Ask anyone to define friendship and you'll usually get a list: loyalty, honesty, being there. Anne Kingsmill Finch turns that question into a miniature play. Two speakers, Ephelia and Ardelia (the second a name Finch used for herself in her verse), trade twenty lines. The surprise is that the best answer turns out to be the one Ardelia gives in her very first reply.
The labels "Eph." and "Ard." make the poem read like a script, with Ephelia as the questioner and Ardelia as the one on trial. Ardelia's opening answer, "'Tis to love, as I love You," is almost a riddle, since it defines friendship by pointing at itself. Ephelia is politely unsatisfied. The answer is "short (tho' kind)", and the concession in that bracket is gentle, but her verdict is firm: it "Suits not my enquiring Mind." She wants a definition for the head, and Ardelia has offered one for the heart. Her request, "What is Friendship when complete?", sends Ardelia off to build something grander.
What follows is a staircase of promises. The lines are short, seven syllables, mostly trochaic, so the stress falls hard on the first and last words, as in "'Tis to LOVE, as I love YOU." Paired rhymes snap each thought shut, and the repeated "'Tis to" sounds like a drumbeat. The sacrifices climb steadily. First comes feeling ("share all Joy and Grief"), then help from "the Tongue, the Heart, the Hand," then money ("mortgage House and Land"), then liberty ("be sold a Slave"), and finally life itself ("die upon a Grave"). Notice how much of this vocabulary belongs to bookkeeping. Ephelia's word for the first answer, "Account," already sits in that world, and Ardelia keeps paying out more. The last image has a deadpan edge. The flat "If a Friend therein do lie" treats dying on a friend's grave as a reasonable conditional, almost as if the speaker were checking the terms and conditions of devotion.
Ephelia's reply is the cleverest moment. She grants that the list is "carry'd high" and that it goes beyond "more than e'er was done / Underneath the rolling Sun", a grand phrase that makes the hyperbole sound cosmic. Then she deflates it in one line: "This has all been said before." Her objection isn't that Ardelia exaggerates but that she repeats herself, reaching for the stock gestures anyone would use. The poem seems to know that the language of friendship can harden into cliché. The word "more" echoes through this exchange ("more than," "no more"), and Ephelia's challenge, "Can ARDELIA say no more?", sounds both teasing and sincere.
Ardelia's answer is an admission. "Words indeed no more can shew" concedes defeat on the level of language, and then she returns to where she began. The final line nearly repeats the second, and its rhyme on "you" and "shew" echoes the opening couplet, so the poem ends where it started. One small change is worth noticing: in this text the capitalised "You" of line 2 has become a lowercase "you". The same words now feel quieter, as if they had been tested and were no longer being displayed. The repetition is not a failure of imagination. The big list of sacrifices only described what friendship might cost, while "as I love you" is spoken to the actual person, in the present, and is therefore the one thing that cannot be "said before."
That is what makes the poem worth reading. In twenty lines it enacts its own argument: it sets the learned demand for a definition against the plain act of declaring love, and it lets the plain act win without sneering at the grand gestures. It is also witty about its own medium, a poem that proves the limits of poetic language and still makes the admission elegant. Friendship here isn't a concept to be catalogued but a relationship carried on between two voices, and the poem treats a quiet conversation between friends as serious enough to build a whole structure around.