Anne Finch's Descriptive Turn

Anne Finch’s Descriptive TurnCourtney Weiss Smith

The Eighteenth Century, Volume 57, Number 2, Summer 2016, pp. 251-265(Article)

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https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2016.0016

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634865

https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2016.0016

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634865

The Eighteenth Century, vol. 57, no. 2 Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

Anne Finch’s Descriptive Turn

Courtney Weiss SmithWesleyan University

This essay contends that the poetic project of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchil-sea, resonates with the “descriptive turn” of Bruno Latour, and it proposes that the comparison illuminates both writers’ works.

“Descriptive turn”: the phrase is not Latour’s, but it helpfully captures a fundamental impetus of his methodology and program.1 Latour proposes a reorientation from debunking to assembling, from seeing through to simply seeing, from critique to description. He is not interested in the critical work of demystification, of suspiciously unveiling the “powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously” behind or beneath everyday phenomena.2 (As Susan Sontag once mocked a similar critical impulse, “Look, don’t you see that X is really— or, really means— A? That Y is really B?”3) La-tour points out that this kind of critique often relies on a rather tidy ontological bifurcation and an attempt “to purify by separating natural mechanisms from human passions,” nature from society, the real from the constructed. That is, critique purifies by dividing objects from subjects and then denouncing the “il-legitimate mixtures” between these poles.4 Latour offers a lively exaggeration of how this can work: critics revel in showing that, while “naïve believers” think that their behavior is autonomous and free, it is really “entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality” (e.g., “genes,” “social domination,” or “economic infrastructure”). Reversing course— in a way that has been especially influential in readings of poetry— critique also insists that what these “believers” “are doing with objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself.”5 The be-havior of subjects is really objectively determined, but depictions of “objective” nature are really subjective constructions. In sharp contrast to such ontological categorizing, Latour allows for the reality and even agency of human desires, society, things, and discourse, as well as hybrid combinations and relations be-tween and amongst these. Humans are not the only actors in the world. And

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in sharp contrast to critique’s impulse to purification and denunciation, La-tour advocates description as an altogether less confident and more provisional mode: “The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.”6 As Heather Love puts it, Latour’s descriptions “are close, but they are not deep; rather than adding anything ‘extra’ to the description, they account for the real variety that is already there.”7

“Close, but not deep,” involving a complex “gathering” but not the pro-jection of “extra” forces— this offers a useful way of thinking about early eighteenth- century nature poetry. My test case will be Finch’s Pindaric ode, “Upon the Hurricane” (1713), which treats the terrible storm that ravaged Eng-land in November 1703.8 As the poem surveys the destruction of trees, fields, mansions, and ships, it describes things in all their ontological hybridity and intricate interconnectedness.

Like much early eighteenth- century nature poetry, however, Finch’s poem is often read as a “projection of” human “wishes,” imagination, or categories onto a neutral “material entity that does nothing at all by itself.” The notion that poetry involves loading up nature with subjective, imaginative meanings is so pervasive that it is unsurprising that even the very best readings of eighteenth- century poetry sometimes lapse into such assumptions. For example, Charles Hinnant speaks off- handedly about the poem (and poems like it) in a way that locates meaning and value in the human mind: “cataclysmic events are made the instrument of the poet’s vision by a projection of human values onto the ex-ternal world.” Another scholar takes the storm as the “objective correlative” of “the political tumults of Finch’s life.”9 The notion of an “objective correlative” makes the human the source of meaning and presumes symbolic projection outward; in this reading, it is Finch’s own deeply personal experiences that find physical form in the storm. Such assumptions are further licensed by powerful ideas about genre. Our templates for understanding the meditative poem and the Pindaric ode often emphasize human imagination and feeling, and they work backwards from a quintessentially Romantic understanding of the mind and the poem (where “an aspect of the outer scene” is important primarily in “stimulat[ing]” in human minds some “passionate,” “personal,” “emotional,” or “human” truth).10 In short, we assume that humans make nature meaning-ful. Yet, this is a strange way to read a poem that tries earnestly for over three hundred lines to understand the workings of nature and God— as we will see, a poem that foregrounds doubts about the human ability to interpret and that insists on the limits of the human mind.

