Trees in Anne Finch’s Jacobite Poems of Retreat

Trees, especially oaks, are recurring images in the poetry of Anne Finch. As politically inflected emblems of shade and protection, Finch’s trees invoke the Virgilian pastoral and its attendant themes of exile and leisured retirement. However, by moving Meliboeus’s place of exile from the scorching plain to the shady oak grove, Finch relocates political exile within the site of pastoral retreat itself. Several of Finch’s poems are discussed in terms of her Jacobite poetics, including “Upon the Hurricane,” “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat,” and “A Nocturnal Reverie.”