Does first approach, dressed up in welcome joy;
At first he to the cheated lover’s sight
Naught represents, but rapture and delight,
Alluring hopes, soft fears, which stronger bind
Their hearts, than when they more assurance find. [30]
Emboldened thus, to Fame I did commit
(By some few hands) my most unlucky wit.
But, ah, the sad effects that from it came!
What ought t’have brought me honour, brought me shame!
Like Aesop’s painted jay I seemed to all,
Adorned in plumes I not my own could call:
Rifled like her, each one my feathers tore,
And, as they thought, unto the owner bore.
My laurels thus an other’s brow adorned,
My numbers they admired, but me they scorned: [40]
An other’s brow, that had so rich a store
Of sacred wreaths, that circled it before;
Where mine quite lost, (like a small stream that ran
Into a vast and boundless ocean)
Was swallowed up, with what it joined and drowned,
And that abyss yet no accession found.
Orinda, (Albion’s and her sex’s grace)
Owed not her glory to a beauteous face,
It was her radiant soul that shone within.
Which struck a lustre through her outward skin; [50]
That did her lips and cheeks with roses dye,
Advanced her height, and sparkled in her eye.
Nor did her sex at all obstruct her fame,
But higher ’mong the stars it fixed her name;
What she did write, not only all allowed,
But ev’ry laurel to her laurel bowed!
Th’envious age, only to me alone
Will not allow, what I write, my own,
But let ’em rage, and ’gainst a maid conspire,
So deathless numbers from my tuneful lyre [60]
Do ever flow; so Phoebus I by thee
Divinely inspired and possessed may be;
I willingly accept Cassandra’s fate,
To speak the truth, although believed too late.
ANNE FINCH COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA 1661–1720
Her father, Sir William Kingsmill, died before her birth, her mother Anne (Hazlewood) and stepfather, Sir Thomas Ogle, during her childhood; she survived, to become Maid of Honour to Mary of Modena, and marry, in 1684 (registering herself as ’spinster aged about 18 years’) Col. Heneage Finch, a Court officer: the marriage was childless but very happy. When James II was deposed they retired to the Kent country seat of the Earl of Winchilsea, to which title Finch expectedly succeeded in 1712. Lived a retired, country life; published her poems anonymously, praising the virtues of having ‘the skill to write, the modesty to hide’. In some respects a typical Augustan poet of society – she knew Pope and Gay (who mocked her in Three Hours after Marriage as Phoebe Clinket, ink-stained and with pens in her hair): conjugal life, women’s friendship, nature and retirement constituted major themes. Wordsworth made an anthology of her poetry.
Miscellany Poems On Several Occasions (London, 1713); Myra Reynolds (ed.), The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1903); Katharine N. Rogers, Six Eighteenth-Century Women Authors (NY: Frederick Ungar, 1979).
The Introduction*
Did I intend my lines for public view,
How many censures would their faults pursue!
Some would, because such words they do affect,
Cry they’re insipid, empty, incorrect.
And many have attained, dull and untaught,
The name of wit, only by finding fault.
True judges might condemn their want of wit;
And all might say, they’re by a woman writ.
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men, [10]
Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our utmost art and use. [20]
Sure, ’twas not ever thus, nor are we told
Fables, of women that excelled of old;
To whom, by the diffusive hand of heaven,
Some share of wit and poetry was given.
On that glad day, on which the Ark returned,
The holy pledge, for which the land had mourned,
The joyful tribes attend it on the way,
The Levites do the sacred charge convey,
Whilst various instruments before it play;
Here, holy virgins in the concert join, [30]
The louder notes to soften and refine,
And with alternate verse complete the hymn divine.
Lo! the young poet, after God’s own heart,
By Him inspired and taught the Muses’ art,
Returned from conquest a bright chorus meets,
That sing his slain ten thousand in the streets.
In such loud numbers they his acts declare,
Proclaim the wonders of his early war,
That Saul upon the vast applause does frown,
And feels its mighty thunder shake the crown. [40]
What can the threatened judgement now prolong?
Half of the kingdom is already gone:
The fairest half, whose judgement guides the rest,
Have David’s empire o’er their hearts confessed.
A woman here leads fainting Israel on,
She fights, she wins, she triumphs with a song,
Devout, majestic, for the subject fit,
And far above her arms, exalts her wit,
Then to the peaceful, shady palm withdraws,
And rules the rescued nation with her laws. [50]
How are we fallen! fall’n by mistaken rules,
And education’s, more than Nature’ fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed;
And if some one would soar above the rest,
With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,
So strong th’opposing faction still appears,
The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.
