A Nocturnal Reverie

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A Nocturnal Reverie

ANNE FINCH
1713

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM TEXT
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

During her lifetime, Anne Finch received limited recognition as a poet, despite the care she took with her writing. She was an aristocrat and a woman, therefore few took her work seriously. In the twentieth century, Finch's work was rediscovered and appreciated. Written in 1713, Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie" is among the works that has garnered serious critical attention for the poet. Characteristically Augustan in style and content, the poem contains classical references and descriptions of nature (particularly flowers and the moon) that are consistent with the English Augustan Age. Some consider the poem to be a precursor to the romantic movement. This position is supported by the fact that William Wordsworth, one of the fathers of romantic literature in English, referenced Finch's poem in the supplement to the preface of the second edition of his famous collection Lyrical Ballads (1815), coauthored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The poem is serene in tone and rich in imagery. Finch creates a natural scene that is inviting and relaxing—a nighttime wonderland that, unfortunately, must be left as daybreak approaches. The speaker is saddened that dawn is coming and she must return to the harsh reality of the world and the day. This poem remains one of Finch's best-loved and most-anthologized works. It appears in 2003's Anne Finch: Countess of Winchilsea: Selected Poems, edited by Denys Thompson.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, was born in April 1661 to Anne Haselwood and Sir William Kingsmill. Finch was their third child, and would be their last, as William died when Finch was only five months old. Fortunately, William made arrangements for all of his children's educations before his death. After her mother was remarried to Sir Thomas Ogle in 1662, the couple had a daughter named Dorothy who was a close sister and lifelong friend to Finch. Anne died, leaving Thomas with the formidable task of rearing four young children alone. All were under seven years old at the time.

Finch was a member of Charles II's court at the age of twenty-one, when she became a maid of honor to Mary of Modena, wife of the Duke of York. There she befriended other young women with literary interests, and Finch began to dabble in poetry. She also met Colonel Heneage Finch, a soldier and courtier appointed as Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York. The Colonel courted the young maid until she agreed to marry him in 1684 and leave her position in the court. By all accounts, the marriage was happy for both of them. He continued to work in government affairs, and they first lived in Westminster before moving to London when Colonel Finch became increasingly involved with work duties upon the accession of King James II in 1685. The Finches' support of James and their Stuart sympathies cost Colonel Finch his position when James was deposed in 1688. Because Colonel Finch refused to compromise his beliefs and give his support to William and Mary, he had difficulty finding a new job. Colonel Finch's nephew encouraged the couple to live on the family estate in Eastwell, where they spent the next twenty-five years. The Colonel became the Earl of Winchilsea in 1712.

Through the ups and downs of her early years in marriage, Finch's interest in writing did not wane. Taking the pseudonym "Ardelia," she wrote poetry about her husband, whom she loved and honored. A tendency to express personal feelings in her poetry would continue as she matured in her writing; her poetry became a sort of diary through which she related personal experiences, feelings, religious convictions, and observations about the world around her. At the same time, her work reflects knowledge of and respect for seventeenth-century poetry and the conventions that characterize it. Biblical allusions, or references, appear in her work, as do metaphysical tendencies in imagery and verse that combines the spiritual and the logical. Fables became a sizeable part of her writing, comprising nearly one-third of her total work. Still, it has been poems such as "A Nocturnal Reverie" and "The Spleen" that have kept Finch's work in the canon of English literature of interest to scholars.

Because of her early position in the court and her husband's political career, Finch retained an interest in the throne, religion, and the politics of the day. Her early poetry reflects on the days she spent in court and how much she enjoys those memories; her later poetry reveals a mature understanding of the gravity of the politics surrounding the throne, and the seriousness of taking a stand for one's loyalties.

Although some of Finch's work was published beginning in 1701, it was not until the appearance of her 1713 collection Miscellany Poems that she began to enjoy limited recognition by her contemporaries. To most, the idea of a woman writing serious poetry was still a bit far-fetched. It was not until the twentieth century that her work began to receive much critical attention. A modern edition of her work was published in 1903, and various poems appear in major anthologies and studies of women's writing.

After enduring failing health for a number of years, Finch died on August 5, 1720. She was buried in Eastwell. At her funeral, her husband honored her memory by expressing to those in attendance how much he admired her faith, her loyalty, her friendship and support, and her writing.

POEM TEXT

In such a night, when every louder wind

Is to its distant cavern safe confined;

And only gentle Zephyr fans his wings,

And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings;

Or from some tree, famed for the owl's delight,          5

She, hollowing clear, directs the wanderer right;

In such a night, when passing clouds give place,

Or thinly veil the heavens' mysterious face;

When in some river, overhung with green,

The waving moon and trembling leaves are seen;          10

When freshened grass now bears itself upright,

And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite,

Whence springs the woodbind and the bramble-rose,

And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows;

Whilst now a paler hue the foxglove takes,              15

Yet checkers still with red the dusky brakes;

When scattered glow-worms, but in twilight fine,

Show trivial beauties watch their hour to shine;

Whilst Salisbury stands the test of every light,

In perfect charms, and perfect virtue bright;           20

When odors, which declined repelling day,

Through temperate air uninterrupted stray;

When darkened groves their softest shadows wear,

And falling waters we distinctly hear;

When through the gloom more venerable shows             25

Some ancient fabric, awful in repose,

While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal,

And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale:

When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads,

Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads,       30

Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear,

Till torn-up foliage in his teeth we hear:

When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,

And unmolested kine rechew the cud;

When curlews cry beneath the village walls,             35

And to her straggling brood the partridge calls;

Their shortlived jubilee the creatures keep,

Which but endures, whilst tyrant man does sleep;

When a sedate content the spirit feels,

And no fierce light disturbs, whilst it reveals;        40

But silent musings urge the mind to seek

Something, too high for syllables to speak;

Till the free soul to a composedness charmed,

Finding the elements of rage disarmed,

O'er all below a solemn quiet grown,                    45

Joys in the inferior world, and thinks it like her own:

In such a night let me abroad remain

Till morning breaks, and all's confused again;

Our cares, our toils, our clamors are renewed,

Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued.            50

POEM SUMMARY

"A Nocturnal Reverie" is a fifty-line poem describing an inviting nighttime scene and the speaker's disappointment when dawn brings it to an end, forcing her back to the real world. It is written in iambic pentameter, a meter that consists of five feet (or units), each containing an unstressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Moreover, it is written in heroic couplets—two lines of rhyming verse in iambic pentameter, usually self-contained so that the meaning of the two lines is complete without relying on lines before or after them.

Lines 1-5

The poem's opening phrase is repeated three times over the course of the poem, and originates in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. It becomes a sort of refrain that pulls the reader through the poem. The speaker describes a night in which all harsh winds are far away, and the gentle breeze of Zephyr, Greek god of the west wind, is soothing. The other winds are characterized as louder; therefore, the speaker is subtly making a comparison. She does this in other ways throughout the poem, contrasting the near-perfection of her surroundings with other, lesser settings. It communicates the idea that she is in the most perfect place on earth.

The song of a nightingale (Philomel) is heard, along with the sound of an owl. Both sounds are inviting and cheerful. Bird sounds at night are familiar and something to which the reader can readily relate. This makes it easier for the reader to surrender to the imagery of the poem. More birds will enter the sense imagery of the poem, but not until near the end.

