ABSTRACT
This diurnal round of eating, drinking, molestation, quarrelling, theft, and exploitation seems, at first sight, to be brazenly and aggressively self-determined. The day starts when the narrator wakes and ends when he sleeps. His selfishness is inscribed on every clause; every line contains at least one use of the first-person pronoun and in no fewer than nine lines it appears twice or more. The narrator of the poem (could that be Rochester?) is unbound by any social protocols, sexual proprieties or cultural niceties? Only his fear of disease influences his behavior, ejaculating in his mistress's hand instead of her vagina.3 He sleeps in (surely a rebuttal of the Puritan work ethic), dines late and gets drunk early. He spends the evenings with his whore and, if she is unavailable, he will turn to the nearest alternative and bugger the page. The perfunctory nature of this alternative is symptomatic of the speaker's egocentricity - others exist only to satisfy his pleasure whether they be his servants against whom he rails, his whore with whom he
quarrels, or the pageboy. But the boy is only a quiet, passive receptor of the speaker' s sexual appetites and, we might add, fluids. Obviously the page's consent is unsolicited and umequired as he exists merely to satisfy and, in so doing, pacify his master, called upon when all other options have proved unavailable.4 Of all the secondary figures in the poem, it is the page who is treated most dismissively, most anonymously and most cavalierly. His being compulsorily sodomized is the final demonstration of the fiercely abusive character of the cavalier - a term which denotes a level of courtly sophistication but which has come to connote, typified by conduct like the above, haughtiness, nonchalance, arrogance, disdain, even superciliousness.
