A Wavering Form, A Nameless Thing: Anne Finch and the Recovery of What It Means to be Human

In his General Audience on January 13, 1988, St. John Paul II described miracles as revelations of God’s kingdom: “This ‘power from on high’ (Lk. 24:49), namely, God Himself, is above the entire natural order. It directs this order and at the same time makes it known that– through this order and superior to it–human destiny is the kingdom of God.”

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With St. John Paul’s words in mind, I would like to explore how Anne Finch’s poem “Adam Posed” (1709) points to the social corruption of the divine order. The poem depicts Adam sweating and toiling at his plough and asks whether he would be able to name the shallow “nymphs” who populated English society. Written during a period of adjustment both for Finch and for England, the poem asks a deeply existential question in a lighthearted way: What have people become after the upheaval of the Glorious Revolution? In response, Finch reconsiders Adam’s ability to name living creatures to point out two things: how far people have fallen, and how much beauty hums below the surface of all creation, offering an infinite number of patterns and, at the same time, no patterns at all.

 

Adam Posed (1709)

 

Could our first father at his toilsome plough

Thorns in his path and labour on his brow

Clothed only in a rude unpolished skin

Could he a vain fantastic nymph have seen

In all her airs in all her antic graces

Her various fashions and more various faces

How had it posed that skill which late assigned

Just appellations to each several kind

A right idea of the sight to frame

To have guessed from what new element she came

To have hit the wavering form or given this thing a name

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A Brief History

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Anne Finch was a British poet who served as the Maid of Honour to Mary of Modena, the future Queen of England. Her husband Heneage served as Gentleman of the Bedchamber to James, the future King James II. When the Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposed the Catholic James and Mary, the Protestant monarchs William and Mary of Orange ascended the throne. Because of concerns about Catholic sympathies in England and especially at court, the new rulers expected their new subjects to swear the Test Oath, which required people to vow that they did not believe in Transubstantiation. Heneage refused to take this oath, and he and Anne chose to leave London for the countryside where their sympathies for Catholicism and the former rulers were more tolerated.

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The Beauty of Patterns

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Finch, an avid learner and supporter of women’s education, wrote poems like “The Introduction,” in which she emphasizes women’s ability to write as well as men and recovers women’s oft-ignored role in history, especially, as in this case, Biblical history. Biblical women are shown as powerful figures who lead their people to freedom. In “Adam Posed,” Finch shifts her vision of women to consider how the superficialities of their current age have altered them. She asks: “Could our first father at his toilsome plough / Thorns in his path and labour on his brow / […] Could he a vain fantastic nymph have seen [and have] given this thing a name [?]”

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In these lines, Finch sets up both women and the audience as subjects to be scrutinized. She refuses to use the name “woman” in the poem, calling her instead “a vain fantastic nymph.” This shallow woman, “In all her airs, in all her antic graces, [with] Her various fashions, and more various faces,” is a “wavering form,” a nameless “thing.” The objectification via these names draws out questions of subjecthood regarding the woman, who is so involved in appearances that she has forgotten her own substance. At the same time that the poem points this out, it asks questions about the subjecthood of the audience. Readers can understand the essential nature of the woman being described, and they can name her because her name is familiar to them. But their ability to name is nothing like the Biblical Adam’s naming through divine inspiration—it does not understand that his was not a naming of patterns or form, but rather of being itself.

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The poem’s organization underscores the inadequacy of humanity to fully grasp or speak the essential nature of a human being. Whereas sonnets have fourteen lines and are written in heroic (ten-syllable) couplets, “Adam Posed” has eleven lines and includes one triplet (three rhyming lines) with an irregular number of syllables. The triplet asks whether Adam could name a superficial being, questioning the possibility of understanding one so shallow and then pondering whether humanity as become something altogether different from its original form.  The lines point out that Adam had given “just” or appropriate names to creation because he had “A right idea of the sight.” The ever-shifting form of humans caught up in appearances, however, renders it difficult to pin down their “elemental” form and give them a name. The poem itself at first appears as though it should be named “sonnet,”  but then it ends after eleven lines and with a triple rhyme—thus, the form has changed as the poem continues and the reader appears to be mistaken for naming it a sonnet at the beginning.

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This “mistake,” of course, is no mistake at all. Finch starts the poem with an image of the Fall: Adam is sweating as he works, which Biblically is a symptom that God tells Adam and Eve they will have to experience because of their transgression.  Finch then asks if Adam would be able to name people who have fallen prey to vanity. However, we have already been given an image of Adam as fallen. Finch’s question, then, seems to be whether Adam would be able to name vain humanity as a now fallen human himself. The answer, of course, is “no.’ Or, at least, not without a miracle.

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As St. John Paul II suggests in his General Audience, miracles can be momentary revelations of God, different ways of seeing the divine order. By re-orienting our vision, Finch’s poem imitates the re-seeing that is necessary to get out of a rut in our thinking or, perhaps, to get out of a pernicious habit like vanity. Finch’s poem calls out people for being shallow and untrue to their nature, but it also calls out the vanity of readers for falling prey to thinking they knew what was going on in the form of the poem. By showing us our mistake, Finch forces a closer reading of the poem. The last three lines get longer and longer, stretching from ten to eleven to thirteen syllables, prolonging the question of Adam’s ability to name and making us labor to confirm our initial thought that the poem was a sonnet. This modification of form microcosmically reflects Finch’s theological and political concerns with socially prescribed forms. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution in England, many, Finch among them, questioned the Anglican apologists whose politically-inflected Providential doctrine suggested that the Revolution had been divinely ordained. She took issue with politically-inflected readings of God’s divine will because, for her, trying to pin down God’s will was a mistake that rendered humanity even more fallen.

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Thus, Finch’s inability to name human beings as human beings or to name the “new element” they are comprised of underscores her mortal reliance upon forms and outward appearances to identify God’s creation. In order to acknowledge this limited capability and to avoid becoming trapped within its shallow depths, Finch offers an apophatic way of affirming divine order: by implying what the human is not, she begins to reorder and stabilize, if only in words, a corrupted understanding of human existence. Such a re-patterning begins to re-envision how the divine word functions in her time, demonstrating that its infinite different appearances in the world are not a sign of its inability to formulate itself but rather a sign of the infinite, miraculous ways God presents the beauty of divine order in the world.