Lines 6-10

Clouds pass gently overhead, at times allowing the sky to shine through to the speaker. The distant night sky is depicted as enigmatic and elusive. There is a river with large trees hanging their leaves over it, and as it flows, its surface reflects the leaves and the moon. The reflections have movement, which simultaneously brings the moon and the leaves to life while also reminding the reader of the aforementioned breeze. The leaves shake partly because of the flow of the river, but also because the leaves themselves are moving with the wind.

Lines 11-15

Fresh grass stands strong and upright, suggesting that this poem takes place during spring. The grass seems to be freshly grown and maybe even recently rained upon. The grass invites the speaker to rest in it on the banks of the river. Various plants and flowers, including woodbind, bramble-rose, cowslip, and foxglove, grow there. The speaker describes the plants and flowers as not only being colorful but also as almost having personalities and interactions with one another. The images of the trees, the descriptions of overgrown foliage, and the mention of flowers being sheltered indicates that this is a shady area during the day, meaning it is especially cozy at night.

Lines 16-20

The speaker then notices that glowworms have appeared during the twilight hour, and she comments that their beauty can only last a limited time because they rely on the dark to show their light. The speaker then mentions a lady named Salisbury (who is believed to have been a friend's daughter), whose beauty and virtue are superior to the glowworms because they hold up in any light.

Lines 21-25

The speaker's senses next pick up certain aromas that are not present during the day but only waft through the night air. It is as if they were waiting for just the right air for their arrival. Again, Finch enlivens nature through personification. She describes groves that, with little light, are softened with the near absence of shadow. In the distance, she hears a waterfall.

Lines 26-30

A large edifice seems menacing in the darkened setting, and unshaded hills are hidden. In a field, there are haystacks and a horse grazing.

Lines 31-35

The horse's slow pace across the field seems sneaky and his large shadow frightening, until the sound of his eating grass sets the speaker at ease. She suggests that the darkness sometimes makes people fearful of what they cannot see, but once she recognizes it is only a horse, her fear vanishes. She next mentions sheep grazing and cows chewing their cud without being bothered by anyone at all, and then she turns her attention to what the birds are doing. She hears the curlews.

Lines 36-40

The partridge calls out for her young. All of this sound she considers celebratory noise carrying on while men sleep; at night, nature is free of man's rules and domination. She also remarks that the nighttime celebration does not last long. The speaker contemplates the relaxation and contentment of the setting, which is free of strong and piercing light.

Lines 41-45

The speaker describes how the scene inspires silent, peaceful musings about profound things that are hard to put into words. In fact, according to the speaker, it is impossible in such a setting for a person to hold onto anger. The serenity and seriousness of her spirit embraces the charm and joy of nature in such a way that her very soul is engaged.

Lines 46-50

As the poem draws to a close, the speaker longs to stay in the nighttime world of nature until morning comes and forces her back into her world of confusion. In the daytime, in man's world, there are the worries of everyday life, the complications of living in society, work that must be done, and sounds that are not relaxing; however, she adds that people continue their pursuit of pleasure in the day. Because the poem's title refers to a reverie, the reader is left wondering if the entire experience was a dream, or if her musings on the river bank were the dreamy state to which it refers.

THEMES

Natural World versus Civilized World

The speaker evokes a strong sense of serenity and escape in "A Nocturnal Reverie." The speaker has left her ordinary life behind in favor of exploring the inviting and relaxing nighttime landscape. Everything from the sights, sounds, and smells of the night creates an almost perfect world that comforts her and allows her the luxury of going deeply into her own thoughts and feelings. At no point does she feel lonely or hurried because nature in the twilight provides everything her real self—her spiritual self—needs.

In contrast, the world of her day-lit society is depicted as restrictive and overpowering. It lacks all the peace and sensitivity of the natural setting she enjoys at night. Although Finch's fifty lines only contain four that refer to the civilized world, they are enough to demonstrate the sharp contrast at the heart of "A Nocturnal Reverie." In line 38, men are described as tyrannical beings. When they sleep is when nature can enjoy its celebratory expression. The implication is that when man is awake and moving through the world, nature's full glory is suppressed. It also implies that man really has no idea how alive nature is when he is out of the way. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker longs to remain in the nighttime setting. She resists returning to her everyday world of worrying and working. The pleasures of that world, she feels, are pursued but rarely reached.

Nature as Living Community

Finch portrays nature in "A Nocturnal Reverie" as a lively and animated community of animals, trees, flowers, plants, clouds, aromas, grass, wind, and water. These elements of nature are described as if they have feelings, opinions, and joy. The wind is not merely a lucky turn of the weather, but an act by the Greek god of the west wind himself. The owl sounds in the night for the purpose of leading the speaker to the right place. Clouds do not randomly float across the sky but act to hide and reveal the mysterious night sky. Grass stands tall of its own accord. The cowslip is sleepy, and the foxglove goes pale. Glowworms seize the right moment to show off their light, knowing that they can only do so for a limited time. Odors intentionally wait until evening to come out, when the air is more suitable. An edifice is both venerable and resting, and hills have expressions hidden by the night. The entire scene is a jubilee, a group celebration shared by the elements of nature and witnessed by the speaker. In the poem, nature is active instead of passive, and relational instead of merely existing. In short, the speaker brings nature to life in the same way that describing a person makes him or her seem like a real person to those who do not know him or her. The message behind this approach is that nature is alive and has much more to offer than aesthetic value. Finch is suggesting that nature can teach and minister to people wise enough to submit to it.

Escape

The poem's title bears the word reverie which is a dream or dream-like state. The poem is so rich, lavish, and utterly inviting, the reader must wonder if the speaker is describing a dream she had just before she awoke in the morning, or if she actually wandered through nature at night and, in her relaxation, fell into a dreamlike state. After all, as she rests on the riverbank, she describes thinking about things that are hard to put into words, and she admits the experience of being in that setting is spiritual. Either way, the appeal of the nocturnal setting she describes is that it affords her the opportunity to escape completely her humdrum daytime life. At the end of the poem, she describes the day as a time of confusion, work, and worry. She longs to stay in her reverie because it is an escape, real or imagined, from the life that makes her feel oppressed.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

"A Nocturnal Reverie" is rich in imagery and sensory descriptions. Find three to five works of art that, when combined, give a sense of the poem's setting. Create a display that features the artwork and the poem. If you can find nature sounds that are consistent with the poem, add those for a multimedia experience.
The speaker lovingly embraces the serenity of nature at night. How does being outside at night make you feel? Drawing on your personal experiences, write a poem or a prose piece expressing your thoughts and feelings in such a different set of surroundings. The speaker prefers this setting to that of her everyday life. Which setting do you prefer?
Some scholars claim that this poem was a pre-romantic poem. Read about the romantic movement in England to find out what the writers were trying to accomplish and what the poetry of the movement was like. Who were the major poets of the time? Read at least five romantic poems and write an essay examining how Finch's poem is like or unlike the other romantic poems you have selected.
Finch was hindered in seriously pursuing poetry by her society and her status in it. Who were some of the first prominent women poets in England? What were their backgrounds and what subjects did they choose for their work? Create a digital "Hall of Fame" (in the form of a Web site or multimedia slideshow) presenting your findings in writing and in images.

