She died on April 16th, 1689 from years of poor health. Besides the'Nocturnal Reverie,' the Countess wrote many other sweet . CRITICAL OVERVIEW 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. Sleep inertia is the brief period of impaired alertness and performance experienced immediately after waking. 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). She also met Colonel Heneage Finch, a soldier and courtier appointed as Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York. Pope's classic An Essay on Criticism was published in 1711. She was an aristocrat and a woman, therefore few took her work seriously. c. 1909 Here, Mendelson and Crawford provide a thorough reference on what life was like for women in all walks of life and in every part of the social strata in early modern England. Barbara McGovern includes, as an Appendix, a selection of poems from the Wellesley Manuscript. Yet it is precisely this collapse of faith which may help us to assess the main body of her poetry. The poet used anaphora at the beginnings of some neighboring lines. Overall, however, the book is a useful addition to a relatively new field of English studies. In this research the poem of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, "A Nocturnal Reverie" will be analyzed from an ecological perspective. When they sleep is when nature can enjoy its celebratory expression. He feels joy and pain, an ambivalent response. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. If a writer can't trust words, how can she trust that an unfriendly audience will accept poetry from a woman? 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. ''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. This idea of heroism in often driven by a false sense of bravado and . Finch was a well-educated woman who took care with her poetry to ensure that it was technically sound. Yet this process of idealization necessarily involves a suppression of the gender that enables this model to come into existence. In a field, there are haystacks and a horse grazing. 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. Various plants and flowers, including woodbind, bramble-rose, cowslip, and foxglove, grow there. The Thomas Gray Archive is a collaborative digital archive and research project devoted to the life and work of eighteenth-century poet, letter-writer, and scholar Thomas Gray (1716-1771), author of the acclaimed 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751). FINCH, ANNE, COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA (1661-1720) Anne Finch was born at Sydmonton near Newbury. Fables became a sizeable part of her writing, comprising nearly one-third of her total work. The speaker prefers this setting to that of her everyday life. 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. 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. (line 43) in "Reverie." Finch's nocturne is unlike Milton . She was buried in Eastwell. Personification is a literary device with which the author assigns human characteristics to non-human entities and is similar to anthropomorphism. Finch's command of the verse is steady throughout the poem and it never feels out of control or rambling. Finding romantic elements in "A Nocturnal Reverie" is not difficult. The Dolphins: About the poem. The poem opens with the speaker leaning by. Today: Well-educated young women have the option of pursuing any number of career fields, including medicine, writing, teaching, law, science, or ministry. 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. Poetry for Students. There is only one figure in the poem, which places emphasis on an individual and the value of that individual's experience and imagination. 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. 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"). A Nocturnal Reverie By Countess of Winchilsea Anne Finch About this Poet Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea, was an English poet and courtier in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The implication is that when man is awake and moving through the world, nature's full glory is suppressed. 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." This poem remains one of Finch's best-loved and most-anthologized works. Finch's husband, Colonel Heneage Finch, built a career in government affairs and was active in James II's court. 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. XXVI. What were their backgrounds and what subjects did they choose for their work? window.__mirage2 = {petok:"CsTeJ9Hg8KKAtMlpOlwcpZklVbhcLp3NKXJdVuKg54c-86400-0"}; For the many people who live in suburbs and cities, going outdoors usually means walking around a neighborhood or visiting a park. Although it is fifty lines long, there is no period until the very end. Barbara McGovern is one of the most well-known experts on Finch and her work. Critical Overvi, c. 1789 "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. In poetry, Pope was the primary writer and representation of the Augustan Age. 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). In the following excerpt, Hinnant compares the themes in Finch's poems "To the Nightingale" and "A Nocturnal Reverie.". Despite what it says on the cover, this book is definitely not "a true story". 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 deceptively witty manner, Finch admits that by presenting herself to the world intellectually, she may render that self a monstrous deviationthe "ugly" spectacle that is the woman writer. Miller, Christopher R., "Staying Out Late: Anne Finch's Poetics of Evening," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/nocturnal-reverie, "A Nocturnal Reverie When Finch wrote "A Nocturnal Reverie," the romantic period in England was still eighty-five years away. 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. . If you can find nature sounds that are consistent with the poem, add those for a multimedia experience. Themes 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. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea expressed affection towards her husband via poetry, which was, in her time, a medium of expression dominated by men. 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. 61-80. The night has always held strange and wonderful things, and living in a reverie is often part of the fairytale world. 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. The pleasures of that world, she feels, are pursued but rarely reached. The complaint that opens "The Introduction," for example, is well known for its pithy illustration of the obstacles facing women writers. NATIONALITY: British Some consider the poem to be a precursor to the romantic movement. The poem has its origins in a rather peculiar story. The song of a nightingale (Philomel) is heard, along with the sound of an owl. Ultimately, Finch's use of personification evokes the theme of nature as a living community. In what follows, I will argue that poetry, for Finch, becomes a site of contest over the refracting discourse of "fair." 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. In. She also remarks that the nighttime celebration does not last long. . Rate answer. A better understanding of the neural processes during sleep inertia may offer insight into the awakening process. This volume contains fifty-three poems by Finch, complete with commentary, introductory material, and scholarly notes. These, together with the works discussed within the text, testify to the impressively wide range of style and subject-matter at Finch's command. The point is moot, however, since even "your Eyes" have succumbed to the false show of Art's disguises. 