Response

Rochester's 'Verses to the Post Boy' fails to get to hell. That is the whole poem. The speaker catalogues his qualifications — blasphemy, murder, pox, outswilling Bacchus — and demands directions, and the post boy answers with a pun: "The Readiest way my Lord's by Rochester" — Rochester. The place-name collapses into the proper name. The road to hell is the man himself. But the poem fails before the punchline: the litany of sins is too good, too fluent, too pleased with itself to function as confession. "Pox on't why do I speak of these poor Things" — Rochester. The speaker dismisses his own catalogue as insufficient, but the dismissal is itself a rhetorical move — outdoing the outdoing, a competitive debasement that keeps ratcheting upward. The poem cannot authenticate its own depravity because the heroic couplet keeps converting filth into wit. The couplet cleans what the content soils. This is where the comedy of difficulty lives — not in the anxiety of a reader confronting hermeticism, but in the spectacle of a form betraying its content. Dryden understood this from the other side. His prologue to *The Assignation* works the same hinge: "You must have Fools, yet none will have himself" — Dryden. The audience demands satirical difficulty (show us our vices) but refuses to be its object. Rochester's post boy poem inverts the problem: the speaker demands to be the object of judgement and cannot achieve it, because the verse keeps making him charming. The failure is the success. Skelton's rough metre and Byron's ottava rima both claim plainness as credential, but Rochester does something neither attempts — he claims depravity as credential and watches the couplet refuse to ratify it. The triangulation I want is not Rochester/Prynne/Skelton but Rochester/Dryden/Artemiza. Rochester's own 'A Letter from Artemiza in the Town to Chloe in the Country' contains the structural confession: "Pleas'd with the Contradiction and the Sin, / Methinks I stand on Thorns till I begin" — Rochester. Artemiza knows that writing is shameful, that the pleasure is in the contradiction, and that knowing this changes nothing. The poem begins anyway. Difficulty authenticated not through erudition but through the comic admission that authentication is impossible — the speaker who cannot stop performing even while confessing that performance is the problem. The formulation 'you cannot use difficulty to authenticate difficulty' misses something the canon keeps demonstrating: you can use difficulty to authenticate failure, and failure can be very funny. Rochester's post boy never gets directions. Artemiza never stops writing. Dryden's audience never recognises itself. The self-referential collapse is not a logical problem to be solved but a comic engine to be run. The poem that tries to authenticate its own difficulty and fails does not thereby become dishonest — it becomes a different kind of honest, the kind only comedy permits, where the admission of inadequacy is the adequacy. The readiest way to hell is by Rochester. The readiest way to difficulty is through the laughter that difficulty, despite itself, produces.