STYLE

Syntax

This poem is one continuous telling of the speaker's experience; it tells a story in a clear path from the beginning to the end. Although it is fifty lines long, there is no period until the very end. Still,

Finch's command of the verse is steady throughout the poem and it never feels out of control or rambling. In fact, Finch controls the poem so carefully that all of the dreamy language and imaginative scenes are expressed in heroic couplets from start to finish. The effect of the ongoing punctuation is that the poem reads like a natural flow of thought as the speaker experiences the nighttime setting and allows her feelings to respond. It also propels the poem forward; as there are no hard breaks brought on by periods, other punctuation such as colons, commas, and semicolons instead serve to show the reader how one thought or image leads to the next. By the time the reader gets to line 39, in which the speaker describes her relaxed spirit surrendering to high-level spiritual thoughts, the reader is already accustomed to an almost stream-of-consciousness feel. Like the speaker, the reader experiences the flow and relaxation of the nighttime setting.

Personification

Using personification, Finch breathes life into the natural elements in "A Nocturnal Reverie" so thoroughly that the scene seems populated with friends, old and new, rather than with trees, animals, and breezes. Every element that the speaker encounters in her nighttime adventure is alive and familiar because it possesses some characteristic or behavior that seems human. Personification is a literary device with which the author assigns human characteristics to non-human entities and is similar to anthropomorphism. When an author employs anthropomorphism, he or she assigns these human characteristics literally, such as having a character who is a talking animal. Finch, however, opts for the more subtle device of personification, bringing her setting to life through figures of speech that humanize the natural elements. Examples in "A Nocturnal Reverie" include the owl directing the visitor where to go, the grass intentionally standing up straight, the glowworms enjoying showing off their light, the aromas that choose when they will float through the air, the night sky and the hills having faces, and the portrayal of the entire scene as one in which all of nature celebrates together. Ultimately, Finch's use of personification evokes the theme of nature as a living community.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Glorious Revolution of 1688

James II was the king of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1685-88. He was a Catholic king whose strong arm angered and disgruntled Protestant Britain. He succeeded his brother King Charles II, who died in 1685 after achieving a peaceful working relationship between the king and Parliament. James was less interested in a mutual sharing of power, and quickly grabbed power back from Parliament. Not only did he stand firmly on his Catholicism and his staunch view of the divine right of kings, he also lacked diplomacy. Because James did not seem likely to produce an heir, whereas his Protestant brother already had children, most of James's opponents were willing to tolerate a temporary Catholic rule on the hope that another Protestant reign was in the offing.

When James set about aggressively restoring Catholicism as the predominant religion in Great Britain, he attempted to enlist Parliament to pave the way by overturning certain legislation that got in his way. Rebellions against the king did nothing to slow him down in his mission. When James assigned handpicked judges to the King's Bench, or high court of common law, he began to make real headway; he was able to appoint staunch Catholics to various government posts, along with positions in the military and academia. When Church leaders, especially a group of bishops, resisted James's orders to bring politics to the pulpit, the winds began to blow more strongly against James. Then James and his wife gave birth to an heir, which provoked his opponents to take action.

In June 1688, seven prominent political leaders from both the Whig and the Tory parties sent a letter to Holland to William III of Orange. The clandestine letter encouraged William to come to England, overthrow James, and assume the throne. William was chosen because he was Protestant and also in the Stuart bloodline. The letter was well timed for William, as the Dutch Republic faced war with France. Having the English military on his country's side would make all the difference. He arrived in England in November, and by December, he had overthrown James in the Glorious Revolution, at the conclusion of which James fled to France.

A convention parliament met to arrange for the lawful transfer of the crown to William and his wife, Mary. On February 13, 1689, the two officially assumed the throne. Finch's husband, Colonel Heneage Finch, built a career in government affairs and was active in James II's court. The Finches' refusal to support William and Mary after James was deposed created some difficulties for the couple.

Augustan Age in England

"A Nocturnal Reverie" is strongly associated with Augustan writing in England. The term comes from the rule of Emperor Augustus in Rome, who was known for his love of learning and careful attention to writing. In Great Britain, the dominant writers of what is considered the Augustan Age were Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sir Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison. The exact dates of this age are a matter of debate; some put them as following Queen Anne's reign (1702-14), while others equate them with the life of Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Writing during this period intentionally paid homage to classical literature, using allusion to draw parallels between their own world and that of the ancients. The novel saw tremendous growth as a literary form, satire was popular, and poetry took on a more personal character. Writers often addressed political issues and concerns, yet did so from a philosophical or detached position. The serious writer was more of a keen observer of the world, rather than a figure trying to assert influence over his readers. Of course, in making observations, writers did exert a certain amount of influence, and this was especially seen through the satire that so characterized much Augustan writing.

In poetry, Pope was the primary writer and representation of the Augustan Age. Poetry gave satire another venue, but poetry grew in its purpose in the Augustan Age. Poets adhered to conventions of form and versification, but also experimented with adaptations. For example, a traditional form might be applied to a subject not normally associated with that form. Most notably, Augustan poets used classical forms to make modern statements. For example, a classical poem could be recast in a seventeenth-century setting or could merely be retold in a way that thinly veiled criticism of current events. Poetry was not only political and social, and an increasing body of work showed how personal poetry could be, and how well it suited the poet's need to reflect on his or her world. Many scholars have argued that the seeds of romanticism are in the Augustan Age.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1713: Few aristocratic women attempt to become serious poets, regardless of their skill or education. Women generally are not considered major literary figures. A woman trying to position herself as a serious poet would invite ridicule from the social elite and potentially embarrass her family.
Today: Women are some of the most popular, celebrated, and frequently published poets. Many of the most well-known living poets are women, including Adrienne Rich and Louise Glück. Numerous women have earned the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, including Natasha Trethewey in 2007.
1713: Well-bred, well-educated young women like Finch are employed by the court, live with their fathers, live off a family inheritance, or marry respected men with desirable incomes.
Today: Well-educated young women have the option of pursuing any number of career fields, including medicine, writing, teaching, law, science, or ministry. Such women also retain the choice to marry men of their choosing and to stay home to care for their families.
1713: People are frequently drawn to the outdoors as a source of peaceful relaxation. It is common for aristocrats to unwind by enjoying a leisurely walk around the grounds of their property, or to enjoy a horse ride in the countryside. Nature is rarely far away, and this type of relaxation is readily accessible.
Today: People are still drawn to the outdoors for recreation and relaxation. For the many people who live in suburbs and cities, going outdoors usually means walking around a neighborhood or visiting a park. Experiencing nature for an extended period of time might involve travel. While some still enjoy leisurely outdoor activities like walks, many Americans are drawn to rigorous activities like hiking, rock climbing, and white water rafting.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

In Finch's lifetime, she enjoyed a minimal amount of attention and respect for her work. Her reputation was largely based on "The Spleen" and "A Nocturnal Reverie." Renewed interest in women writers, and especially overlooked women writers, led to Finch's rediscovery in the twentieth century and inclusion among major English poets. Prior to that, William Wordsworth mentioned "A Nocturnal Reverie" in the supplement to the preface of his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1815). Because of this mention, some scholars place the poem in the pre-romantic tradition, while others maintain that the poem rightly belongs among the Augustan poetry of Finch's time. Jamie Stanesa in Dictionary of Literary Biography weighs in with the comment, "Finch's expression is more immediate and simple, and her versification ultimately exhibits an Augustan rather than a pre-Romantic sensibility." Reuben A. Brower notes in Studies in Philology, "In the eighteenth century the poetry of religious meditation and moral reflection merged with the poetry of natural description in a composite type," which includes Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie."He adds that those seeking the roots of romanticism in such poems should look beyond the mere setting.