Latour is helpful here, proposing that we question the autonomy of those “project[ing]” minds and the passivity of nature (which supposedly “does nothing at all by itself”). Without denying that our psyches and our societies are involved, Latour helps us see nature as “much more real, nonhuman and objec-tive than those shapeless screens on which society— for unknown reasons—


SMITH— ANNE FINCH’S DESCRIPTIVE TURN 253

needed to be ‘projected.’”11 This is a salutary reminder as we approach Finch’s poem. Of course, the poet writes the poem, and of course her personal experi-ence of the storm and her personal beliefs come into play. However, we need not therefore assume that these are the only sources of meaning, and we need not posit a manipulative distance between the meaning- generating writer and the neutral world described. In so doing, we are drawing on a set of unexam-ined assumptions about “modern” (or “Romantic”) autonomous subjects and inert, “blank” nature.12

These assumptions are both anachronistic and inappropriate for Finch’s po-etry. In her “Petition for an Absolute Retreat” (1713), Finch offers a different way to understand the relationship between a meditative human mind and the natural world. In her wished- for “sweet, but absolute Retreat,” she will meditate in peace:

Thus from Crouds, and Noise remov’d,

Let each Moment be improv’d;

Every Object still produce,

Thoughts of Pleasure, and of Use:13

Finch’s statement echoes late seventeenth- and early eighteenth- century pro-grams of Protestant meditation on the creatures. They use a similar idiom: meditation on natural “Objects” is a way of “improv[ing]” “little Fragments, or Parcels of Time,” and the practice is remarkable for its “pleasantness” and pious “Usefulness.”14 For Finch as for other contemporary meditators, the human plays an active role in the process: she puts herself in the right place and the right frame of mind, and she attends to the “Objects.” (She prepares and scrutinizes, not imagines or projects.) The impetus to meaning, however, comes from outside of her— usually, for contemporaries, from the Book of Na-ture that God encoded with instructive moral lessons. Finch states forthrightly that it is the “Object” that “produce[s]” meditations. Significantly, the “Use”- ful “Thoughts” that Protestant meditation accesses are not understood as imagina-tive projections onto objects or immediate revelations from God (neither es-sentially human nor essentially divine). Rather, they are speculative guesses, prompted by particular objects, about ultimately unknowable, supra- human truths. Though the meditator’s agency and possible fallibility are always re-membered, the humble hope is to glimpse hints that would help render nature and God a little less unknowable.

What if “Upon the Hurricane” does not involve the human mind project-ing onto nature? We do not have to naively affirm Finch’s God, her moral dis-coveries, or her political ideas to respect her poem’s basic orientation: seeking to describe the storm and thereby at least partially comprehend the meanings it “produce[s].” Hinnant, for instance, contradicts his off- handed mention of imaginative “projection” by arguing insightfully that Finch’s poem features,



above all, “the mind’s difficulty in coming to terms with a force that defies human understanding.”15 The mind does not project meaning onto the world of the storm, so much as it grapples modestly with the storm’s meaning for the world.

In “coming to terms” with the storm, Finch is pursuing something quite like Latour’s descriptive turn. The two writers share a resistance to ontologies that distinguish tidily between subjects and objects. Of course, Finch’s under-standing of the nature of the world is different from Latour’s, which allows for “variable ontologies” and actants of all sorts working in networks, but she too complicates any stable distinction between human and environment as she de-scribes the many forces active in the storm. Like Latour, too, she describes these forces in all their dense, multifarious relationships: she “gathers” the manifold “participants” together in a poem and seeks to “account for the real variety that is already there.” Her posture is modest and provisional— very different than the confident, illusion- shattering posture of critique. Her descriptions help mediate the experience of the storm to her readers. Sean Silver has pointed out that the November storm was understood as “the Great Storm” only after print culture enabled contemporaries to make sense of their individual experience in relationship to larger systems and collectives.16 Finch participates in such a project, but— more than this— she models mediating and meditative tech-niques of making sense.

For Finch, the storm is an ontologically complex force “that defies human understanding.” Certainly, God is involved. The poem’s extended title is “A Pindarick Poem Upon the Hurricane in November 1703, referring to this Text in Psalm 148. ver. 8. Winds and Storms fulfilling his Word,” and its opening lines insist that the storm be understood in relation to a divine plan:

You have obey’d, you WINDS, that must fulfill

The Great Disposer’s righteous Will;17

The winds “obey” God and “fulfill” his “Will”— God acts through them. Finch also tries to situate the current storm in the unfolding sweep of provi-dence and history, likening it to biblical storms in Lebanon and Kadesh. The poem, though, recognizes that total knowledge of God’s meaning and His “fulfill[ment]” of prophecies is not possible for the limited human mind. What is more knowable is the storm itself, and it is thus telling that the poem’s open-ing lines shift quickly from God to the natural realities of the winds. Both God and the winds are actors within the world of the poem, and God’s agency does not diminish the very real agency of the natural second causes that He deploys. From the poem’s third line, Finch allows the natural entities their own mate-riality and force, giving them much more specificity than the Psalms’ general mention of “Winds and Storms.” She describes the winds’ usual behavior (they use “gentle Methods” to “bestow” some “Motion” on “sluggish Vapours” that



