“I rise at eleven, I dine about two,

I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do…” 

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester 

Number Two Son sent the following link to me and my brother, a professor of ancient literature at Princeton. He said, “I thought you two would appreciate it… but you should listen to it in private…”

I was intrigued.

It was a poem by John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, who lived during the reign of Charles II in the late 17th century. The poem itself, as you will see, is bawdy. But it is also technically impressive.

I love the idea that proficiency at writing verse might have been something that the king and his gentlemen friends considered important. In that sense, Wilmot is typical of a group of courtiers of his time that are now known as the Cavalier poets. (Although back then they were sometimes referred to as “roistering gallants.”) For these aristocrats, wit and poetry were considered de rigueur for their class, just as playing the pianoforte was expected of gentle ladies a century later.

(I took a few extra minutes to write that last paragraph because I wanted to see if I could sound like a Princeton professor. My brother said, “Not quite!”)

You can hear the poem beautifully read by Douglas Murray here.