SOURCE: Barley, Tony. “‘Upon Nothing’: Rochester and the Fear of Non-entity.” In Reading Rochester, edited by Edward Burns, pp. 98-113. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

In this essay, Barley explores Rochester's treatment of “nothing” and finds that even as he appears to be advocating non-entity the poet is anxious to distance and distinguish himself from it.

Because of its knowing exhibitionism, because of its flair, because of its mock-solemn pride in its own achievement, Rochester's poem Upon Nothing brushes aside the kind of readerly interrogation invited by similarly impressive metaphysical displays. If Donne's ‘Lecture on the Shadow’ or ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucie's Day’ or Marvell's ‘Definition of Love’, provide a recent generic pedigree for Upon Nothing, Rochester's salient improvisation on non-entity requires of its readership qualitatively less imaginative effort to succumb to its arguments and admire its paradoxes. Upon Nothing asks, supposing it asks anything of its...