“Condens[e] into Mists”), and she develops a contrast to their violent, “unlim-ited” actions during the storm.18 God and nature both work in and through the storm. Finch even further complicates the issue by grappling with the question of human agency. She worries that God might have willed the winds because of bad English actions: the winds “chastis’d” the “Ill” done by “our most secret Sins.”19 She suggests that the storm might be providential punishment. Richard Kidder, Bishop of Bath and Wells, was killed when two chimney stacks crashed through his house, and Finch wonders if the nonjuring minister that Kidder had replaced would have met a similar fate.20 She also partially recants: “let no daring Thought presume / To point a Cause for that oppressive Doom.”21 She guesses, doubts, and leaves the thought hovering skeptically. The poem renders the storm ontologically and causally hybrid: it is not really God so much as it is a complicated constellation activated by an ultimately unknowable com-bination of winds, God, and human actions.

Finch’s providentialism is interesting in relation to the project of critique, sometimes called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Given Finch’s earnest Christian faith, it is clearly inadequate to read her appeals to God critically or suspiciously, “decod[ing] religious language and ideas as mystifications of economic, political, and social conditions and relationships.”22 This would be to unveil “powerful agents hidden in the dark,” instead of respecting Finch’s own understanding of the “real variety” of forces at work in the world.23 More-over, several scholars have pointed out that scholarly critique today replicates a traditional Christian logic, whereby “the most significant truths are not im-mediately apprehensible and may be veiled or invisible” (as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus put it).24 “X is really— or, really means— A,” because God stands behind or above things, securing their true, deep, symbolic meanings. Impor-tantly, it is also inadequate to read Finch’s poem as engaging a type of Christian hermeneutics in which “the most significant truths” are “invisible,” deep mean-ing somewhat replaces material reality, and God is the “real” invisible causality that explains everything. Instead, Finch leaves readers with an awareness of the storm as a complex constellation that draws together not only winds, God, and human actions, but a whole range of other relevant agents and forces: the Bible, the past, Kidder, oaths of allegiance, chimney stacks, us, our sins, her guesses, death, fallen branches, vapors, and local motion. Even as Finch wonders what “Warning” the storm is sending to “Britannia now,” she offers no real answers.25 Her position is humble, provisional, and attuned to multiple actors and forces that are somewhat flattened out so they all interact with one another. The storm signifies but it remains a storm; and, while its meanings are hard to appre-hend fully, its physical actions and the interrelations between natural actors are not. Finch’s providentialism, then, shares less with the confident postures of contemporary critique (or of a strong version of Christian hermeneutics) than with the modest eighteenth- century brand of empiricism- cum- voluntarism that Robert Markley recovers in Daniel Defoe’s account of the same storm: “fer-



vent assertions of God’s hand in the storm” and of “the inscrutability of divine will”— far from “serving as a bar to scientific inquiry”— actually “provoke sci-entific speculations,” and observers recognize that “human activities, the land, and the climate are bound in complex feedback loops within . . . a divinely ordered but still mysterious universe.”26 The appeal to God is a way of making sense of a phenomenon’s complexity, not of reducing it to (or substituting it for) one deep, true meaning. Finch seeks comprehension by humbly describing, by “gather[ing]” multiple forces and possibilities together within the “aren[a]” of the poem.

The poem continues to foreground the multiple, overlapping, and dispersed agencies involved in the storm. The first stanza features the undeniable truth that the storm winds destroyed lots of trees. (Defoe stopped counting fallen trees in Kent at 17,000).27 Finch’s account highlights a natural ecosystem in which a whole array of objects and forces play a role. The winds are active, but they meet the recalcitrance of the trees— like the oak, which “Rely’d upon” its “native Force.”28 She writes:

But oh, you Trees! . . .

You num’rous Brethren of the Leafy Kind,

To whatsoever Use design’d,

Now, vain you find it to contend

With not, alas! one Element your Friend;

Your Mother Earth, thro’ long preceding Rains,

(Which undermining sink below)

No more her wonted Strength retains;

Nor you so fix’d within her Bosom grow,

That for your sakes she can resolve to bear

These furious Shocks of hurrying Air;

But finding All your Ruin did conspire,

She soon her beauteous Progeny resign’d

To this destructive, this imperious Wind,

That check’d your nobler Aims, and gives you to the Fire.29

Finch here acknowledges another possible role that God played in the storm: in the beginning, He “design’d” the trees to serve certain “Uses” that His in- the- storm actions subvert. Even God’s role is complex. Finch also implicates the entire ecosystem in the trees’ destruction. They fall because “not, alas! one Ele-ment” is able to help them. She is specific, exploring natural facts about soils, erosion, and high winds. Rainfall has saturated the soil, which is then unable to keep trees fixed; trees strive to stay put, but the “destructive” hurricane winds finally upend them; “Fire” will eventually consume them. To her emerging con-stellation of natural actors and forces, she adds creation, rainfall, soil saturation, tree roots, and fire. “Upon the Hurricane” describes the world of the storm in all its ontological complexity.



