his friends during his lifetime; it wasn't widely published until years after his death. Like a lot of Rochester's poems, this "Song" is witty, mocking, and lewd. In it, a speaker assures his lover that the best way he can prove his undying love for her is to cheat on her a lot: only through testing out the "torments" of infidelity can he be truly faithful when he returns to her. Using the shape of a love poem and the language of religious piety, Rochester satirizes traditional ideas about both love and religion. To this Restoration-era courtier, it isn't love or God, but lust that makes the world go round.
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“Absent from thee (A Song)” Summary
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When I'm away from you, I'm weak and feeble with longing. So don't ask me when I'm coming back. It would obviously kill me, wandering fool that I am, if I had to stay away and pine for you all day and night.
In that case, my darling, let me go! That way, my fantasizing brain can get a good taste of all the pains of infidelity it deserves to suffer—the infidelity that rips my devoted heart away from you, my love.
Then, when I've suffered the agony of cheating on you, and I return to the security of your breast (in which I find true love, rest, and loyalty), let me die happy with you—
Because if I don't die, I might find myself leaving the paradise of your embrace again and chasing after some lowly, unholy love—and then, being truly faithless and past redemption, I'll lose the eternal, heavenly peace of being with you.
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“Absent from thee (A Song)” Themes
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Infidelity and the Power of Lust
The insincere speaker of “Absent for thee” assures his beloved that he longs for her when he’s away from her—and then goes on to say that she should therefore let him sleep around, knowing that he’ll always come back to his true love for her in the end. His flowery declarations of eternal passion sound less than sincere, however—especially when he hopes to die in his lover’s arms, but only because that’s the one way he can guarantee he won’t cheat on her again! This satirical poem plays on all the tropes of love poetry to deliver a deeply unromantic message: the power of lust, this speaker suggests, beats the power of love any day.
While the speaker assures his lover that his pure, deep affection for her will always win out over his dalliances with other women, he’s not-so-subtly implying that the exact opposite is true. His argument that he needs to test out the “torments” of infidelity so that he can appreciate his love for her more deeply is really just an excuse to keep sleeping around.
Even if he does have sincere feelings for his lover, the poem suggests, they’re never going to be powerful enough to rein in his lust. And in any case, he doesn’t seem too interested in even trying to restrain himself: after all, this whole poem is an argument that he should get to sleep with whomever he wants.
Comparing his lover to a precious “heaven” that his infidelity might expel him from, the speaker suggests that her love is like paradise: but even paradise isn’t powerful enough to make him give up other women. Imagining how he’d love to “expire” in his lover’s heavenly embrace, he goes on to say that, if he doesn’t die in her arms, he’s probably going to go right back to philandering, “faithless” to her holy love: that is, only death has the power to stop him from sleeping around. By framing this argument in religious terms, he suggests that neither the laws of God nor man can stand up to his lust: his sexual appetite can and will overpower any barrier short of death itself.
To this speaker, big ideas about love and holiness are dust in the wind compared to the power of sexuality. Neither affection nor the threat of damnation can quench his ravenous sexual appetite. Only fools fall in love, this poem suggests: those in the know attend solely to their own pleasure.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Absent from thee (A Song)”
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Lines 1-4
Absent from thee I languish still;
Then ask me not when I return.
The straying fool 'twill plainly kill
To wish all day, all night to mourn.The first line of "Absent from thee" makes it seem as if this is going to be an old-school love poem. The speaker begins with an apostrophe to his lover, telling her that, while he's away from her, he "languish[es]," practically wilting from his longing for her. So far, so familiar.
But the second line abruptly changes course. "Knowing that I long for you when I'm away," the speaker basically goes on, "can you please stop bugging me about when I'm going to come back?"
It's not just the meaning of this question that feels like an abrupt change, but the sound. Listen to the way consonance works in these first two lines:
Absent from thee I languish still;
Then ask me not when I return.The first line repeats languorous, liquid /l/ sounds; the second, on the other hand, is marked with crisp, curt /t/ sounds. It's as if the speaker moves speedily from flattering his lover to cutting her off.
Already, then, readers get the sense that this "love poem" isn't what it seems. This will be a poem, not about true love, but about the speaker's desire to have as much sex as he likes with whomever he likes.
His one problem is that his current girlfriend isn't so into that idea. As such, he'll communicate his real desires in the language of love poetry, framing his plans to sleep around as an expression of sincere affection for the lady he's addressing. This poem will be a satire of love poetry, and even of the clichéd "power of love" itself: love's power, this speaker will suggest, is no match for the force of lust.