Other critics are more interested in the poem itself than in its proper category within English poetry. Charles H. Hinnant in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 comments on Finch's view of imagination. He writes that, as in other examples of her poetry, here "poetic consciousness is envisaged as an ‘emptiness’ or ‘lack’ which seeks to coincide with a peace or plenitude that it attributes to something outside of itself." In Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography, Barbara McGovern comments on the melancholy imagery that permeates the poem. She explains that the images "are common to melancholic verse: moonlight, an owl's screech, darkened groves and distant caverns, falling waters, winds, ancient ruins, and shadows that cast an eerie gloom over the entire isolated scene." Among the strongest advocates for considering "A Nocturnal Reverie" as serious poetry is Christopher Miller, writing in Studies in English Literature. In his essay, he openly regards Finch's work as a masterpiece in its own right. While he considers the weight of Wordsworth's endorsement in a romantic context, Miller finds plenty to like in "A Nocturnal Reverie" apart from that. He deems it "remarkable," noting the poem's wandering in content and continuous subordinate clause. He comments, "In this temporal arc, Finch mimics the famous evening-to-dawn fantasy of scholarly devotion in John Milton's ‘Il Penseroso’ (1631), but she focuses more on sensory absorption of the nocturnal world than on the humoral disposition associated with it." He adds that the poem is "a lyric that responds in innovative ways to other poetic traditions."

CRITICISM

Jennifer Bussey

Bussey has a master's degree in interdisciplinary studies and a bachelor's degree in English literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. In this essay, Bussey explores in more depth the debate about whether Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie" is Augustan or pre-romantic.

Modern readers of Anne Finch's work take a particular interest in "A Nocturnal Reverie" with regard to its categorization. With the benefit of significant historical and literary hindsight, some scholars regard the poem as an example of the Augustan literature that was so popular in England at the time the poem was written (1713). But others see in the poem glimpses of one of the most influential literary movements to come—romanticism.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Barbara McGovern is one of the most well-known experts on Finch and her work. In Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography (1992), McGovern combines autobiographical material with her own expertise on Finch's work to give the reader a full sense of how the two influenced one another.
Edited by Eva Simmons, Augustan Literature, 1660-1789 (1994) compiles the greatest writing of the age by the writers who characterized the Augustan Age in England. Poetry, prose, and essays are all included and discussed in an easy-to-use volume organized by writer.
Edited by Denys Thompson, Selected Poems: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (2006) is the most complete current collection of Finch's poetry. It includes "A Nocturnal Reverie," "The Spleen," and numerous other poems not often included in anthologies.
Edward Vallance's The Glorious Revolution: 1688—Britain's Fight for Liberty (2007) is among the more engaging treatments of the bloodless overthrow of James II by William and Mary. To further enliven the topic, Vallance includes comments by Karl Marx, Margaret Thatcher, and others.

From a chronological standpoint, "A Nocturnal Reverie" seems best positioned among Augustan literature. This would place Finch alongside writers such as Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Jonathan Swift, who are considered great British writers and some of the best satirists ever published. But Augustan literature was not merely biting wit and lengthy verse and prose. Augustan literature paid homage to the Roman Augustan Age, in which language was exalted and treated carefully. Education and inquiry were also embraced, which is reflected in poetry that is technically sharp. English Augustan poets followed suit, writing verse that followed conventions and demonstrated mastery of language and technique. They relied on allusion to draw clear comparisons between their society and that of ancient Rome, or to bring to their verse the flavor of classical poetry. Like the novelists, playwrights, and essayists of the time, Augustan poets observed and commented on the world around them, but often retained a level of detachment. The result is poetry that is contemplative and insightful without being overly emotional or desperate. Augustan writers were not interested in the kind of rhetoric that seeks to sway readers to the author's point of view, but wrote merely to comment and let the reader decide. In this way, Finch's fables are consistent with the Augustan approach to literature; a fable simply relates a story, but the story happens to have a message that the reader may find compelling.

Given the overall character of Augustan literature, why is "A Nocturnal Reverie" considered one of its titles? The poem features many of the qualities that typified poetry of this period. It contains classical allusions to Zephyr and Philomel. Zephyr was the Greek god of the west wind, which was considered the most gentle and inviting wind. Philomel was a person who, according the Greek mythology, was turned into a nightingale. "A Nocturnal Reverie" also boasts highly technical construction. The poem is a neat and even fifty lines long, composed of twenty-five heroic couplets. The rhyme scheme and the rhythm are held consistently over the course of all fifty lines. This is an impressive technical feat, and Finch succeeds in maintaining the integrity of her poem's restrictive construction while smoothly relating the subject of the poem in a way that does not call too much attention to the pains she takes in writing in heroic couplets. Finch offers the reader a story of a nighttime experience (or vision), telling it as if she has no motive but to relate a story. The end of the poem, however, reveals the comment the poet makes about the struggles of daily life in civilization. Like a good Augustan poet, she offers it only as an observation of her own life, leaving it to the reader to personalize it to himself or his community.

In the supplement to the preface of his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1815, the renowned romantic poet William Wordsworth praised "A Nocturnal Reverie" for its imagery in describing nature. Wordsworth himself saw something in Finch's work that caught his romantic eye and resonated with him in its depiction of nature. For this reason, critics took another look at "A Nocturnal Reverie" and many concluded that the poem is truly a pre-romantic work. Since all literary movements arise out of a set of circumstances before becoming full-fledged movements, it is not at all unusual to see the seeds of a movement in works that precede it. Wordsworth's appreciation of the poem for something as distinctly romantic in its depiction of nature is enough to make any serious critic consider whether "A Nocturnal Reverie" should be positioned among the earliest romantic poems.

The romantic period officially began with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and lasted until about the mid-nineteenth century. For nearly a century, romanticism dominated English literature. During this time, England saw its own Industrial Revolution, major political reform, and the introduction of such philosophical perspectives as Utilitarianism. It was a dynamic time of upheaval, opportunity, and possibility, and optimism generally bested cynicism in the early years of romanticism. Toward the end of the period, literature raised questions and expressed doubt. Out of this came a view of the individual as very important, along with a deep appreciation for art and nature. In fact, many romantics considered nature to be among their wisest teachers. The great romantic poets included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In addition to love of nature, the romantics exalted imagination and freedom from creative restraints.

Finding romantic elements in "A Nocturnal Reverie" is not difficult. The setting is nature, and it is described in affectionate detail. The speaker is completely enthralled by her experience outdoors, and she appreciates every aspect of it, making sure to include every animal, plant, flower, cloud, river, and glowwormin her telling. Nature is humanized through extensive use of anthropomorphism and personification, and the effect is that nature is characterized as being friendly, welcoming, and nurturing. The speaker is so at ease in the natural setting that she dreads returning to the life she leads in the civilized world. This assessment of the natural world versus man's world is very much in line with the romantic way of thinking. Finch's style in "A Nocturnal Reverie" is also very lush and descriptive, as so much of romantic poetry is, and the experience is described in relation to the speaker's emotional response to it. There is only one figure in the poem, which places emphasis on an individual and the value of that individual's experience and imagination. All of these elements make it easy to see why so many scholars are anxious to line "A Nocturnal Reverie" up with the classics of romantic poetry.

"A Nocturnal Reverie" contains qualities of both Augustan and romantic literature, therefore a look at the literary-historical context of the poem's composition helps determine where it properly belongs. Finch was a well-educated woman who took care with her poetry to ensure that it was technically sound. She read the predominant poets of her time, and learned from what she read. She was, from an early age, drawn to poetry as a means of self-expression, even knowing that her pursuit would likely be only personal. When Finch wrote "A Nocturnal Reverie," the romantic period in England was still eighty-five years away. For her to explore romantic tendencies, there would have to have been something influential in her world leading her to turn her attentions to the things that would be uniquely romantic. Because there is not a large body of work by Finch that explores romantic themes, it seems unlikely that she was working out a new philosophy in "A Nocturnal Reverie."