“Close, but not deep,” involving a complex “gathering” but not the pro-jection of “extra” forces— so far so good, but Finch’s descriptions seem strik-ingly unlike Latour’s insofar as they are poetic. Finch, though, does not offer up literary figures like personification, metaphor, and apostrophe as imaginative projections of human categories onto neutral nature. Far from it: the figures are tools in her descriptive project.30 Take the personifications, for example. The poem gives objects agency without departing from natural fact: the trees get mostly passive verbs attached to them— they are “design’d,” “resign’d,” “check’d”— and their active verbs indicate plausible (and failed) actions: they struggle “to contend,” and they “grow” in ways not “fix’d” enough in the soil. Heather Keenleyside, John Sitter, and Tobias Menely have done exciting work on eighteenth- century personifications like these; they argue that such figures are materially sensitive and ontologically levelling. Personifications illuminate the very real ways that things act.31 Intriguingly, Finch’s personifications thus anticipate recent work pursuing parallels to Latour’s descriptive turn. For in-stance, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter explains:

[A]n anthropomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of reso-

nances and resemblances. . . . We at first may see only a world in our own image,

but what appears next is a swarm of “talented” and vibrant materialities (includ-

ing the seeing self).

A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a

world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and ob-

jects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations. In re-

vealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting up structural parallels

between material forms in “nature” and those in “culture,” anthropomorphism

can reveal isomorphisms.32

Anthropomorphism can be instrumental. While at some level fanciful or imagi-native, the trope can also quite seriously figure— or give form to— natural reali-ties and relations. It can help us apprehend and better understand the multiple kinds of agency and animation that surround us. Finch’s personifications work exactly like this. Keenleyside has even suggested that “eighteenth- century personifications might help us to imagine the sort of world that scholars like Latour and Bennett envision: one that is not divided into persons and things, agents and instruments, animate and inanimate beings.”33 Centuries before Bennett suggested it, personifications helped Finch describe the world in its fraught complexity.

Significantly, I would add, in Finch’s poem it is not just personifications that work like this. Nor is it just agencies outside of the human (the “swarm” of “vi-brant materialities”) that are discovered. Finch’s figurative language accesses other kinds of isomorphism still, probing likeness across ontological and epis-temological categories. “Upon the Hurricane” refines sophisticated techniques



for highlighting likeness. Objects are not only personified: they are named in periphrastic ways that highlight their relations in a larger cosmic scheme, and descriptions are attuned to the metaphorical freight that inheres in our “fac-tual” words. Metaphors bring out the moral implications of things, and analo-gies slide easily from the explicit to the submerged, raising questions about the difference between rendering humans like or as objects.

The poem often uses repeating, resonant words to flag relations across cate-gories or species in the world of the storm. For instance, the word “vain” is used to link together the general and the particular: trees in general (“you Trees!”) “found it” “vain” to resist the winds, but so did the particular trees depicted (“In vain the Shrubs,” “The Beech in vain”).34 The word also connects objects across categorical boundaries— such as when clouds seek the end of the hur-ricane “Vainly” and “In vain.”35 Further, the word links trees and clouds with people, as the poem notes that “vainly” humans had built their “Fences” and made their property “Bargains.”36 Such keywords highlight similarity while recognizing difference. They embrace the individuality of objects while placing them in a larger cosmic scheme.37 Finch seeks to understand— to describe— the dense interconnectedness of things in her world.

Interconnectedness, moreover, is not merely material. The poem explores the relationship between natural actions and human truths. To better under-stand how this works, we should return to Finch’s model of Protestant medita-tion, which also draws on tropes of likeness. For Finch in the “Petition” poem as for other eighteenth- century meditators, the move from the “Object” to the “Use”- ful “Thoughts” they “produce” requires instrumental analogies. For ex-ample, the “Petition” poem features a meditation on a dying tree. The “Object” “produces,” first, an invitation to compare perceived and perceiver: an oak withers and dies, and so do we. The analogy then yields a pious meditation for humans about embracing mortality and preparing for death. In such medita-tion, it is not so much that Finch’s language or imagination has made the tree an analogue for people. Rather, the meaning is articulated by the poet but has its source and mandate in a supra- human truth somehow encoded in the tree. Both trees and humans are mortal, after all. Contemporary meditators under-stood their figures to be epistemologically instrumental because likeness was part of the structure of the world. The tree relates to humans, while still being really a tree (a precisely, empirically described tree, at that).38 Indeed, as nature is God’s great book, crammed full of linkages and lessons, the accumulation of more details about the tree opens up more analogical truths. Eighteenth- century meditators used analogies to explore “a whole world of resonances and resemblances.”