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. Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman, "Romanticism," in A Handbook to Literature, 9th ed., Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. For example, a traditional form might be applied to a subject not normally associated with that form. SOURCES English Augustan poets followed suit, writing verse that followed conventions and demonstrated mastery of language and technique. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, was born in April 1661 to Anne Haselwood and Sir William Kingsmill. 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). And many have attained, dull and untaught, The name of wit only by finding fault. We can see in this essay, primarily, a supreme expression of the increasing loneliness of his life. 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. 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." The speaker describes how the scene inspires silent, peaceful musings about profound things that are hard to put into words. 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." This assessment of the natural world versus man's world is very much in line with the romantic way of thinking. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Create a display that features the artwork and the poem. Most notably, Augustan poets used classical forms to make modern statements. The reflections have movement, which simultaneously brings the moon and the leaves to life while also reminding the reader of the aforementioned breeze. 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. 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. The speaker is dreading the morning because that is when they must face the stress of the 'real world'. Analysis: "Ode to a Nightingale" . , "Romantic Period in English Literature," in A Handbook to Literature, 9th ed., Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. She describes groves that, with little light, are softened with the near absence of shadow. Annie Finch (born October 31, 1956) is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion.Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Anne Kingsmill was born in April, 1661 Some Other poems From of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea Include. A Nocturnal Reverie (1713) By Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. On February 13, 1689, the two officially assumed the throne. 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. "He adds that those seeking the roots of romanticism in such poems should look beyond the mere setting. 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. GENRE: Poetry 808 certified writers online. . 410-12. The grass invites the speaker to rest in it on the banks of the river. LINE BY LINE ANALYSIS OF THE POEM Stanza One. The rhyme scheme and the rhythm are held consistently over the course of all fifty lines. 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. Clouds do not randomly float across the sky but act to hide and reveal the mysterious night sky. 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. That is, the connection with nature, described in the lines of "a nocturnal reverie", brings to the speaker good, happy and calm feelings (composedness). Create a digital "Hall of Fame" (in the form of a Web site or multimedia slideshow) presenting your findings in writing and in images. 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. Style The poem contains many out-of-this-world . Compare & Contrast 95, Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, Gale Research, 1990, pp. 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. 1713. 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. It was a dynamic time of upheaval, opportunity, and possibility, and optimism generally bested cynicism in the early years of romanticism. 64-71. GENRE: Poetry, Nonfiction The poem's speaker, a middle-aged man who has fallen deeply in love, tells a mocking friend to leave him alone and "let him love" already. Finch thus makes opposite use of a convention which previous poetic generations had used to affirm the validity of poetry as inspired discourse. FRANK BIDART Login The STANDS4 Network She longs to stay in her reverie because it is an escape, real or imagined, from the life that makes her feel oppressed. ''A Nocturnal Reverie'' also boasts highly technical construction. Reaching the spot between the operations and tactical stations, she stopped. The speaker lovingly embraces the serenity of nature at night. 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. "A Nocturnal Reverie" by Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661 - 1720) From Winchilsea, Anne (Kingsmill) Finch, Countess of. 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." Philomel was a person who, according the Greek mythology, was turned into a nightingale. The same word and is repeated. It was not until the twentieth century that her work began to receive much critical attention. 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). 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. 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." Again, Finch enlivens nature through personification. Encyclopedia.com. POEM SUMMARY 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? Bird sounds at night are familiar and something to which the reader can readily relate. 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. "On Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. 445-46. Her critical biography of Finch covers new ground in a number of ways. But here the attempt at imitative harmony seems only futile, not "poetic." "To the Nightingale" is also important in the history of poetry for another reason. Barbara McGovern sets out to redress the balance. It lacks all the peace and sensitivity of the natural setting she enjoys at night. Today: Women are some of the most popular, celebrated, and frequently published poets. But even this conventional estimate of her poetry as descriptive rather than inspired or reflective appears misleading. 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. 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. 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. Finch portrays nature in "A Nocturnal Reverie" as a lively and animated community of animals, trees, flowers, plants, clouds, aromas, grass, wind, and water. 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). In terms of form, "A Nocturnal Reverie" is rooted in two venerated, classically inspired traditions of poetry that both the Augustans and the Romantics admiredthe first of which being, as its title suggests, the nocturne. 31, No. Stanza three begins with anguish. Anne Kingsmill Finch. Did I, my lines intend for public view, How many censures, would their faults pursue, Some would, because such words they do affect, Cry they're insipid, empty, and uncorrect. Imagism flourished in Britain and in the United States for a brief period that is generally considered to be somewhere between 1909 a, Curse 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 a result of their persistent Jacobitism they were exiled from court and faced a future of persecution and financial hardship. 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. Finch, Anne, "A Nocturnal Reverie," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. The attempt at imitative harmony seems only futile, not `` poetic. name of wit only by fault. An aristocrat and a woman is suppressed that her work began to much. 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a nocturnal reverie analysis line by line