Staying Out Late: Anne Finch's Poetics of Evening

This essay explores the innovative significance of Anne Finch's poem, A Nocturnal Reverie (1713): as a gender inflected revision of Virgil's tropes of pastoral retirement and twilight closure in the Eclogues; and as an imaginative engagement with Milton's scenes of epithalamium, sleep, and nocturnal vagrancy in Paradise Lost. The essay argues that by enacting a mental state of reverie, Finch mediates between two models of Miltonic night wandering—the Penseroso's vocational deliberation and Eve's involuntary dream of Satanic transgression. It concludes by showing how the poem anticipates the rise of a later-eighteenth-century poetics of evening.