Staying out late: Anne Finch's poetics of evening.(A Nocturnal Reverie)

I

When William Wordsworth assessed the state of descriptive poetry between Paradise Lost and The Seasons, he saw very little to admire besides Alexander Pope's "Windsor Forest" and a poem by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, called "A Nocturnal Reverie" (1713). (1) Finch scholars such as Barbara McGovern have found this remark to be a "mixed blessing": while it brought attention to a neglected female writer, it has also promoted the misleading impression that Finch was primarily a nature poet, or even a pre-Romantic. (2) Following the example of Reuben A. Brower's 1945 study of Finch's affinities to Metaphysical poets, (3) McGovern has shown how the ethos of "A Nocturnal Reverie" differs from that of Wordsworthian Romanticism (4); and Charles H. Hinnant has suggested that Wordsworth mistakenly values Finch's poem from "an implicitly teleological perspective," in which the efforts of predecessors pave the way for his own poetry. (5) No one has suggested that Wordsworth is similarly colonizing Pope, perhaps because Pope's place in literary history has been more clearly defined and securely established than that of Finch. Indeed, the effort to save Finch from Wordsworth's praise means placing her squarely in Pope's literary and cultural moment rather than in a limbo somewhere between Paradise Lost and "Tintern Abbey."

And yet Wordsworth had a point: the "Nocturnal Reverie" is remarkable not only for presenting "image[s] of external nature" but also for doing so in the dark. (6) The poem presents a fantasy of night wandering, its timeline framed by one long and complex subordinate clause beginning with the phrase, "In such a Night, when every louder Wind / Is to its distant Cavern safe confin'd." A litany of elaborative whens finds completion in a petitionary predicate at the end: "In such a Night let Me abroad remain, / Till Morning breaks, and All's confus'd again." (7) 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. Indeed, Finch's departure from her predecessor is evident in the opening lines: Milton's ceremonial gesture of banishment that begins "Il Penseroso"--"Hence vain deluding joys"--becomes the natural confinement of wind to some aeolian haven. (8)

It is clear that Wordsworth was impressed by the poem's nocturnal setting, because he cites two neoclassical night pieces for disparagement--"the style in which John Dryden has executed a description of Night in one of his Tragedies [The Indian Emperor], and Pope his translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the Iliad." The idea that anyone might find these lines beautiful baffles the poet: "Strange to think of an enthusiast, as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity!" (9) Still stranger to imagine legions of English noctambulists marching into moonlit fields to chant Dryden and Pope; but the implication of Wordsworth's scenario is that anyone undertaking the experiment would soon see the superiority of the night sky to the painted firmament of Augustan poetry. Mimetic fidelity aside, these passages also differ from "A Nocturnal Reverie" in that they are scenic backdrops to dramatic or epic action; the description in Finch's poem stands on its own.

Finch's poem has had no shortage of admirers in the time since Wordsworth made his remark. Over a century ago, Myra Reynolds claimed that the "Nocturnal Reverie" is "[t]he earliest poem in which we find the beauty and something of the spiritual power of night represented." (10) Most recently, in a phenomenological account of that power, Susan Stewart has placed the poem in a tradition of nocturnes with affinities to Orphic hymn. (11) The gender of Finch's nocturnal sensibility has also invited commentary: Ruth Salvaggio has argued that Finch's expressed preference for darkness and shade reflects an essentially feminine opposition to what she calls a masculine "Discourse of Light" typical of the "Enlightenment mind." (12) This binary opposition invites several qualifications, however. First, the scientific discourse of optics and the related tropes of illumination did not exclude an aesthetic attraction to picturesque darkness or shade, among either men or women. Second, while Finch's poem declares a preference for darkness, it intensely focuses on what remains of the world to be seen in moonlight; it represents an empirical acuity that tallies with the concerns of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding. Far from opposing contemporary discourses, the poem reflects them.

I will argue that the innovative significance of the "Nocturnal Reverie"--with respect to both literary innovation and gender--ought to be clarified within a more specifically literary, rather than broadly cultural, context. Most obviously, the poem revises "Il Penseroso": insofar as she identifies herself as an anonymous "Lady" on the title page of her 1713 collection, Finch implicitly adopts the role of La Penserosa. Beyond this connection, I propose to open a new avenue of inquiry by showing how the poem functions as a witty, gender-inflected version of pastoral and as a revisitation of nocturnal scenes in Paradise Lost. With reference to the pastoral, the poem deliberately crosses the twilight threshold at which shepherds must fold their flocks, and thus presents a dusky mirror image of noontime otium. With reference to the Miltonic poetics of sleep and consciousness, the poem echoes and revises Eve's famous dream of night wandering. (13) While the "Nocturnal Reverie" can certainly be enjoyed as pure description. I wish to show its imaginative inversions and revisions of poetic precursors. I will begin by examining several other poems in which Finch imaginatively engages with pastoral and Miltonic traditions. The "Pastoral Dialogue between Two Shepherdesses" and the "Petition for an Absolute Retreat" will illuminate Finch's use of the pastoral tropes of retirement, and the "Invocation to Sleep" will show Finch's elaboration of Milton's symbolic scenes of sleep and wakefulness. In this way, the "Nocturnal Reverie" can be read not only as part of a generic continuum of nocturnes as identified by Stewart, but also as a lyric that responds in innovative ways to other poetic traditions.

II