SOURCE: "'My Old Inveterate Foe': Poems of Melancholy and Grief," in The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in Interpretation, University of Delaware Press, 1994, pp. 197-226.

In the following excerpt, Hinnant describes how melancholy is associated with patriarchal power structures in Finch's poems.

One of the striking features of the poems that Finch devoted to melancholy is their absorption in suffering—as if depression itself was being embraced as a substitute for a lost existence. While it is true that she does not refer explicitly to political issues in these poems, it is difficult not to link her obsessive preoccupation with melancholy, loss, mourning, care, and the spleen with the abdication of James II and the subsequent arrest of her husband. Indeed, court politics and political disappointment provide a source for the insights and imagery of these poems. Moreover, in the "Preface" that she originally intended to publish...