Be cautioned, then, my Muse, and still retired;
Nor be despised, aiming to be admired; [60]
Conscious of wants, still with contracted wing,
To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing.
For groves of laurel thou wert never meant:
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.
A Letter to Daphnis
This to the crown and blessing of my life,
The much loved husband of a happy wife;
To him whose constant passion found the art
To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart,
And to the world by tenderest proof discovers
They err, who say that husbands can’t be lovers.
With such return of passion as is due,
Daphnis I love, Daphnis my thoughts pursue;
Daphnis, my hopes and joys are bounded all in you.
Even, I for Daphnis’ and my promise’ sake, [10]
What I in women censure, undertake.
But this from love, not vanity, proceeds;
You know who writes, and I who ’tis that reads.
Judge not my passion by my want of skill:
Many love well, though they express it ill;
And I your censure could with pleasure bear,
Would you but soon return, and speak it here.
from The Spleen. A Pindaric Poem*
Thou Proteus to abused mankind,
Who never yet thy real cause could find
Or fix thee to remain in one continued shape.
Still varying thy perplexing form
Now a Dead Sea thou’lt represent,
A calm of stupid discontent,
Then, dashing on the rocks, with rage into a storm.
Trembling sometimes thou dost appear
Dissolved into a panic fear; [10]
Or sleep intruding dost thy shadows spread
And crowd with boding dreams the melancholy head;
Or when the midnight hour is told
And drooping lids thou still dost waking hold,
Thy fond delusions cheat the eyes;
Before them antic spectres dance,
Unusual fires their pointed heads advance
And airy phantoms rise.
Such was the monstrous vision seen
When Brutus (now beneath his cares oppressed [20]
And all Rome’s fortunes rolling in his breast
Before Philippi’s latest field,
Before his fate did to Octavius yield)
Was vanquished by the Spleen.
Falsely, the mortal part we blame
Of our depressed and ponderous frame,
Which, till the first degrading sin
Let thee its dull attendant in,
Still with the other did comply
Nor clogged the active soul, disposed to fly [30]
And range the mansions of its native sky.
Nor whilst in his own heaven he dwelt
Whilst Man his Paradise possessed,
His fertile garden in the fragrant east,
And all united odours smelt,
No armed sweets until thy reign
Could shock the sense, or in the face
A flushed, unhandsome colour place.
Now the jonquil o’ercomes the feeble brain;
We faint beneath the aromatic pain, [40]
Till some offensive scent thy powers appease,
And pleasure we resign for short and nauseous ease.
In every one thou dost possess
New are thy motions and thy dress;
Now in some grove a listening friend
Thy false suggestions must attend,
Thy whispered griefs, thy fancied sorrows hear,
Breathed in a sigh and witnessed by a tear;
Whilst in the light and vulgar crowd
Thy slaves, more clamorous and loud, [50]
By laughters unprovoked thy influence too confess.
In the imperious wife thou Vapours art,
Which from o’erheated passions rise
In clouds to the attractive brain
Until, descending thence again,
Through the o’ercast and showering eyes,
Upon her husband’s softened heart,
He the disputed point must yield,
Something resign of the contested field;
Till lordly man, born to imperial sway, [60]
Compounds for peace, to make that right away
And woman, armed with spleen, does servilely obey.
The fool, to imitate the wits,
Complains of thy pretended fits,
And dullness, born with him, would lay
Upon thy accidental sway;
Because sometimes thou dost presume
Into the ablest heads to come:
That often men of thoughts refined,
Impatient of unequal sense, [70]
Such slow returns where they so much dispense,
Retiring from the crowd, are to thy shades inclined.
O’er me, alas! thou dost too much prevail:
I feel thy force whilst I against thee rail:
Through thy black jaundice I all objects see
As dark, as terrible as thee,
My lines decried, and my employment thought
An useless folly or presumptuous fault:
Whilst in the Muses’ path I stray, [80]
Whilst in their groves and by their secret springs
My hand delights to trace unusual things,
And deviates from the known and common way;
Nor will in fading silks compose
Faintly the inimitable rose,
Fill up an ill-drawn bird, or paint on glass
The Sovereign’s blurred and undistinguished face,
The threatening angel and the speaking ass.