Further, the giants of the Augustan Age were in full force at the time Finch wrote "A Nocturnal Reverie." Pope's classic An Essay on Criticism was published in 1711. Pope is not at all associated with the romantic period, and his views on criticism, like his writing, are consistent with the Augustan perspective. Also in 1711, two other major players in Augustan literature, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele established The Spectator, a journal that would become the most influential periodical of the century. Pope's essay and Addison and Steele's periodical are two major additions to England's literary history, and "A Nocturnal Reverie" comes on their heels, written by a woman who kept up with such things. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that Finch was far more influenced and inspired by the Augustans than by any pre-romantic influences that may have been stirring in England in 1713.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on "A Nocturnal Reverie," in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Susannah B. Mintz

In the following excerpt, Mintz discusses how Finch's nature poems, including "A Nocturnal Reverie," utilize the natural world as a spiritual and political counterbalance to an anti-feminist society.

Anne Kingsmill Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea (1661-1720), holds an established position in the history of women's writing, but scholars have not always agreed on whether Finch reproduces or challenges the gender-bias of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetic conventions. On the one hand, Finch could be outspoken in her critique of male resistance to women's poetry, but on the other, Finch herself clearly worries about how her poetry will be received, and thus seems at times to uphold the very standards against which her own writing might be doomed to fall short. The complaint that opens "The Introduction," for example, is well known for its pithy illustration of the obstacles facing women writers. Here, Finch anticipates the "censure" (2) that will attend any woman's entrance into the public sphere, and assumes that men will be quick to "condemn" (7) women's writing as "insipid, empty, uncorrect" (4):

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature is esteem'd,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;

Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play

Are the accomplishments we should desire;

To write, or read, or think, or to enquire

Would cloud our beauty … (9-17)

Worried about exposing a lack of wit, Finch displays her intelligence through irony, appeal to biblical authority, and rhetorical sophistication, thus proving the inadequacy of misogynistic denouncement. But at the very same time, such poetic strategies demonstrate the lengths to which she must go to ensure that her work will not be read as "uncorrect" (the "fair" sex may be deemed but "fair," mediocre writers). The poem thus records a tectonic unsteadiness, working to deconstruct the myth of women as beautiful but insignificant even as it manifests the poet's anxiety about the "beauty" of her work in the very world that imposes that censure.

In what follows, I will argue that poetry, for Finch, becomes a site of contest over the refracting discourse of "fair." By manipulating her culture's assumptions about beauty, femininity, and intellect, Finch's work ultimately exposes the insufficiencies of a patriarchal law that reproduces "unfairness" in both its construction of women and its determination of what counts as aesthetically pleasing. In a deceptively witty manner, Finch admits that by presenting herself to the world intellectually, she may render that self a monstrous deviation—the "ugly" spectacle that is the woman writer. By dint of such acknowledgment, however, she exacts her own form of condemnation, utilizing this catalogue of patriarchal insults ("an intruder," "a presumptuous creature") to impugn the culture's construction of a "fair sex" confined to "the dull manage of a servile house" (19) and to the shallow maintenance of beauty. Despite, but also because of, insecurity about their worth, Finch's poems work to rescue women from confinement as objects in men's poetry, and insist upon the legitimacy of female visibility and speech ….

Poetry, Finch acknowledges, is dangerous, because it becomes a public act, its creator enters into the realm of evaluation with its arbitrary criteria and its arbiters of taste. What's more—and indeed as an exact result of that value-making domain—art is dismayingly prone to obscuring true feeling, and can thus keep two people at odds with one another. In "A Song" ("'Tis strange, this Heart"), for example, the speaker longs to know "what's done" (4) in the heart of her other (lover, husband, friend?):

In vain I ask it of your Eyes

Which subt'ly would my Fears controul;

For Art has taught them to disguise,

Which Nature made t' explain the Soul. (5-8)

The speaker here invites a certain kind of looking, one so completely stripped of artifice that the soul's integrity would be appropriately revealed through the windows of the eyes. Significantly, though, she also seems to recognize that even an honest gaze, a gaze unencumbered or unmediated by the influence of cultural narrative—if such a look could be posited at all, as Finch implies that it could not—would nonetheless be a containing, limiting, even policing one, capable of a form of "controul" over female emotion. The point is moot, however, since even "your Eyes" have succumbed to the false show of Art's disguises.

At one level, "A Song" seems tonally to be addressed to an intimate other, one whose openness and, perhaps more desperately, whose genuine affection the speaker craves a guarantee of. A second possible referent for the poem's "you," however, is not a single auditor at all, but rather the audience—male readers both specifically (as opposed to women) and in general (in their powerful collectivity). Such a reading turns a private lament about the failure of interpersonal communication into a direct statement about the poet's wish for public approval of her writing as well as her careful perusal of readers' responses for the approbation she hopes they might contain. In this sense the poem proliferates and reiterates a set of interlocking worries that pervades much of Finch's work. Since words can dissemble, be untrue, or are too heavy, too many, too deceptive, to find "Truth" (12) in them, how can one—especially a woman—write poetry that expresses oneself, with words that match feelings and intent; and, more troublingly, how could anyone else understand those words as they were meant? Since readers (men, writers, critics) are far too schooled in manipulating words to their advantage for any positive judgment to be trusted, how can a woman penetrate to the essence of another's evaluation of her work? If a writer can't trust words, how can she trust that an unfriendly audience will accept poetry from a woman? In short, how can, and should, a woman write?

By way of unfolding this set of questions, I would like to argue for Finch's "The Petition for an Absolute Retreat" as an ars poetica that takes the mobius strip of writing and specularity as its thematic and structural principle. "The Petition" is usually categorized, along with "The Tree" and "A Nocturnal Reverie," as one of Finch's best-known nature poems, works contingent upon a distinction between nature and culture and which posit the natural world as a spiritual or political counteractant to an unfriendly (anti-feminist, anti-Stuart) society. The retreat of "The Petition" can thus be read as a location—for example, of solidarity with other women, in what Carol Barash describes as a "rethink[ing of] the pastoral topos of political retreat as a place where women's shared political sympathies can be legitimately expressed"; or a process—an elaborated metaphor for what Charles Hinnant reads as "a philosophic ascent of the human mind" (150). I would add to these convincing readings the possibility that the petition is a suit for and mapping out of both a place and a process of writing, which could be protected from the incursions of artifice, ambition, dishonesty, and isolating competitiveness. In this sense "The Petition" stands as a potent manifesto of a way of composing poetry that could resist the pressure of writing to satisfy the demands of patriarchal readers, a constraint to which, Finch reveals elsewhere, she often felt compelled to succumb.