This is central to Finch’s poetics in “Upon the Hurricane.” In traditional lit-erary terms, Finch’s tree destruction passage moralizes the trees; but, whereas this sounds relatively stable (there is the thing and the human application), the poem’s descriptions remain acutely precise in their treatment of nature, even as



they open up multiple, overlapping moral resonances that are articulated pro-visionally. The tree destruction passage sets up family relationships: the trees are “Brethren” to one another and the “beauteous Progeny” of their “Mother Earth.” These tropes are responsive to the etymology of “progeny”— the Latin progenies refers to the result of breeding, to human children, animals, or plants. They are also responsive to material fact, for contemporary natural philoso-phers often understood soil as a motherly matrix of sorts. 39 “Mother Earth” is not only a figure for all of nature but refers to a particular stretch of mother- like soil that provided its plant “Progeny” the nutrients enabling growth and that now struggles to keep them “fix’d within her Bosom.” Finch thus brings together nature and culture, the literal and the figurative, the general and the particular. She manages something similar in her use of “undermin[e]”: be-cause of “long preceding Rains, / (Which undermining sink below),” “Mother Earth” has lost “her wonted Strength.” The word “undermine” had a literal, scientific meaning at the time— water could “undermine” soil, saturating the soil as it works its way underground and making erosion more likely. “Under-mine” also implies very human motives and trickery. Finch continues to attend carefully to the natural process and natural relationships as she discovers fun-damental truths about motherly love, mortality, and ambition: “Mother Earth” has been “undermin[ed]” by rain, by an overabundance of fertility and wealth. Trees should help: a 1707 agricultural manual explains that alder trees helpfully “preserv[e] the Banks” of “Rivers and Streams . . . from being undermined by the Water.”40 But they have failed to guard against saturation, and the soil in turn fails its plants. There is a limit to the soil’s maternal role. Finch explains, addressing the trees: you are not “so fix’d within her Bosom . . . / That for your sakes she can resolve to bear” the slings and arrows of outrageous rainfall. By casting the soil’s saturation as a question of “resolve,” Finch underscores the personified relationship (and of course mothers “bear” children and can decide to endure great suffering and pain). “Resolve” also has several literal, scientific senses that involve loosening or dissolving.41 When water joins with wind and God’s will, the soil “resign[s]” the trees to death. The storm winds “check’d” the trees’ “nobler Aims,” and the reader is invited to take away a momento mori moral (akin to that in “Petition”). We are in the exact same position as the trees: we too are passive in the face of destruction and death, and we too will die, despite our noblest hopes.

Clearly, Finch’s descriptions are elaborately wrought, but— I insist— the figurative language, the moral categories, and the analogically accessed value judgments are not simply imaginative additions to the real facts of nature. The poem complicates stable distinctions between object and meaning— the real and the constructed— by cultivating the moral without diminishing the natu-ral processes involved in the tree destruction. In fact, as Finch acknowledges that the storm might be linked to human moral failings, the natural and the moral are never as tidily separate as we might want to make them. The poem



thereby adds to the complicated constellation of forces involved in the storm some moral and human realities: mortality, ambition, sin, love, family, endur-ance, suffering, failure. Meanings accessed by literary figures are part of the “real variety that is already there,” that is humbly called up and considered by the poem’s descriptive techniques.

Finch pursues a descriptive project attuned to both interconnectedness and moral meaningfulness in larger ways, too. She knits her poem together through patterns of point / counterpoint. The tree destruction passage has its counter-point in a description of human destruction. “Death” lurks everywhere during the hurricane, including “in the Street”:

Where some, too tardy in their Flight,

O’ertaken by a worse Mischance,

Their upwards Parts do scarce advance,

When on their following Limbs th’extending Ruins light.