The rest of this stanza shows exactly how the speaker will go about mocking the conventions of love and poetry. Having warned his girlfriend to stop asking him when he's coming back, he goes on to add that it would absolutely kill him to stay away from her any longer. But take another look: he doesn't exactly say that it would kill him to stay away, but that it would kill a hypothetical "straying fool"—that is, the sincere, devoted kind of lover he's mocking here.
He conceals that sly little moment in florid poetic language. Take a look at how he uses chiasmus in line 4 here:
The straying fool 'twill plainly kill
To wish all day, all night to mourn.The flipped grammar there draws a lot of attention to itself—and makes it sound as if the speaker is putting on an elegant Poet Voice to deliver his insincere message of love. Watch out for that kind of dramatic, disingenuous poetic diction: this speaker is about to use it a lot.
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Lines 5-8
Dear! from thine arms then let me fly,
That my fantastic mind may prove
The torments it deserves to try
That tears my fixed heart from my love. -
Lines 9-12
When wearied with a world of woe
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire, -
Lines 13-16
Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblest,
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,
And lose my everlasting rest.
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“Absent from thee (A Song)” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
The speaker of "Absent from thee" uses moments of strong alliteration to make his insincere "love" song sound all the more dramatic.
For instance, take a look at the intense alliteration in line 9:
When wearied with a world of woe
All those /w/ sounds in a row draw a lot of attention to themselves—and help to underline the speaker's insincerity. This is a line in which the speaker imagines how exhausted he'll eventually be by the "woe" (or sorrow) of sleeping around—a "woe" that might not actually be all that woeful for him.
Here, his alliteration is so dramatic it's almost silly, and works like a nudge and a wink, letting readers know that this stormy "woe" is purely imaginary. (It also draws attention to the possible joke in the word "wearied": perhaps the speaker will indeed be pretty worn out after sleeping with every woman in a ten-mile radius.)
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Consonance
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Apostrophe
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End-Stopped Line
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Extended Metaphor
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Cliché
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Repetition
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Asyndeton
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"Absent from thee (A Song)" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Thee, Thine, Thy
- Languish
- Still
- Straying
- 'Twill
- Plainly
- Fly
- Fantastic
- Prove
- Torments
- Fixed
- Bosom
- Retire
- Expire
- Lest
- Base
- Unblest
- Faithless
- False
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"Thee," "thine," and "thy" are old-fashioned ways of saying "you" and "your." While they might sound fancy now, they were once an intimate and informal way to address someone.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Absent from thee (A Song)”
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Form
"Absent from thee" is a song, a musical little poem with an even, balanced shape. It's built from four quatrains (stanzas of four lines apiece).
This is a deceptively simple shape for a poem with a sting in its tail. At first glance, this looks like a classic love song, in which a lover pours his heart out in melodious verse. The speaker here wittily uses that shape to smuggle in a rather unromantic proposition: that his girlfriend should let him "try" the "torments" of infidelity so that he can fully appreciate how good it is to be with her.
Using the form of a love song to write a poem about sexual infidelity, Rochester slyly satirizes traditional ideas about romance.
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Meter
The basic meter in "Absent from thee" is iambic tetrameter. That means that each line uses four iambs, metrical feet that follow an unstressed-stressed, da-DUM rhythm, like this:
Then ask | me not | when I | return.
Iambic rhythms are common in English poetry, but they're especially well-suited to poems that deal with love and sex: that da-DUM rhythm sounds a lot like a pounding heartbeat.
This poem likes to play with that basic iambic pattern. Even in the very first line, the speaker experiments with his stresses, starting the poem with a trochee (a stressed-unstressed foot, DUM-da) rather than an iamb:
Absent | from thee | I lan- | guish still;
In fact, that pattern shows up more than once: you can also find a trochee at the start of lines 5 and 15. Wherever one of these initial trochees appears, it gives the poem a little extra oomph. Whether the speaker is exclaiming "Dear!" or imagining how "Faithless" he might end up being, his trochees make him sound insistent and serious—an effect that only serves his own selfish ends.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Absent from thee" uses a steady rhyme scheme throughout. It runs like this:
ABAB
This musical pattern is a tried-and-true rhyme scheme for a "song," and fits in with the way this speaker uses the conventions of love poetry to deliver his unconventional message.
While the basic rhyme scheme stays steady across the poem, some of the rhymes here aren't perfect, but slant: "return" and "mourn" in the first stanza, and "heaven" and "unforgiven" in the last stanza. Perhaps those little mismatches gesture at the "mismatch" between this poem's romantic style and its deeply unromantic meaning. (Note, though, that another rhyme a modern reader might hear as slant, "prove" and "love," was likely to have matched perfectly in Rochester's time!)
