FINCH, ANNE, COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA (1661-1720) Anne Finch was born at Sydmonton near Newbury. 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. Most notably, Augustan poets used classical forms to make modern statements. The poet used anaphora at the beginnings of some neighboring lines. Through the ups and downs of her early years in marriage, Finch's interest in writing did not wane. Her reputation was largely based on "The Spleen" and "A Nocturnal Reverie." This assessment of the natural world versus man's world is very much in line with the romantic way of thinking. 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. Various plants and flowers, including woodbind, bramble-rose, cowslip, and foxglove, grow there. Fresh grass stands strong and upright, suggesting that this poem takes place during spring. This poem, evoking, as the Helpful Footnote points out, Collins's "Ode to Evening" and Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie", takes them as their starting point, but moves beyond them in an interesting direction.It starts in the usual way: the hot day is over and the much more preferable evening starts, described in clearly gendered terms: Diana's Moon rises, pushing her brother . 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. "He adds that those seeking the roots of romanticism in such poems should look beyond the mere setting. Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on "A Nocturnal Reverie," in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009. Miller, Christopher R., "Staying Out Late: Anne Finch's Poetics of Evening," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 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. In the twentieth century, Finch's work was rediscovered and appreciated. The closest we come, in a sense, are the "windings" and "shade" that act as threshold tobut also, powerfully, as guards ofthe actual place of a woman's poetic spirit. 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. It lacks all the peace and sensitivity of the natural setting she enjoys at night. In this essay, Bussey explores in more depth the debate about whether Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie" is Augustan or pre-romantic. There is evidence of Finch's feminist attitudes in this poem because Finch deliberately uses different masculine and feminine words to describe day vs. night. 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. However, the date of retrieval is often important. 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. Elliott's guide to the sounds of animals and insects at night includes descriptions, explanations, and pictures to help the reader identify and enjoy the sounds of night. The clandestine letter encouraged William to come to England, overthrow James, and assume the throne. Both sounds are inviting and cheerful. al., W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. From the analysis of this essay we can find Lamb's characteristic way of expression. ''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. Themes 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. Poetry gave satire another venue, but poetry grew in its purpose in the Augustan Age. Either way, the appeal of the nocturnal setting she describes is that it affords her the opportunity to escape completely her humdrum daytime life. 22 Feb. 2023 . Besides the'Nocturnal Reverie,' the Countess wrote many other sweet . D.parallelism. On moonlit nights, the beach looks particularly lovely. The speaker lovingly embraces the serenity of nature at night. The poem is serene in tone and rich in imagery. The serenity and seriousness of her spirit embraces the charm and joy of nature in such a way that her very soul is engaged. 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. From a chronological standpoint, "A Nocturnal Reverie" seems best positioned among Augustan literature. Love, this poem suggests, is timeless in more than one way: it can strike at any age . FURT, Waller, Edmund Romanticism as a literary movement lasted from 1798, with the publication of Lyrical Ballads to some time between the passage of the first Re, Imagism The Lutz family move into a new house right before Christmas. This resembles but is importantly different from Wordsworth's own "ennobling interchange / Of action from . Modern readers of Anne Finch's work take a particular interest in "A Nocturnal Reverie" with regard to its categorization. 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). Having the English military on his country's side would make all the difference. Brower, Reuben A., "Lady Winchilsea and the Poetic Tradition of the Seventeenth Century," in Studies in Philology, Vol. Reaching the spot between the operations and tactical stations, she stopped. 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. Although repeatedly analyzed in a variety of contexts, it has not been reprinted as often as the other "favorite" poem by Anne: The Nocturnal Reverie. The end of the poem, however, reveals the comment the poet makes about the struggles of daily life in civilization. The muse and the nightingale are not, however, to be allowed to collapse into one another. 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. The complaint that opens "The Introduction," for example, is well known for its pithy illustration of the obstacles facing women writers. Then James and his wife gave birth to an heir, which provoked his opponents to take action. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet who used narrative poems to memorialize people and events in American history, including Paul Revere. ." 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. 61-80. Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions, London: printed for J [ohn] B [arber] and sold by Benj. The liberation the poet finds . Mendelson, Sarah, and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England: 1550-1720, Oxford University Press, 2000. Alternatively of course, it could be both, happening by night and about night. Colonel Finch's nephew encouraged the couple to live on the family estate in Eastwell, where they spent the next twenty-five years. 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. In "A Nocturnal Reverie" by Anne Finch, the speaker's attitude toward the morning is the following: it is a time for renewed toil and activity. The poem's title bears the word reverie which is a dream or dream-like state. It was not until the twentieth century that her work began to receive much critical attention. The point is moot, however, since even "your Eyes" have succumbed to the false show of Art's disguises. English Augustan poets followed suit, writing verse that followed conventions and demonstrated mastery of language and technique. 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"). In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Her . The idea of being a hero in the battlefield is as tantalizing as it is fatal. invest little era to entrance this on-line message Tyson Hesse S Diesel Ignition as capably as review them wherever you are now. 