Patron thou art to every gross abuse,
The sullen husband’s feigned excuse
When the ill-humour with his wife he spends [90]
And bears recruited wit and spirits to his friends.
The son of Bacchus pleads thy power
As to the glass he still repairs,
Pretends but to remove thy cares,
Snatch from thy shades one gay and smiling hour
And drown thy kingdom in a purple shower.
When the coquette, whom every fool admires,
Would in variety be fair,
And changing hastily the scene [100]
From light, impertinent and vain,
Assumes a soft, a melancholy air,
And of her eyes rebates the wandering fires,
The careless posture and the head reclined,
The thoughtful and composed face,
Proclaiming the withdrawn, the absent mind,
Allows the fop more liberty to gaze,
Who gently for the tender cause inquires.
The cause, indeed is a defect in sense,
Yet is the spleen alleged and still the dull pretence […] [110]
The Unequal Fetters*
Could we stop the time that’s flying
Or recall it when ’tis past,
Put far off the day of dying
Or make youth for ever last,
To love would then be worth our cost.
But since we must lose those graces
Which at first your hearts have won
And you seek for in new faces
When our spring of life is done,
It would but urge our ruin on. [10]
Free as Nature’s first intention
Was to make us, I’ll be found,
Nor by subtle Man’s invention
Yield to be in fetters bound
By one that walks a freer round.
Marriage does but slightly tie men
Whilst close prisoners we remain,
They the larger slaves of Hymen
Still are begging love again
At the full length of all their chain. [20]
A Nocturnal Reverie*
In such a night, when every tender wind
Is to its distant cavern safe confined;
And only gentle Philomel, still waking, sings,
Or from some tree, famed for the owl’s delight,
She, hollowing clear, directs the wand’rer right;
In such a night, when passing clouds give place,
Or thinly veil the heaven’s mysterious face;
When in some river, overhung with green,
The waving moon and trembling leaves are seen; [10]
When freshened grass now bears itself upright,
And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite,
Whence springs the woodbind and the bramble-rose,
And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows;
Whilst now a paler hue the foxglove takes,
Yet chequers still with red the dusky brakes;
When scattered glow-worms, but in twilight fine,
Show trivial beauties, watch their hour to shine;
Whilst Salisb’ry stands the test of every light,
In perfect charms and perfect virtue bright; [20]
When odours, which declined repelling day,
Through temp’rate air uninterrupted stray;
When darkened groves their softest shadows wear,
And fal
ling waters we distinctly hear;
When through the gloom more venerable shows
Some ancient fabric, awful in repose,
While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal,
And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale;
When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads,
Comes slowly grazing through th’adjoining meads, [30]
Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear,
Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear;
When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,
And unmolested kine rechew the cud;
When curlews cry beneath the village walls,
And to her straggling brood the partridge calls;
Their short-lived jubilee the creatures keep,
Which but endures whilst tyrant man does sleep;
When a sedate content the spirit feels,
And no fierce light disturbs, whilst it reveals, [40]
But silent musings urge the mind to seek
Something too high for syllables to speak;
Till the free soul to a compos’dness charmed,
Finding the elements of rage disarmed,
O’er all below a solemn quiet grown,
Joys in th’inferior world and thinks it like her own:
In such a night let me abroad remain,
Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again:
Our cares, our toils, our clamours are renewed,
Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued. [50]
SARAH FYGE EGERTON 1669–1723
What cross impetuous Planets govern me,
That I’m thus hurry’d on to Misery.
Her riposte to Robert Gould’s misogynist satire, Love Given O’re (1682) was published in 1686 and again in 1687; she was sent away from home by her father, Thomas Fyge, apothecary, and married off to an attorney, Edward Field, who died c.1695; despite a fancy for Field’s married clerk, she then married a much older cousin, The Revd Thomas Egerton. The marriage developed unhappily (a meat pie was thrown), and both parties petitioned for divorce, unsuccessfully, in 1703. The woman playwright Delariviere Manley pitied the ‘old thin raw-bon’d Priest’ married to ‘a she-Devil incarnate … in love with all the handsome Fellows … flatnos’d, blubber-lipp’d’.
The Female Advocate, or, an Answere to a late Satyr against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy, etc., of Woman (London, 1686); Poems on Several Occasions, together with a pastoral (London, 1703); A Collection of Poems (London, 1706).
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