The fantasized locale of "The Petition" is an abundant natural place laden with "All, that did in Eden grow" (except the "Forbidden Tree") (35-36), a place of "Unaffected Carelesness" (71) far "from Crouds, and Noise" (126), a place where, the speaker exults, she might "remain secure, / Waste, in humble Joys and pure" (202-3). The speaker repeatedly longs to relieve herself of the trappings of a stylized femininity, and to realign "inside" with "outside" in a new form of poetic, philosophical, psychical wholeness: she asks for "plain, and wholesome Fare" (33); for clothes "light, and fresh as May" (65), and "Habit cheap and new" (67); for "No Perfumes [to] have there a Part, / Borrow'd from the Chymists Art" (72-73); and when she "must be fine," she will "In … natural Coulours shine" (96-97). It is significant, then, that the express longing to inhabit a domain unfettered by the accouterments and affectations of culture is dressed in so foliate a poetry, whose stanzas are thick with allusion and detail—and, more to our purposes, that the poem repeatedly returns to, and turns on, the phrasing and imagery of "those Windings, and that Shade," the line that closes each of the seven substantial stanzas. The image (the psychical "syntax," as it were) of arriving at a feminized realm of writing and psychic pleasure through "Windings" and "Shade" works to establish an opposition far more pointed (if deceptively counterintuitive) than a dichotomy between an idealized, pure, female landscape and the corrupted involutions of patriarchal civilization. If "Windings" conducts us on a topographical level along a path designed to ward off "Intruders" (8), it also traces the contours of a poetic impulse. Only by twisting and turning, Finch seems to say, does the woman poet avoid the traps of copping to male desire; only by (with the use of) and through (by sustaining the duration of) a deliberate traveling along a winding course, entangling and coiling oneself in one's own poetic energies, can freedom from male expectation be found.

In one way, the very lushness of the natural setting and the poetry that describes it acts as a corrective to institutionalized cultural (human, male) rigidities of politics or social grace. At the same time, though, the poem's depiction of this pastoral Retreat is undeniably laced with references to the very human world it purports to eschew, as when the "Willows, on the Banks" are shown to be "Gather'd into social Ranks" (134-35). What is at work, I think, is Finch's understanding that her own call for "an Absolute Retreat" leaves in place a problematic set of binary oppositions (male/female, culture/nature, reason/emotion, ornamentation/purity, and so on) without defying the epistemology on which such ideologies rest. Instead, Finch suggests a wholly different method of breaking down patriarchal schema via poetic meandering—kind of post-lapsarian revision of the scene of errored wandering that constitutes lapsarian loss—that might conduct women to paradisal space.

In a complicated sense, to doff the ornamentation demanded of women might in itself be linked to the act of writing poetry, which, according to convention, engenders a mannishly unfeminine woman. But Finch goes further than this, arguing instead for a woman writer to symbolically divest herself of dependence upon the apparel of male-centered literary standards (to make herself "plain") and then to redress herself by following a symbolically "Winding" course that separates her from the domain of men and conducts her to a self-determined place that cannot be seen from without. Finch deepens this desire to disentangle herself from constructions (and constrictions) of gender in the poem, but the desire is further problematized by virtue of the poem's very composition, which re-enacts a "feminine" adorning. Thus the poem in part exhibits what is both "male" and "female"—but in such a way as to deprive each category of ontological status. In this "The Petition" sets in high relief an axiomatic paradox, that the oppositional categories of "masculine" and "feminine" are in fact present to and in each other, and that the toppling of patriarchal authority may best be achieved not simply by reversing the standings of those terms but by a more involved process of poetic "windings" and in a place of "shade" that emphatically contradict masculinist standards of reason, genius, and the pursuit of convention as "enlightened" states of being or mental activities.

That the retreat holds out the promise of intellectual stimulation for women in particular becomes clear in the relationship between two passages, one requesting "A Partner" (106), the other "a Friend" (197). Though the speaker asks in the first instance for a partner "suited to my Mind" (106), the heterosexual bond is described primarily in terms of a pre-lapsarian fantasy of the "Love" and "Passion" (120) of "but two" (112) whose union is undisturbed by "Bus'ness," "Wars," or "Domestick Cares" (114-15). In contrast to a vision of interconnectedness which enumerates no other pastime but being "In Love" (120), the model for friendship is the woman Arminda, who,

Warm'd anew [Ardelia's] drooping Heart,

and Life diffus'd thro' every Part;

Mixing Words, in wise Discourse,

Of such Weight and won'drous Force,

As could all her Sorrows charm,

And transitory Ills disarm;
 

With Wit, from an unmeasured Store,

To Woman ne'er allow'd before. (166-75)

Women, once situated in the symbolic realm of the "Retreat," will be able to enjoy a wider set of options for how to be and behave, both individually and in consort with each other, than the earlier description of wedded happiness had seemed to offer. Women can soothe and rejuvenate each other—unsurprisingly feminine tasks that take on subtly new meaning in the context of a definitively feminine space—but also, more defiantly, they can discover themselves capable of "Mixing Words, in wise Discourse," of using language with "such Weight and wond'rous Force" that it would "charm," "disarm," and "Chea[r]" one another in a way that seems magically "delightful." Further, women might find "Wit" here, that elusive quality of mind and poetry held so firmly—"To Woman ne'er allow'd before"—by men. The ambiguity of "allow'd" conveys the point exactly: that women have been excluded from the ranks of male poets not because they can't produce good work, but because of the "mistaken rules" of men who won't concede women as equal participants in artistic creation ("The Introduction"). Arminda, then, serves as less the singular exception than as an embodied metaphor for what might obtain for women by pursuing "those Windings and that Shade"—what the speaker herself calls, later in the poem, "Contemplations of the Mind" (283).

Throughout her work, Finch's concern is not simply to vent "spleen" against anti-feminist bias, but to ironically undercut the paradigms of that bias by manipulating the very language of its constructions of femininity. "The Petition" reiterates that project in a striking way, suggesting that the subversive ambiguities of a woman's work may provide the necessary "overgrowth" to protect it from male dismissal. As many have noted, Finch's complete oeuvre includes a broad range of poetic forms; Hinnant remarks that it is "one of the most diverse of any English poet—encompassing songs, pastorals, dialogues, Pindaric odes, tales, beast fables, hymns, didactic compositions, biblical paraphrases, verse epistles, and satires" (17). Such variety implies another form of "winding," the trying-on of different poetic styles (and selves) that manifest the search for a way of writing that could both legitimize her and solidify an interior sense of poetic integrity.

It is crucial, I think, to Finch's ideological and literary purposes that though the poem amply analogizes the quality of experience possible in the "Retreat," it also rests in a subjective mood, called for and imagined but never realized within the frame of the poem itself. The closest we come, in a sense, are the "windings" and "shade" that act as threshold to—but also, powerfully, as guards of—the actual place of a woman's poetic spirit. It is often said of Finch that she was a pivotal writer, echoing predominant seventeenth-century poetic patterns (in particular, the theme of female friendship in Katherine Philips and the poetry of pastoral retreat); using popular eighteenth-century forms to her own, sometimes feminist, sometimes sociopolitical aims; and finally, gesturing toward the inward-looking preoccupations of the Romantics. Such ambiguity in temporally locating Finch seems doubly apt: it accounts for the stylistic, tonal, and structural complexity of her work, but also, in a less direct way, suggests that she has followed her own advice, writing poems "through those Windings, and that Shade."

Source: Susannah B. Mintz, "Anne Finch's ‘Fair’ Play," in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1, Autumn 2003, pp. 74-95.

Harriett Devine Jump

In the following essay, Jump addresses the misrepresentation of Finch as a nature poet and the resultant popularity of such poems as "A Nocturnal Reverie."

