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 readers, for a take-it-or-leave-it sense of delightedly amused awe. The strength of its regal negligence acts to make the poem seemingly impregnable.

The conceptual game seems everything in ‘Upon Nothing’, which ostensibly delivers an extended descriptive definition of non-entity, but which couches the absolute with which it deals in terms of the dissolutions of a vigorously playful relativism. Knowing that his subject will of itself take the breath away, Rochester's title advertises and enacts what is to prove an unremitting sequence of dextrous disintegrations. What can be constructed upon nothing? Why, nothing, of course, and with that apodictic flourish, the poem proper begins, apostrophizing Nothing as personage, attracting Nothing's attention, engaging Nothing in one-sided dialogue, lauding Nothing with priest-like compliment, taking for granted its pre-eminent dominion over the universe.

Immediately, the absolute Nothing is conceived in terms of a relativism and a negativity which instantly destabilize much, though not all, of the sense of Nothing as a supreme idealist essence. Although Nothing can have no point of origin, Nothing is here historicized.