One half’s interr’d, the other yet survives,

And for Release with fainting Vigour strives;

Implores the Aid of absent Friends in vain.42

Finch’s diction flags trees and people as analogues or foils— and not simply with the word “vain.” Where trees found it “vain . . . to contend” with the wind when “not, alas! one Element” was their “Friend,” the people “Implor[e] the Aid of absent Friends in vain.” The relation between the two is even more fundamental. If trees are treated like humans in the earlier passage, here hu-mans are depicted as objects. Introducing the people, Finch says only “some”— strategically withholding a more precise noun that could distinguish between persons and plants. Her ways of describing these “some,” then, focus on the physical, their “upward Parts,” “following Limbs” and “hal[ves].” In the be-ginning of the passage, especially, they are— like the trees— mostly acted upon (“O’ertaken” and “interr’d”), and their more active verbs involve fundamen-tal kinds of movement that humans share with nonhumans: “advance,” “sur-vives,” “strives.” Finch objectifies and distances the people described from the reader: it is hard to even tell the “Limbs” belong to people until the bodies they are attached to start to “Implor[e].” The poem’s language somewhat levels ontological distinction, requiring us to reckon with the passivity, materiality, and mortality that we share with trees. These connections are central to Finch’s “coming to terms” with the storm. They help her to one of the poem’s fun-damental meditative (analogical) insights: humans have no more control over their “Fate” than the objects destroyed all around them during the storm.43 This is a physical and a moral truth.

As “Upon the Hurricane” describes the storm, it represents the relationships between people and things in ways much closer to the messiness of Latour’s ontological categories than the “modern” or “Romantic” ones we usually bring



to the period’s poetry. Scholarly postures of critique and suspicion do an injus-tice to the poem’s logics: instead of confidently unveiling hidden depths or the secret truth, it grapples humbly with multiple possible meanings prompted by real phenomena. The poet does not project onto blank screens, so much as she “gathers” together and attempts to at least partially understand the complexity that resides in God’s creation— a creation that is in itself active, material, and moral.

Moreover, the Pindaric ode or meditative poem does not necessarily feature the (proto- Romantic) projections of the human mind. As Desiree Hellegers has suggested in an intriguing reading of The Spleen (1701), Finch and many of her contemporaries associated the Pindaric form “with the contingent, voluntaris-tic methodology espoused by the English experimentalists” in their attempts to make sense of the real: its irregularity signaled a “commitment to an induc-tive methodology” and a “rejection of theoretical closure and dogmatism.”44 And Finch’s attitude to language shares less with a “Romantic”/“modern” as-sociation of literary figure with creativity and imagination than with late sev-enteenth- and early eighteenth- century natural philosophy’s serious interest in language as a tool for provisionally illuminating truths about the world.45 In fact, we might understand the fundamental posture of the early eighteenth- century meditative poet as akin to that of Latour’s scientists, who “translate” or mediate the language of things— things that, though “mute from birth,” are nonetheless “capable of speaking, writing, signifying within the artificial chamber of the laboratory.” Latour foregrounds the complexity of this relation: “Who is speaking when [such things] speak? The facts themselves, beyond all question, but also their authorized spokespersons.” (Finch tells us, we remem-ber, that it is the “Object” that “produce[s]” the meditations she writes.) Like Latour’s scientists, Finch is a “scrupulous” but fallible “representative” of things that, in themselves, act and mean in the world around her.46 Aware of representation’s vagaries, she tries, heuristically, to represent. Put another way, hers is a brand of anthropomorphism and metaphor that tries to get past anthropocentrism to a humble, always- only- partial understanding of what the storm means.

To truly appreciate Finch’s “descriptive turn,” then, we need to resist not only the fundamental postures of critique and suspicion, but very precise in-terpretative moves that these postures motivate. Latour points to some such moves: critique works by purifying phenomena into two ontological poles (ob-jects versus subjects, or nature versus society) and denouncing anything in be-tween. I would add that scholarship also sets up and polices strong boundaries between different disciplines or areas of inquiry. Science gets to be on the side of nature, but politics, morality, and poetry are “social.” Yet, Finch would not have shared our sense of the disciplinary divides. For her and her contempo-raries, nature just was moral and political— even when scientifically understood and even before any human attempts to specify that content. Scholars often



presuppose another fundamental boundary: between language and reality. We assume that literary figures come from the human mind or from human cul-ture and that, as linguistic creations, they can have only an arbitrary relation to the world itself. Like Latour, however, many of Finch’s contemporaries would resist any understanding of language completely severed from the world of things and the world of action. Words mediate: they can illuminate God’s great book of nature. Finally, and most subtly, we assume that the claims of poetry are confident, total, and final, that the poet creates and controls the meanings of things. We thus overlook modesty and provisionality in the meaning- making process. We neglect the ways that eighteenth- century poems can offer not con-clusions but the experience of coming to terms: interpretations are proposed, doubted, and left hovering, while multiple, even conflicting meanings can help a poet (and a reader) make sense of something that exceeds both the self and the poem. All of these scholarly interpretative moves, pervasive in recent liter-ary and cultural critique, foreclose the possibility of rich, dynamic interactions between people, words, and things. But such interactions are the most impor-tant part of the world of Finch’s “Hurricane.”