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. 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. Prentice Hall - 1977. It also implies that man really has no idea how alive nature is when he is out of the way. Iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets = heroic couplets. "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. A Nocturnal Reverie By Anne Finch Summary. In fact, according to the speaker, it is impossible in such a setting for a person to hold onto anger. Poetry for Students. Another kind of ambiguity has to do with the nature of the . 603-23. Yet it is not so easy to determine whether Finch was ever a nature poet in the Addisonian sense. "The Apology" 5. A Nocturnal Reverie. Ultimately, Finch's use of personification evokes the theme of nature as a living community. In poetry, Pope was the primary writer and representation of the Augustan Age. 45, No. The retreat of "The Petition" can thus be read as a locationfor 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 processan elaborated metaphor for what Charles Hinnant reads as "a philosophic ascent of the human mind" (150). Finch's works often express a desire for respect as a female poet, lamenting her difficult position as a woman in the literary establishment and the court, while writing of "political ideology, religious orientation, and aesthetic sensibility". It was a dynamic time of upheaval, opportunity, and possibility, and optimism generally bested cynicism in the early years of romanticism. 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). The reflections have movement, which simultaneously brings the moon and the leaves to life while also reminding the reader of the aforementioned breeze. Finch's command of the verse is steady throughout the poem and it never feels out of control or rambling. Odors intentionally wait until evening to come out, when the air is more suitable. 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). Further, the giants of the Augustan Age were in full force at the time Finch wrote "A Nocturnal Reverie." Philomel was a person who, according the Greek mythology, was turned into a nightingale. A second possible referent for the poem's "you," however, is not a single auditor at all, but rather the audiencemale readers both specifically (as opposed to women) and in general (in their powerful collectivity). By all accounts, the marriage was happy for both of them. 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." Analysis of 'A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day' . John Brown is an interesting anti-war lyric which describes the horrors of war and the ease with which young men find themselves trapped in one. The collection ended with a blank verse pastoral tragedy (Aristomenes: or the Royal Shepherd), which followed perhaps her most ambitiously experimental poem, the fifty-line, single-sentence "Nocturnal Reverie." Finch's work only recently entered the Norton Anthology and she remains "under-studied" among newly canonical writers. She let out a large yawn and rubbed her eye as she closed the door behind her, hanging her bag on the coat rack in the corner. A reverie is a dream or dream like state and what quickly becomes apparent is that this meditation on the night-time world sees attractive tranquillity everywhere. In addition to love of nature, the romantics exalted imagination and freedom from creative restraints. 1961-62. 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." Mood of the speaker: The punctuation marks are various. 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. Poem Summary The result is poetry that is contemplative and insightful without being overly emotional or desperate. 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. 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. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. 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. After enduring failing health for a number of years, Finch died on August 5, 1720. The distant night sky is depicted as enigmatic and elusive. Many authors during this time used his style, and were inspired by his works. What's moreand indeed as an exact result of that value-making domainart is dismayingly prone to obscuring true feeling, and can thus keep two people at odds with one another. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (ne Kingsmill), was an English poet and courtier. 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." "A Nocturnal Reverie" is rich in imagery and sensory descriptions. The entire scene is a jubilee, a group celebration shared by the elements of nature and witnessed by the speaker. Dowd, Michelle M., and Julie A. Ackerle, Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England, Ashgate, 2007. 1616- Death of William Shakespeare. 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. A Nocturnal Reverie. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. The speaker thinks, all the good things in his life are absent as his lover is no more . In his essay, he openly regards Finch's work as a masterpiece in its own right. She challenges him to make a "sofa", a . Pope's classic An Essay on Criticism was published in 1711. All of the characteristics that make the muse femininebeauty, grace, pity, harmony with nature, and so ondisappear. Tooke at the Middle-Temple-Gate, William Taylor in Pater-Noster-Row, and James Round, in . Who were the major poets of the time? She died on April 16th, 1689 from years of poor health. He deems it "remarkable," noting the poem's wandering in content and continuous subordinate clause. The essay 'Dream Children; A Reverie" can be considered as a reflection of Lamb's tragic life. I don't believe my neighbour will suffer because I want it to happen and I've read too many books about Aleister Crowley. . 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. A 50 line poem, describing an inviting nighttime scene and the speakers disappointment when dawn breaks. Poetry for Students. 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. 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. The speaker is so at ease in the natural setting that she dreads returning to the life she leads in the civilized world. "Poetry," in Pulitzer Prizes, http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Poetry (accessed October 17, 2008). There she befriended other young women with literary interests, and Finch began to dabble in poetry. Wordsworth himself saw something in Finch's work that caught his romantic eye and resonated with him in its depiction of nature. 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. In Great Britain, the dominant writers of what is considered the Augustan Age were Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sir Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison. Summary and analysis of John Brown by Bob Dylan. 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. [MK73] "Penury," in line 51 of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," means extreme poverty; destitution. 