Till Morning breaks, and All's confus'd again;
Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew'd.
Or Pleasures, seldom reach'd, again pursu'd.
‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ (published 1713)
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (1661-1720)
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| Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea. Portrait by Peter Cross, c. 1690, (National Portrait Gallery, London). |
The poem is essentially one huge sentence, all
describing an imaginary night spent savouring the beauties of the natural world:
‘In such a Night, when every louder Wind
Is to its distant Cavern safe confin’d;’(lines 1-2)
The reference to every ‘Wind’ being held within a
‘Cavern’ is an allusion to the cave of the wind god Aeolus in classical Greek
mythology; instead of violent winds ‘only gentle Zephyr fans his Wings’.
Meanwhile, the nightingale (represented by ‘lonely Philomel’) either softly
sings, or from the vantage of ‘some Tree’ she raises her melodic voice to guide
‘the Wand’rer right’ (lines 4-6). The night is mostly clear, since the ‘passing
Clouds give place’, or else only ‘thinly vail the Heav’ns’ (lines 7 & 8).
The viewer’s gaze returns to earth via a reflection ‘in some River, overhung
with Green’ of the ‘waving Moon’ (lines 9 & 10). The riverside grass is now
‘freshen’d’ by the moist night air and the ‘cool Banks’ of the river now
‘invite’ the wanderer to rest (lines 11 & 12). Within this tranquil oasis,
various country flowers bloom including the ‘Woodbind, and the Bramble-Rose’
alongside the ‘sleepy Cowslip’ and the ‘Foxglove’ (lines 13-16).
The personification begun with the idea of the
Cowslip being ‘sleepy’ is now continued through the likening of the ‘scatter’d
Glow-worms’ to ‘trivial Beauties’ in society who must ‘watch their Hour to
shine’; the inference is that only the most ‘perfect Charms’ can withstand the
unforgiving light of day, and the whole thing is turned into a clever compliment
to Finch’s friend the Countess of Salisbury whom, she writes ‘stands the Test
of every Light’. It’s an unusual detour in a poem that focuses primarily upon
nighttime as beautiful, and thus offers the possibility that some of the appeal
of the night is owing to the limitations it imposes upon visual perception.
Now, sweet ‘Odours’ can wander ‘uninterrupted’
through the air, and shadows are softened because they offer less contrast
within the ‘darken’d Goves’. This is a world of shadows now, where the
‘lengthen’d Shade’ or shadow of an ambling horse becomes an object of ‘fear’
until the sound of ‘torn up Forage in his Teeth’ is heard (lines 29-32). From
this momentary glimpse of the fearfulness of the dark, Finch returns us swiftly
to the peacefulness of twilight as sheep and cows eat, and birds call in a
‘shortliv’d Jubilee’ of tranquillity enjoyed ‘whilst Tyrant-man does sleep’
(lines 33-38). Sharing in this idyllic, untroubled condition Finch identifies
this nocturne as a space in which to experience ‘a sedate Content’ that nonetheless
does not inhibit the ‘silent Musings’ that prompt ‘the Mind to seek /
Something, too high for Syllables to speak’ (lines 39-42). By becoming immersed
within the natural world, a sense of sublimity is achieved and the wanderer’s
soul is finally, for a moment, ‘free’. ‘In such a Night,’ Finch writes, ‘let Me
abroad remain, / Till Morning breaks, and All’s confus’d again’ (lines 47-48).
Happy Reading everyone!
Other poems
by Anne Finch can be found here:
(A superb and totally free database of eighteenth-century poetry – there’s a beautifully presented copy of Finch’s poem here, as well as hundreds of other eighteenth-century poems throughout the site.)
(Poetry Foundation online: great free resource!!)
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Selected Poems, ed. by Denys Thompson
(Carcanet Press Ltd, 2003)
(this is pretty much what it says on the tin:
selected poems by Anne Finch)
Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-century women poets: an Oxford anthology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990)
– The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century
Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
(both are available from numerous book shops
online and on the high street, and both are truly excellent volumes! There are plenty
of economical priced second-hand copies of this available online too)
You can find out more about Anne Finch here:
(Wikipedia – usually a good starting point, and it’s free!)
Barbara McGovern, ‘Finch, Anne, countess of
Winchilsea (1661-1720)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9426
[accessed 16 July 2015]
(sadly, this resource is accessible by
subscription only)Resources used in the composition of this blogpost:
Claire Pickard, Literary Jacobitism: The Writings of Jane Barker, Mary Caesar and Anne
Fich, DPhil Thesis (Oxford, 2006) https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:85514fc9-6f0c-4992-ae8c-2666dc1f7ede/download_file?safe_filename=602157226_Redacted.pdf&file_format=application%2Fpdf&type_of_work=Thesis
Katherine M. Quinsey, ‘Nature, Gender, and Genre
in Anne Finch’s Poetry: “A Nocturnal Reverie”’, Lumen, 26 (2007), 63-77
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/lumen/2007-v26-lumen0255/1012061ar.pdf