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“Absent from thee (A Song)” Speaker
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The speaker of "Absent from thee" is an insincere, smooth-talking, lustful charmer who bears a more than passing resemblance to Rochester himself—a man so famously lascivious that his contemporaries wrote plays about his philandering.
This speaker knows the language of love poetry well enough to imitate it, talking of how he "languish[es]" while separated from his beloved and longs to return to her "safe bosom." But he's using all these conventions only to argue that, really, it's in his beloved's best interests to let him cheat on her. Only by experiencing the "torments" of infidelity, he says, can he truly be faithful to her.
It doesn't take a genius to spot the ways in which this argument might be a little self-serving. But then, this knowing, witty speaker expects his reader to be in on the joke.
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“Absent from thee (A Song)” Setting
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While there's no specific setting in "Absent from thee," the poem's style and themes place it in the time and place it was composed: the court of King Charles II. The poem fits right into a tradition of 17th-century English poems in which a man tries to persuade a woman to let him do what he wants with her. The twist here is that this speaker isn't begging his lover for sex; they're already well beyond that point. Instead, he's arguing that she should let him have sex with other people—only so that he can return and be truly faithful to her, of course!
This kind of argument (and these ideas about sexuality) are straight out of the Restoration, the era when Charles II made a triumphant return to the English throne after years of exile. Charles's reinstatement marked the end of an intensely moralistic, Puritanical period of English history, and the English upper classes were more than ready for some fun. Plenty of poetry from this period reflects a hunger for wild sexual freedom.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Absent from thee (A Song)”
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Literary Context
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), was a scandalous poet in an age when people were pretty hard to scandalize. A member of King Charles II's debauched court, Rochester wrote irreverent (and often out-and-out dirty) poetry that was mostly about sex, sometimes about politics, and occasionally about both at once.
"Absent from thee," with its proclamation of unquenchable lust, fits right into Rochester's body of work. Rochester was infamously preoccupied with sex—so much so that contemporaries wrote plays about what a notorious philanderer he was. But if his lustful ways made his reputation, they also caused his downfall: he died of a venereal disease, likely syphilis, at the age of only 33.
Courtiers like Rochester saw publishing one's poetry as rather vulgar; haughty noblemen didn't want any old commoner reading their work. Instead, Rochester circulated his work in handwritten manuscripts among his fellow courtiers (some of whom, like Dryden, were important poets in their own right).
A lot of Rochester's work therefore didn't get published until long after his death. Even once he'd been recognized as an important poet, much of his poetry was so filthy that generations of scholars felt it was too scandalous to be reprinted; some of it didn't see the light until the 1960s. But much of Rochester's writing was only an intensification of themes common in Restoration poetry. Other poets of the period often wrote of infidelity and passion in veiled terms; Rochester just made things (very) explicit.
But Rochester's work also cut across the grain. In an era that valued clarity, reason, and elegance, he famously once remarked that he'd rather be a monkey or a dog than a human. Unlike humans, he observed, animals don't pat themselves on the back for being "rational"—and thus don't fool themselves into thinking they're smarter than they are.
The things that once made Rochester's poetry unmentionable have today made him famous. He's known not only as a poet, but a character, the very model of a libertine.
Historical Context
Rochester was one of the foremost writers of the Restoration: that is, the wild, fun-loving, and often debauched era that followed King Charles II's return to the English throne in 1660. Charles had been in exile since 1649, when the Puritan rebel Oliver Cromwell overthrew—and beheaded—his father, King Charles I. But the intensely moralistic government Cromwell installed in the place of the monarchy was neither popular nor stable, and it didn't take long for the country to welcome its exiled king-in-waiting back.
When Charles II took the throne, he ushered in a new era of freedom and pleasure. Cromwell, a strict Puritan, had cracked down on art, holidays, and fun in general. The canny Charles realized that one way to win his people's affections was to encourage all the pleasures that Cromwell had outlawed. His court was full of poets and artists—and also full of unbridled sexuality. The kind of wild philandering "Absent from thee" describes was just another day at work for Charles's courtiers. Rochester might have been the most famous libertine in Charles's court, but he was far from the only one; Charles himself was a notorious womanizer.
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More “Absent from thee (A Song)” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Read about Rochester's short and scandalous life at the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the poem read aloud.
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Rochester in his World — Read about how Rochester's libertine poetry fit into the Restoration court he lived and worked in.
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Rochester the Iconoclast — Read a witty article about how Rochester's lewd poetry reflects his iconoclastic philosophy.
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Rochester in Manuscript — See images of Rochester's poetry in its original form: as a handwritten manuscript meant to be passed around among courtiers.
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