Mourn, mourn, ye Muses, all your loss deplore,
The young, the noble Strephon is no more.
In the first two lines of the poem, Behn accomplishes two literary master-strokes: she acknowledges and then subverts the traditional invocation of the Muses, and she reframes a notorious libertine as an innocent pastoral shepherd.
Satire has lost its art, its sting is gone
Wilmot was a well known satirist, and responsible for the popularization of satire and sarcasm in literature. With Wilmot dead, the genre has suffered a significant loss.
The last reproacher of your vice is dead.
By presenting Wilmot as a person who used his gift of satire to "reproach" vice, Aphra Behn neatly avoids mentioning the fact that Wilmot was a key figure in the drunken revelries surrounding the King, having enabled and even explicitly encouraged vice and debauchery.
Fix your fair eyes upon your victimed slave,
Sent gay and young to his untimely grave.
Wilmot died at age 33 of what was believed to be complications from alcoholism and venereal disease. With these lines, Behn assigns partial blame for his death to the women Wilmot actively seduced.
When great Augustus filled the peaceful throne;
Had he the noble wond’rous poet seen,
And known his genius, and surveyed his mien,
(When wits, and heroes graced divine abodes),
He had increased the number of their gods;
The royal judge had temples rear’d to’s name,
And made him as immortal as his fame;
Here Behn introduces some political commentary. Augustus Caesar, regarded as one of the greatest monarchs of history, would sometimes elevate a deceased person to the status of a god or goddess by having temples erected and having sacrifices made, bestowing upon the deceased person the closest possible thing to immortality. No such public recognition awaits the late Earl of Rochester, who must cross the river Styx never to return. There is a subtle criticism of royal policy in these lines. Wilmot was banished from the court of Charles II several times for inappropriate, unethical behavior that ranged from ill-advised seductions to fistfights or alcohol-fueled destruction of the King's property. In these lines, Behn suggests that a greater monarch would have been better able to recognize and appreciate Wilmot's genius and superiority.