In closing, I want to suggest that we would be better readers of eighteenth- century nature poetry if we took seriously poets like Finch when they suggest that “Objects” can “produce / Thoughts.” James Thomson and Alexander Pope make similar points:

I know no Subject more elevating, more amusing; more ready to awake the poeti-

cal Enthusiasm, the philosophical Reflection, and the moral Sentiment, than the

Works of Nature.47

The Descriptions of Places, and Images rais’d by the Poet, are still tending to some

Hint, or leading into some Reflection, upon moral Life or political Institution:

Much in the same manner as the real Sight of such Scenes and Prospects is apt to

give the Mind a compos’d Turn, and incline it to Thoughts and Contemplations

that have a Relation to the Object.48

Nature’s objects provoke “Enthusiasm[s],” “Reflection[s],” “moral Sentiment[s],” “Thoughts and Contemplations,” and these various meanings have some onto-logical basis, some “Relation to the Object.” (Such possibilities are often under-written by a sincere belief in God’s book of nature.) Poetry aims to capture such meanings while mimicking and modeling the meditative process. Indeed, we might be better readers of eighteenth- century nature poetry if we took seriously not only the agency of the natural world but also the role figurative language can play in revealing such agency and its larger stakes— in helping people get from the “Object” to “Reflection[s],” “Thoughts and Contemplations.”49

I want to suggest too that, while I have mainly focused on what Latour’s proj-ect offers to our understanding of Finch’s, the reverse is also interesting. Latour



himself recognizes that literature is especially good at thick, messy description. He proposes, even, that sociologists could learn from literature to “become less wooden, less rigid, less stiff in their definition of what sort of agencies popu-late the world”; he has pursued this insight, focusing on semiotics, narratology, and “the beings of Fiction [FIC].”50 At his best, he also helps us see that words, descriptions, and other kinds of representation are themselves active partici-pants in the networks he describes.51 Still, there is more to say about figurative language and poetry— especially since “new materialist” projects in the spirit of Latour often pit themselves against the so- called “linguistic turn” and avoid or downplay issues of language. For instance, Bennett seems to try to sidestep language by treating anthropomorphism as an “element in perception.”52 But what does it mean to translate a trope into perceptive process? Why can’t tropes in themselves— as structures of language, made manifest in ink or sound— be another kind of actant in an ontologically complex world? Certainly, Finch un-derstands anthropomorphism, analogy, and metaphor as useful heuristic tools for understanding nature. And, if seventeenth- and eighteenth- century writers thought carefully about figurative language’s ability to access and shape truth, James Bono argues that figure “function[s] both generatively and transforma-tively” in science and culture still today.53 I am not interested in proposing that we describe nature just as early eighteenth- century poets described it, and I do not want to elide the fact that, unlike Latour’s, Finch’s interest in objects and tropes is underwritten by period- specific beliefs in an active God and a provi-dential natural world. Yet, I think we would be better readers of more than just eighteenth- century poetry if we took seriously the role figurative language can play in helping people get from “Object[s]” to “Reflection[s],” “Thoughts and Contemplations”— to a richer understanding of the world.

NOTES

1. I draw on Heather Love’s use of the phrase in “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 371–91. Love repurposes a term initially used to describe a trend of sociology, and I engage in a little repurposing of my own: I emphasize Love’s points about description, depth, and complexity, while down-playing her challenge to the humanist underpinnings of contemporary literary- critical practice.

2. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Mat-ters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 40 (2004): 225–48, 229.

3. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York, 1983), 95–104, 97.

4. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 35.

5. Latour, “Critique,” 239, 238, 237.6. Latour, “Critique,” 246. 7. Love, 377. 8. Jan Golinski offers an overview account of the storm and its consequences (British

Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment [Chicago, 2007], 43–45).



9. See Charles Hinnant, The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in Interpretation (Newark, 1994), 248; and Christine Gerrard, “Eighteenth- Century Women Poets,” in The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge, 2010), 358–77, 360.

10. This formulation draws on M. H. Abrams’s definition of an “ode,” in A Glossary of Literary Terms, ed. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 8th ed. (Boston, 2005), 206.

11. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 55.12. Elsewhere, I develop these methodological speculations into “a hermeneutic

of provisional trust”: see my Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth- Century England (Charlottesville, 2016).

13. Anne Finch, “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat” [1713], in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago, 1903), 68–77, lines 126–29.

14. Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (London, 1665), 13, 10, 17, 2. For more on such “improvements,” see Mary- Louis Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation,” Seventeenth Century 22, no. 1 (2007): 124–43.

