A Nocturnal Reverie (1713) Anne Finch. From the analysis of this essay we can find Lamb's characteristic way of expression. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), has the distinction of being one of the few women poets whose workssome of them, at leasthave consistently found their way into anthologies. FRANK BIDART Fresh grass stands strong and upright, suggesting that this poem takes place during spring. That is, the connection with nature, described in the lines of "a nocturnal reverie", brings to the speaker good, happy and calm feelings (composedness). 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. Ultimately, Finch's use of personification evokes the theme of nature as a living community. Grass stands tall of its own accord. The novel saw tremendous growth as a literary form, satire was popular, and poetry took on a more personal character. 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): 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. 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). Biblical allusions, or references, appear in her work, as do metaphysical tendencies in imagery and verse that combines the spiritual and the logical. 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). A Nocturnal Reverie (1713) By Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea. 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. The first line of the poem employs A.an apostrophe. al., W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. 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 . A Nocturnal Reverie By Anne Finch Anne Kingsmill Finch is significant because she was one of the earliest published women poets in England. 22 Feb. 2023
. The poem opens on a serene and gentle remark. 42, No. 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. Personification is a literary device with which the author assigns human characteristics to non-human entities and is similar to anthropomorphism. The nocturne originates from John Milton's epic . 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. 45, No. Neither mark predominates. Such women also retain the choice to marry men of their choosing and to stay home to care for their families. The kids are disappointed by their presents, the stepdad feels chilly, the dog pukes, the mom has some sex dreams about a man who isn't her husband, there's a reek of human . (February 22, 2023). At no point does she feel lonely or hurried because nature in the twilight provides everything her real selfher spiritual selfneeds. The liberation the poet finds . . The reflections have movement, which simultaneously brings the moon and the leaves to life while also reminding the reader of the aforementioned breeze. 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. Some consider the poem to be a precursor to the romantic movement. . In fact, many romantics considered nature to be among their wisest teachers. Barbara McGovern sets out to redress the balance. 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. 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. 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). 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. The poet used anaphora at the beginnings of some neighboring lines. 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). Mendelson, Sarah, and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England: 1550-1720, Oxford University Press, 2000. Create a digital "Hall of Fame" (in the form of a Web site or multimedia slideshow) presenting your findings in writing and in images. 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 sees this as one of Finch's most important poems, representative in both style and content of a large body of her work. 14 line lyric poem the first eight lines, called the octave, rhyme abbaabba, the content usually presents a problem. The Finches' refusal to support William and Mary after James was deposed created some difficulties for the couple. The Lutz family move into a new house right before Christmas. Stanza three begins with anguish. 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. a nocturnal reverie analysis line by line. 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. 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. The grass seems to be freshly grown and maybe even recently rained upon. 410-12. STYLE The speaker is so at ease in the natural setting that she dreads returning to the life she leads in the civilized world. Critical Overvi, c. 1789 She has been equally badly served by biographers and critics: no full-length biography or comprehensive critical assessment has hitherto been attempted. Barbara McGovern is one of the most well-known experts on Finch and her work. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. ''A Nocturnal Reverie'' also boasts highly technical construction. . c. 1909 Finch was a well-educated woman who took care with her poetry to ensure that it was technically sound. 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. What is the relationship between place and literature in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray and "A Nocturnal Reverie" by Anne Finch? During this time, England saw its own Industrial Revolution, major political reform, and the introduction of such philosophical perspectives as Utilitarianism. Task Force Z - Bd. As a result of their persistent Jacobitism they were exiled from court and faced a future of persecution and financial hardship. 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. 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. I don't believe my neighbour will suffer because I want it to happen and I've read too many books about Aleister Crowley. Odors intentionally wait until evening to come out, when the air is more suitable. 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. 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." . 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 word "nocturnal" suggests either that the reverie takes place by night or that it is simply about night without necessarily happening at night. 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). 61-80. Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued. "Adam Posed" 2. the poem's form and the foremost theme. Bird sounds at night are familiar and something to which the reader can readily relate. 183, August 1995, pp. 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. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (ne Kingsmill), was an English poet and courtier. POEM TEXT 1713. Anne Finch 1661 - 1720. 1, 5th ed., edited by M. H. Abrams et. Source: Susannah B. Mintz, "Anne Finch's Fair Play," in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 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. Reaching the spot between the operations and tactical stations, she stopped. 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. 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. If a writer can't trust words, how can she trust that an unfriendly audience will accept poetry from a woman? Moreover, it is written in heroic coupletstwo 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. 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. This poem remains one of Finch's best-loved and most-anthologized works. ''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. Style She died on April 16th, 1689 from years of poor health. 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. The Orator, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, A New Vision: Saint-Denis and French Church Architecture in the Twelfth Century, A New View of the Universe: Photography and Spectroscopy in Nineteenth-Century Astronomy, A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin, 1897, A Passion in the Desert (Une Passion Dans le Dsert) by Honor de Balzac, 1837, A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J. D. Salinger, 1953, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/nocturnal-reverie. 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). A Nocturnal Reverie By Anne Finch Summary. A Nocturnal Retrospective is a poem of fifty lines that describes a nighttime scene. Advertisement Advertisement colemanburrows . 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. 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 detailand, 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. 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. 31, No. The speaker has left her ordinary life behind in favor of exploring the inviting and relaxing nighttime landscape. 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. This loss of faith is consistent with the new understanding of language that emerged in the late seventeenth century. 3, Summer 1991, pp. Significantly, though, she also seems to recognize that even an honest gaze, a gaze unencumbered or unmediated by the influence of cultural narrativeif such a look could be posited at all, as Finch implies that it could notwould nonetheless be a containing, limiting, even policing one, capable of a form of "controul" over female emotion. 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. 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. In Finch's lifetime, she enjoyed a minimal amount of attention and respect for her work. "To the Nightingale" is also important in the history of poetry for another reason. The speaker lovingly embraces the serenity of nature at night. The result is poetry that is contemplative and insightful without being overly emotional or desperate. A better understanding of the neural processes during sleep inertia may offer insight into the awakening process. 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. 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). Taking the pseudonym "Ardelia," she wrote poetry about her husband, whom she loved and honored. There's a slight reprieve of misery at the very end of the . 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 flightsomething which is asserted explicitly through the thematic concerns of "To The Nightingale.". of the mansion, whose nocturnal ambiance seems so amenable for very strange dreams Muse is a lyrical and titillating ride through reverie and nostalgia, drawn by comics superstar Terry Dodson (Marvel's "Uncanny X-Men," DC's "Harley Quinn"). 499-513. 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. 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. Encyclopedia.com. English Augustan poets followed suit, writing verse that followed conventions and demonstrated mastery of language and technique. . These elements of nature are described as if they have feelings, opinions, and joy. From a chronological standpoint, "A Nocturnal Reverie" seems best positioned among Augustan literature. Hello, sign in. 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. Poetry for Students. But here the attempt at imitative harmony seems only futile, not "poetic." BORN: 1907, York, England Many scholars have argued that the seeds of romanticism are in the Augustan Age. 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. 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. //