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), has the distinction of being one of the few women poets whose works—some of them, at least—have consistently found their way into anthologies. Wordsworth admired her poetry: his comments in the ‘Essay Supplementary’ to the Preface of the Lyrical Ballads (1815) on the ‘new image[s] of external nature’ in her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ are well known, he included sixteen of her poems in a collection of women's poetry compiled for Lady Mary Lowther in 1819, and, in a letter to Alexander Dyce of May 1830, described her style as ‘often admirable, chaste, tender and vigorous’. Despite Finch's obvious importance, however, the standard edition remains Myra Reynolds's The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago, 1903), although this has long been recognized as incomplete: it omits, among other things, the large body of manuscript poems held at Wellesley College, Massachusetts and recently edited by J. M. Ellis D'Allesandro (Florence, 1988). She has been equally badly served by biographers and critics: no full-length biography or comprehensive critical assessment has hitherto been attempted.

Barbara McGovern sets out to redress the balance. Her critical biography of Finch covers new ground in a number of ways. Finch's life has been painstakingly researched; her poetry—published and unpublished—is analysed; and, by reference to the political and historical conditions prevailing during her lifetime, her work is placed in context for the first time. This is, perhaps, of particular importance, since Finch was, as Barbara McGovern points out, displaced not only by her gender but also by her political ideology and her religious affiliation. Having been appointed, at the age of 21, maid of honour to Mary of Modena, the future wife of James II, she (and her husband) remained loyal to James when he was forced into exile by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and were among the Non-jurors who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new monarchs William and Mary. As a result of their persistent Jacobitism they were exiled from court and faced a future of persecution and financial hardship. They settled for a modest existence in Kent, in some ways beneficial for Finch's poetry, but it is clear that they frequently found country life lonely and isolated and, as time went on, Finch evidently felt restless and longed for the stimulation of London and its literary world. She did manage relatively brief periods of residence in London, and made the acquaintance of Swift and Pope and their circle, but it is not impossible that some of the melancholy which dogged her for most of her adult life resulted from the marginalized position in which she almost always felt herself to be.

Barbara McGovern argues that, as a poet, Anne Finch has been continually misrepresented. The fact that Wordsworth praised her in terms which suggest that she was primarily a nature poet has led to the inclusion in standard anthologies of her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ and ‘Petition for an Absolute Retreat’ despite the fact that, as Barbara McGovern points out, ‘of the more than 230 poems she wrote … only about half a dozen are devoted primarily to descriptions of external nature, and these, with the exception of the two just named, are not among her better poems’ (p. 78). These poems, she goes on to argue, are products of their age which do not prefigure Romanticism in any significant way: Finch sees human beings as providing the spiritual continuity and depth to life, even within the context of a natural retreat. Those elements (images of wandering in lonely haunts, concern with shade and darkness) which could be read as Romantic have recently been identified as characteristic of feminist poetics.

Barbara McGovern devotes two chapters to Finch's use of the pastoral, a genre to which she returned constantly throughout her life and which she adapted to a wide range of styles and themes. The pastoral mode not only allowed her to write about love and passion in ways which, as a woman, she would not otherwise have been able to do with propriety, it also enabled her publicly to criticize her own age from the standpoint of a moral spokesperson confronting the ills of society. Barbara McGovern argues that Finch's most sustained effort at satire, ‘Ardelia's Answer to Ephelia’, bears many thematic and technical similarities to Rochester's ‘Letter from Artemesia in the Town to Chloe in the Country’, and points out that both poets were Royalists who moved for a time in the same circles. However, she sees Finch's poem as a revisionary version of Rochester's more famous satire.

Another chapter is devoted to ‘The Spleen’, the Pindaric ode for which Finch was best known in her own lifetime and throughout the eighteenth century. Barbara McGovern sees this as one of Finch's most important poems, representative in both style and content of a large body of her work. Finch herself was afflicted by melancholy—a disorder much more likely to affect women than men, and thus having gender-discriminatory implications—for most of her adult life. Although, as Barbara McGovern points out, there was a tradition of melancholic poetry at the period, Finch's poem is unique in that it combines an intensely personal approach with rigorous analysis and stark realism, and because the subject raises issues regarding both the nature of poetic commitment and the right of a woman to become a poet. The final years before Finch's death in 1720 seem to have been filled with adversity, and much of her later poetry places a marked emphasis on themes of religion and the significance of human suffering.

Barbara McGovern includes, as an Appendix, a selection of poems from the Wellesley Manuscript. These, together with the works discussed within the text, testify to the impressively wide range of style and subject-matter at Finch's command. Capable of both serious reflection and satirical wit, of tender tributes to marital love and female friendship as well as harsh judgements on the modes and manners of her time, she was clearly a considerable poet, and it is easy to agree with Barbara McGovern's judgement that she has been seriously underestimated.

Anne Finch and her Poetry has many virtues. Barbara McGovern has dealt efficiently with the biographical and historical material, although the lack of much in the way of documentary evidence means that her account of Finch's childhood and education, in particular, is based largely on surmise ‘from what is known about her as an adult and from what is known about the typical upbringing for girls from upper class families at the time’ (p. 10). The footnotes are extremely full and satisfyingly scholarly, although a reasonably well-informed reader may feel that some of the better-known historical background—the Great Fire of London, or the Glorious Revolution, for example—has been annotated rather too heavily. Although, admittedly, the lack of ready availability of much of the poetry means that paraphrase is sometimes called for, the analysis of individual poems seems at times a little ponderous and heavy-handed. Overall, however, the book is a useful addition to a relatively new field of English studies.

Source: Harriett Devine Jump, "Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography," in Review of English Studies, Vol. 46, No. 183, August 1995, pp. 410-12.

Charles H. Hinnant

In the following excerpt, Hinnant compares the themes in Finch's poems "To the Nightingale" and "A Nocturnal Reverie."

… The critics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who once searched Finch's poetry for Romantic tendencies usually overlooked or minimized the doubts that prevent her from recognizing a transcendental legitimizing source of inspiration. They tacitly acknowledged her demystifying rejection of transcendent flight in their praise of her as an earth-bound "nature" poet. She is usually described as a poet of sensation, not song. Edmund Gosse is typical in his assessment of her capacity for "seeing nature and describing what she sees" and so of offering "accurate transcripts of country life." But even this conventional estimate of her poetry as descriptive rather than inspired or reflective appears misleading. On the surface, it seems reminiscent of Addison's Lockean distinction between the primary pleasures of imagination deriving from perceived objects and the secondary pleasures deriving from remembered or absent objects (Spectator 411). Yet it is not so easy to determine whether Finch was ever a nature poet in the Addisonian sense. Her two most famous nature poems, "The Petition for an Absolute Retreat" and "A Nocturnal Reverie," are not really descriptive, as is James Thomson's georgic "The Seasons," but elegiac or invocatory, summoning up a landscape that is either absent or hypothetical. A similar sense of absence also haunts Finch's powerful elegy, "Upon the Death of Sir William Twisden," where the weeping clouds and rivers of the pastoral elegist are exposed as illusory, fictive transmutations of reality. In a sense the poem argues that the mind must resist this seduction into illusion and hence must confront the unpleasant fact that "Nature (unconcern'd for our relief) / Persues her settl'd path, her fixt, and steaddy course" (lines 27-28). Description, a poetic strategy that fuses the eye and its object, seems to overlook the skepticism inherent in "Upon the Death of Sir William Twisden" as well as in "To The Nightingale," both of which presuppose a disjunction between subject and object.