15. Hinnant, 246.16. Sean Silver, “Global Storming: Defoe and the Disaster Narrative” (unpublished

essay).17. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane” [1713], in Eighteenth Century Poetry: An Annotated

Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, 2nd ed. (Malden, 2004), 26–33, lines 1–2. Subsequent citations will be to line numbers.

18. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 5–8, 3. 19. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 190–91. 20. See Fairer and Gerrard’s note to Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 96–108. 21. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 98–99. 22. Ken Jackson and Arthur Moretti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English

Studies,” Criticism 46, no. 1 (2004): 167–90, 168.23. Similarly, recent work participating in the “theological turn” or “postsecular criti-

cism” has resisted scholarly modes of critique on the grounds that they obscure our un-derstanding of the deeply religious early modern culture. Sarah Rivett draws out the important questions about our ways of reading that such work poses: “What are the tools necessary for reading religious texts, for understanding how a literary- critical herme-neutic rooted in secular epistemology can approach a mode of ‘uncritical reading’” and offer “more synchronic accounts of history and human experience?” (“Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age,” PMLA 128, no. 4 [2013]: 989–96, 993, 990).

24. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representa-tions 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21, 4.

25. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 58. 26. Robert Markley, “‘Casualties and Disasters’: Defoe and the Interpretation of Cli-

mactic Instability,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2008): 102–24, 108, 119.27. Pat Rogers, “Hurricanes Happen in Hampshire: Defoe and the Great Storm of

1703,” Times Literary Supplement (4 July 2003): 14–15. 28. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 15–16. 29. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 31, 37–50. 30. My reading of Finch’s tropes is informed by sensitive treatments of other, different

ways that contemporaries used figurative language to make sense of the storm: Golinski, chap.1, 13–40; and Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (Chicago, 2012), 1–5, 92–110.

31. See Heather Keenleyside, “Personification for the People: On James Thomson’s The Seasons,” ELH 76, no. 2 (2009): 447–72; John Sitter, “Eighteenth- Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheology,” Religion and Literature 40, no. 1 (2008): 11–37; and Tobias Menely, “Animal Signs and Ethical Significance: Expressive Creatures in the British Georgic,” Mo-saic 39, no. 4 (2006): 111–27.



32. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, 2010), 99. 33. Keenleyside, “The Rise of the Novel and the Fall of Personification,” in Eighteenth

Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, ed. Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith (Lewisburg, 2014), 105–33, 126.

34. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 11, 13. 35. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 237–38. 36. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 192–95. 37. Finch here draws on the logic— if not the precise phrasings— of periphrasis; see

John Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth- Century Poetry (Ann Arbor, 1949).

38. Finch’s “Petition” features empirical details about the attack on the oak by “Gusts” and “Whirlwind[s],” and its resulting “Rivell’d,” “distorted Trunk,” its “Sapless Limbs” “bent, and shrunk” (lines 142–51).

39. See the Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “progeny”; and Charleton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, s. v. “progenies,” available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.04.0059. John Evelyn, for example, mentions the contemporary debate about “whether” soil functions “only for stability, or as a womb and receptacle to their Seeds and Eggs”; he hazards that he does not imagine the soil “to be altogether so dull and unactive, as to afford no other aid to the Generation of what she bears” (Philosophical Discourse of Earth [London, 1676], 167–68).

40. John Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry, or, the way of managing and improving land (London, 1707), 5.

41. Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “resolve, v.”42. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 85, 86–92. 43. Finch, “Upon the Hurricane,” 295. 44. Desiree Hellegers, Handmaid to Divinity: Natural Philosophy, Poetry and Gender in

Seventeenth- Century England (Norman, 2000), 144. Hellegers develops ideas set forth in David Trotter, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley (London, 1979).

45. For ideas about language in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century science, see Mar-kley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, 1993); and James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison, 1995). For case studies of natural phi-losophers using figurative language instrumentally, see Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston, 1990), 59–89; James Elkins, “On Visual Despera-tion and the Bodies of Protozoa,” Representations 40 (1992): 33–56; and Peter Walmsley, Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Lewisburg, 2003), chap. 4, 96–117.

46. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 29, 28. 47. James Thomson, preface to Winter, 2nd ed. (London, 1726), 15. 48. Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer (London, 1715–20), 4:1280. Pope is discussing

John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642, 1655, 1668).49. See my Empiricist Devotions.50. See Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network Theory (Oxford,

2007), 55, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), chap. 9, 233–57.

51. To my mind, Latour’s most sophisticated treatment of language is “Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest,” in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Real-ity of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 24–79.

52. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99. 53. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature,” 61.


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