Anne Finch:Poetry of the Countess of Winchelsea

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-finch

“As her work developed more fully during her retirement at Eastwell, Finch demonstrated an increasing awareness of the poetic traditions of her own period as well as those governing older verse. Her work’s affinity with the metaphysical tradition is evident in poems such as “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat,” which represents the distanced perspective of the speaker through the image of the telescope, an emblem common to much religious poetry of the seventeenth century. Finch experimented with rhyme and meter and imitated several popular genres, including occasional poems, satirical verse, and religious meditations, but fables comprise the largest portion of her oeuvre. Most likely inspired by the popularity of the genre at the turn of the century, Finch wrote dozens of these often satiric vignettes between 1700 and 1713. Most of them were modeled after the short tales of Jean La Fontaine, the French fable writer made popular by Charles II. Finch mocked these playful trifles, and her fables offer interesting bits of social criticism in the satiric spirit of her age.

However, Finch’s more serious poems have received greater critical attention than her fables. “A Nocturnal Reverie,” for instance, is clearly Augustan in its perspective and technique, although many admirers have tended to praise the poem as pre-Romantic: William Wordsworthmentioned its “new images of external nature” in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” collected in his Poems, first published in 1815. Finch’s poem opens with classical references and proceeds through characteristically Augustan descriptions of the foxglove, the cowslip, the glowworm, and the moon. Finch imitates Augustan preferences for decorum and balance in her use of heroic couplets and the medial caesura in setting the peaceful, nocturnal atmosphere of the poem:

Or from some Tree, fam’d for the Owl’s delight,

She, hollowing clear, directs the Wand’rer right:

In such a Night, when passing Clouds give place,

Or thinly vail the Heav’ns mysterious Face;

When Odours, which declin’d repelling Day,

Thro temp’rate Air uninterrupted stray;

While Finch’s verse occasionally displays slight antitheses of idea and some structural balances of line and phrase, she never attains the epigrammatic couplet form that Alexander Pope perfected in the early eighteenth century. Her admission in “A Nocturnal Reverie” that her verse attempts “Something, too high for Syllables to speak” might be linked to the Romantic recognition of the discrepancy between human aspiration and achievement. But ultimately she retreats to God and solitude and displays a more properly Augustan attitude in the acceptance of her human limitations. At times her descriptions of natural detail bear some likeness to poets such as James Thomson, but Finch’s expression is more immediate and simple, and her versification ultimately exhibits an Augustan rather than a pre-Romantic sensibility. “