499-513. POEM SUMMARY The Colonel became the Earl of Winchilsea in 1712. The poem has its origins in a rather peculiar story. The serious writer was more of a keen observer of the world, rather than a figure trying to assert influence over his readers. Download Citation | Contrasting Nature, Gender, and Genre in Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie" | Anne Finch came to be considered one of the most influential female figures of the Augustan era . 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. She was an aristocrat and a woman, therefore few took her work seriously. McGovern, Barbara, and Charles Hinnant, eds., The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems, University of Georgia Press, 1998. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Anne Kingsmill Finch. ): 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. 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. Suppressing the customary attributes of gender helps to make room for a different kind of concern, one that is poetic rather than cultural. The poem is a neat and even fifty lines long, composed of twenty-five heroic couplets. Elliott, Lang, A Guide to Night Sounds: The Nighttime Sounds of Sixty Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, and Insects, Stackpole Books, 2004. The speaker is saddened that dawn is coming and she must return to the harsh reality of the world and the day. Finch thus makes opposite use of a convention which previous poetic generations had used to affirm the validity of poetry as inspired discourse. The letter was well timed for William, as the Dutch Republic faced war with France. Critical Overvi, c. 1789 Barbara McGovern is one of the most well-known experts on Finch and her work. The poet falls into a reverie while listening to an actual nightingale sing. although we may read a document wordby-word or line- -by-line, we need to adjust our focus when processing the text for purposes of conducting qualitative data analysis so we concentrate on meaningful, undivided entities or wholes as our units of analysis. Which setting do you prefer? 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. A) The peace and solitude found in the settings of the poems gives both speakers time to arrive at deep insights about life. The song of a nightingale (Philomel) is heard, along with the sound of an owl. Every element that the speaker encounters in her nighttime adventure is alive and familiar because it possesses some characteristic or behavior that seems human. William was chosen because he was Protestant and also in the Stuart bloodline. 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. Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman, "Romanticism," in A Handbook to Literature, 9th ed., Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. 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 . Disability Customer Support . The Dolphins' by Carol Ann Duffy is a dramatic monologue written from the perspective of dolphins. 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. 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." He succeeded his brother King Charles II, who died in 1685 after achieving a peaceful working relationship between the king and Parliament. In such a night" as Finch's where "only" a "gentle Zephyr" wind "still fans his wings" and the muse "still waking sings," we see the Enlightenment ideal of i. 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. Poetry for Students. The natural world is the 'inferior world', even when the poet's soul 'thinks it like her own' - a joyful delusion, but a delusion nonetheless. for only $16.05 $11/page. The other winds are characterized as louder; therefore, the speaker is subtly making a comparison. 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." There is no room in this version of the nightingale for an explicit allusion to the mute Philomelathe 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). In the following excerpt, Hinnant compares the themes in Finch's poems "To the Nightingale" and "A Nocturnal Reverie.". All of this sound she considers celebratory noise carrying on while men sleep; at night, nature is free of man's rules and domination. 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. E.a caesura. "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. The authors explore topics such as marriage, roles of women in religion and politics, working women, and the separate society shared only by women. Answers is the place to go to get the answers you need and to ask the questions you want The speaker describes how the scene inspires silent, peaceful musings about profound things that are hard to put into words. I tried finding the perfect song to blare on repeat, but I couldn't make up my mind, so I decided to make my own. "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. A Nocturnal Reverie Summary; The Devastating Portrait of the City of London: A Memoir from Wordsworth's Sonnet Book Review; Sonnet 146: Poor Soul, The Centre Of My Sinful Earth by William Shakespeare; William Wordsworth: Analysis of the poem 'Surprised By Joy' The Rainbow by William Wordsworth; It Is A Beauteous Evening, Calm And Free by . 183, August 1995, pp. The speaker states in the first line, "To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name," where name represents Shakespeare's poetry and dramas, above which appear his name as author. As you read, pick out which words express his pleasure and which ones express his pain and which words express his intense feeling and which his numbed feeling. Experiencing nature for an extended period of time might involve travel. 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. Education and inquiry were also embraced, which is reflected in poetry that is technically sharp. The footnotes are extremely full and satisfyingly scholarly, although a reasonably well-informed reader may feel that some of the better-known historical backgroundthe Great Fire of London, or the Glorious Revolution, for examplehas been annotated rather too heavily. "Nocturnal Reverie" 6. The moon is given a feminine pronoun in line 6, "She, hollowing clear, directs the wand'rer right" (Finch 6). The-e stern religion quenched the unwilling flame, There died the best of passions, love and fame. Furthermore, men of her time tried to convince ladies that writing, reading, and thinking "would cloudbeauty, and exhausttime" (Finch . The poem begins with the speaker describing the beauty of the night, with the stars shining and the moon providing light. A Nocturnal Reverie (1713) Anne Finch. 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. 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. Anne Finch came to be considered one of the most influential female figures of the Augustan era because of her free, intimate exploration of nature and gender through poetry as well as her ability to seamlessly blend both classical and modern genres. Finch is suggesting that nature can teach and minister to people wise enough to submit to it. //
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