"To the Nightingale" is also important in the history of poetry for another reason. It exemplifies what is perhaps Finch's most sophisticated attempt to master a recurrent problem of the seventeenth-century female poet: how to participate in a discourse in which the poet is defined as a masculine subject. Outwardly, the poem remains faithful to the conventional structure of ode and lyric, organizing itself around the dyad of (masculine) poet and (feminine) muse. But the nature of their roles is altogether different from that traditionally associated with the two figures. Finch's purpose is certainly not to show the archetypal permanence of the distinction, nor is it (as in "The Introduction") to show the ill effects of the distinction upon the female poet. Instead, Finch initially at least wants to universalize the opposition radically, by stripping it of the customary attributes of gender, by elevating the poet, muse, and nightingale to ideal categories. All of the characteristics that make the muse feminine—beauty, grace, pity, harmony with nature, and so on—disappear. There is no room in this version of the nightingale for an explicit allusion to the mute Philomela—the classical archetype of woman as victim, nor for Sidney's nightingale whose "throat in tunes expresseth / What grief her breast oppresseth, / For Tereus' force on her chaste will prevailing" (lines 6-8). There is instead a process of idealization, an exchange of attributes, which transforms the grief-stricken female singer into an exemplary model, one that applies to all poets. Yet this process of idealization necessarily involves a suppression of the gender that enables this model to come into existence. The universality of the figure of the poet who "when best he sings, is plac'd against a Thorn" (line 13) depends upon a figure herself mute, unable to make herself intelligible.

Because the figure of the poet is universalized in "To The Nightingale," the anxiety of female authorship is not problematical in this poem. Suppressing the customary attributes of gender helps to make room for a different kind of concern, one that is poetic rather than cultural. The muse is called forth to incarnate an ideal in which there will be no disparity between sound and meaning: "Words" and "Accents" are to be fused into a single "fluent Vein" in which "Syllables" and "Sense" are inseparable (lines 17-21). The muse and the nightingale are not, however, to be allowed to collapse into one another. The muse is rather asked to retain "Still some Spirit of the Brain" because it would otherwise yield a primitive and undifferentiated world of sound, instead of a complex and organized unison of sound and sense which can serve as the goal as well as the inspiration of poetry. This distinction is linked to Henry More's contention that while "a Nightingale may vary with her voice into a multitude of interchangeable Notes, and various Musical falls and risings … should she but sing one Hymn or Hallelujah, I should deem her no bird but an Angel." But Finch lacks More's faith in the superiority of a divinely inspired human art to nature: while the muse of "To The Nightingale" may inspire, she is finally powerless. The speaker's recognition of this impotence is undoubtedly accompanied by the loss of a conviction in the possibility of a union of sound and sense. This loss of faith is consistent with the new understanding of language that emerged in the late seventeenth century. By acknowledging a gulf between the nightingale's song and the poet's speech, Finch tacitly adopts the point of view of theorists like Hobbes and Locke who deny the naturalness of the received link between signifier and signified.

"To The Nightingale" is thus explicitly concerned with the limits of poetic signification. Because the invocation to the muse is evoked in terms of its possible relation to a surrogate self with whom the poet cannot identify, we become aware that poetry cannot become the unequivocal reappropriation of natural song. In An Essay on Criticism Pope was to give canonical formulation to the doctrine that the sound must at least "seem an echo to the sense." But here the attempt at imitative harmony seems only futile, not "poetic." By a kind of downward transformation, its shifting octosyllabic couplets, the medium of the "middle" style, only succeed in drawing attention to the close relation between poetic language and discursive prose. Through the contrast between music and speech, Finch acknowledges a collapse of faith in the power of the poet as singer rather than as persuader. Yet it is precisely this collapse of faith which may help us to assess the main body of her poetry. Implicit in many other poems is a tendency to self-consciousness which results from their overtly explicit secondariness. The characteristic late seventeenth-century forms of beast fable, religious meditation, pastoral dialogue, and moralizing reflection, functioning as they do within the framework of the poetic enunciated in "To The Nightingale," recognize something substitutive and sentimental in lyric inspiration. As Brower said, though in another context, "there are in Lady Anne's poetry traces" of a "union of lyricism with the diction and movement of speech." By retaining touches of humor and wit, by refusing to purge diction of common usage, her poetry draws attention to the element of rhetoric and representation in poetic language. Many of Finch's poems may, as Brower insisted, be characterized as attenuated metaphysical verse, the work of a "minor poetess" in a period of transition. But one can also argue that "To The Nightingale" occupies a place in Finch's poetry analogous to Swift's renunciation of the Muse's "visionary pow'r" (line 152) in "Occasioned by Sir William Temple's Late Illness and Recovery" and to Pope's decision, announced in the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," to abandon "Fancy's maze" and moralize "his song" (lines 340-41). The union of "rapture and cool gaiety" in her poetry, its reliance upon colloquial idiom, and its relative looseness of "texture," may imply a similar demystified rejection of transcendent flight—something which is asserted explicitly through the thematic concerns of "To The Nightingale."

Finch thus makes opposite use of a convention which previous poetic generations had used to affirm the validity of poetry as inspired discourse. The implications of her loss of confidence in that discourse are not confined to "To The Nightingale" but can be seen, in different ways, in such poems as "A Nocturnal Reverie" and "The Bird." In these poems, as in "To The Nightingale," poetic consciousness is envisaged as an "emptiness" or "lack" which seeks to coincide with a peace or plenitude that it attributes to something outside of itself—whether it be the "inferiour World" of domestic animals, a bird, or more specifically, the nightingale. In the conventional ode, this lack is reflected, as Norman Maclean put it, in the speaker's hope "that the quality he is contemplating … will make its power felt again in him." Yet the ambivalence generated by the speaker's failure to achieve this hope, which is evident in "To The Nightingale," is also present in the other two poems. In "A Nocturnal Reverie," this ambivalence is not only manifested in the hypothetical mode in which the poem's argument is cast but also in the restraint which confines "the free Soul" to the claim that it "thinks" the "inferiour World" is like its own (lines 43, 46). Also at issue is the anticipation of morning that prevents the speaker's experience of "solemn Quiet" from becoming anything more than a momentary respite from a renewal of "Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours … / Or Pleasures, seldom reach'd, again pursu'd" (lines 45-50). In "The Bird" the speaker's ambivalence is manifested in a doubt which represents the bird as alternatively guardian of the heart and male surrogate, the "false accomplice" of love (line 30). "The Tree," by contrast, avoids this ambivalence because it presupposes an absolute separation between human spectator and natural object and thus achieves the serene classical beauty that Ivor Winters detected in the poem. That "The Tree" is epideictic and commemorative only serves to confirm its detachment from a surrogate which the poet seeks to praise rather than to emulate….

Source: Charles H. Hinnant, "Song and Speech in Anne Finch's ‘To the Nightingale,’" in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 31, No. 3, Summer 1991, pp. 499-513.

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Brower, Reuben A., "Lady Winchilsea and the Poetic Tradition of the Seventeenth Century," in Studies in Philology, Vol. 42, No. 1, January 1945, pp. 61-80.

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Finch, Anne, "A Nocturnal Reverie," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, 5th ed., edited by M. H. Abrams et. al., W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. 1961-62.

Hinnant, Charles H., "Song and Speech in Anne Finch's ‘To the Nightingale,’" in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 31, 1991, pp. 499-513.

McGovern, Barbara, "‘The Spleen’: Melancholy, Gender, and Poetic Identity," in Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography, University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 159-78.

Miller, Christopher R., "Staying Out Late: Anne Finch's Poetics of Evening," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 45, No. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 603-23.

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Stanesa, Jamie, "Anne Finch," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 95, Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, Gale Research, 1990, pp. 64-71.