Beachy Head (1807) is a long blank verse poem by the English Romantic poet and novelist Charlotte Turner Smith. Smith wrote Beachy Head between 1803 and 1806, near the end of her life, when she was struggling with debt and ill health. As the poem was being composed, Britain was engaged in the Napoleonic Wars with France, and Beachy Head was regarded as a likely invasion point for the French army; despite an environment of anti-French sentiment, Smith supported French revolutionary ideals of social reform. The poem was published the year after her death, as part of the volume Beachy Head and Other Poems. It was her last poetic work, and has been described as her most poetically ambitious work.
The poem imagines events at the coastal cliffs of Beachy Head from across England's history, to meditate on what Smith saw as the modern corruption caused by commerce and nationalism. Without an overarching narrative, the poem describes a series of scenes: fishers and smugglers using the coast; the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century; a shepherd and two children; the nearby village; a fossilized seashell at the top of a cliff; the futility of science and war; a wandering poetic stranger; and finally, another hermit who lived at the base of the cliffs. As she was composing the poem, Smith wrote sixty-four footnotes, providing details like the scientific names for plants and animals and discussions of historic events. These are generally considered an important element of the poem's multi-layered composition.
As a Romantic poem, Beachy Head is notable for its naturalist rather than sublime presentation of the natural world. A major eighteenth century aesthetic framework was the opposition between the sublime and the beautiful (or picturesque). Beachy Head as a whole is often interpreted as presenting either an anti-sublime viewpoint or a new definition of the sublime, in contrast to the dominant Romantic aesthetic. The poem also explores disillusionment with modern society, through its pastoral social critique and its two hermit figures.
The poem was well received on its first publication, when Smith's reputation as a poet was at a peak. As the nineteenth century went on, Smith's reputation and the importance of Beachy Head waned. By the early twentieth century Smith was considered only a minor writer of novels; when Smith began to attract new scholarly interest in the twentieth century, Beachy Head was often overshadowed by her novels and by Smith's first poetry volume, Elegiac Sonnets. Twenty-first century scholarship increasingly examines Beachy Head alongside Smith's other poetry as the culmination of her poetic career.
Composition
Charlotte Turner Smith, an English Romantic poet and novelist, began writing Beachy Head in 1803, the year that Britain and France ended their one year of peace between the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. At this time, Smith lived in cheap housing near her childhood home in the South Downs, eighty miles from Beachy Head, in poverty due to debt caused by her estranged husband, Benjamin Smith. Her novels had stopped selling well as readers were less sympathetic to her revolutionary political views, and she sold her personal library of 500 books to support herself. She was also increasingly ill during these years, with rheumatoid arthritis making it difficult to write, and sometimes immobilizing her.
Smith continued to write and revise Beachy Head for the next three years. She also wrote extensive footnotes to the poem. She sent a draft of the poem and notes to her publisher Joseph Johnson in May 1806. Smith died on October 28, 1806, and her relatives took over the task of publishing her works. According to the preface, the publication of Beachy Head was delayed because the publisher wanted to locate a preface possibly written by Smith, and to add a biography of her life, but ultimately it was published without these materials. The poem appeared in print January 31, 1807, as the first poem of the volume Beachy Head and Other Poems.
The preface written by Smith's publisher states that the poem was "not completed according to the original design", though Smith's last letter to Johnson does not mention intended revisions to the poem other than footnotes. Some scholars have concluded that Smith intended to add a short epitaph to the end of the poem. Others, however, believe that the poem intentionally falls within the genre of the Romantic fragment poem. In this reading, it has been suggested that the incomplete elements are the missing memoir or preface.
Poem
Synopsis The poem does not present a narrative, but rather a loose meditation on the history of England and humanity's relationship with nature, addressed in an extended exclamation (or apostrophe) to the "Muse" of Beachy Head, headland with chalk cliffs in East Sussex, England. Throughout the poem, the speaker imagines or remembers Beachy Head and the surrounding area of the South Downs, describing a hypothetical vision of what the speaker might see if she could revisit the landscape. The first two stanzas imagine the events of a single day, beginning with dawn on the coast and the departure of fishing boats. A departing merchant ship prompts the speaker to criticize consumerism of luxury goods. The sun sets, the fishing boats return, and smugglers use the coast in darkness. In the third stanza, the poem shifts back in time to describe the history of Beachy Head during the Norman Conquest.
The sixth stanza returns to the present day, beginning an extended pastoral section. The poem describes a shepherd, deviating from typical pastoral poetry by demonstrating the rough and laborious realities of peasant life, rather than presenting idealized conventions. The poem describes two village children whose innocence allows them happiness, and the speaker describes her own lost childhood innocence. In the eighth stanza, the poem moves to look down upon the roofs of houses in the village, the church, and gardens, describing the bountiful local plants.
The eleventh stanza introduces natural history with the memory of a fossilized seashell found at the top of a cliff. This begins a sequence discussing the limits of science and ambition. The speaker describes how the successive wars fought in the area have not led to lasting glory for the combatants, but have been forgotten. The thirteenth stanza turns away from the futility of war to the more attractive image of the contemporary shepherd, and an imaginary long-distance view of peaceful life in England.
The fifteenth stanza begins a story of a "stranger" who used to live in a ruined castle, wandering and singing. Two fragments of his songs are included, by which he is remembered. His story is followed by that of another solitary but enviable figure, a hermit who lived at the base of the cliffs at Beachy Head, introduced in the nineteenth blank verse stanza. The hermit lived a harsh life of exile, but demonstrated virtue by risking his life to rescue sailors from shipwrecks during storms, burying those he could not save. After a particularly terrible storm, the hermit was himself found drowned, and he was buried by shepherds.
The poem ends with the statement that "Those who read / Chisel'd within the rock, these mournful lines, / Memorials of his sufferings, did not grieve", but unlike with the stranger's songs, no "mournful lines" are included in the poem. Some have interpreted these lines to indicate that Smith intended to add more verses to the poem, while others consider the poem to be complete.
Style Poetic form
The poem consists of 742 lines, in twenty-one blank verse stanzas of varying lengths, with two inserted rhyming poems that add nineteen additional stanzas. It is accompanied by sixty-four footnotes written by Smith.
Unlike Smith's most famous poems, her Elegiac Sonnets, Beachy Head does not follow a strict poetic convention or fall into a clear genre. In one scholar's words, the poem "forgoes the sonnets' crisp circumspection for expansive blank verse paragraphs". Donelle Ruwe describes the resulting genre as "a greater romantic lyric fragment", and others have also interpreted the poem as an intentional literary fragment. As a "dependent fragment poem", which relies on its relationship to its authors' other works for its full interpretation, Beachy Head is considered the first Romantic dependent fragment poem, with John Keats's two fragmented epics as the last.
The poem combines elements of epic, pastoral, and georgic poetry. It is also often considered a prospect poem, a popular Romantic genre of poem which presents, and often praises, an external landscape. For these scholars, Beachy Head is "in the first instance a place-related poem, a poem which both describes and constructs place, inscribing it into the imagination of its readers and into cultural history". In this reading, the poem's blank verse paragraphs are often seen as physically resembling the cliffs themselves, akin to concrete poetry. A related assessment sees it as an "excursion poem", which mingles travel descriptions with philosophical reflections, like William Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814).
Smith composed sixty-four notes to accompany the poem, which appeared collected as endnotes in the first edition. These notes provide, among other details, scientific names for plants and animals; descriptions of historical events; and explanations for some of her allusions to other writers. The notes are generally considered an important part of Smith's overall poetic approach. The notes establish Smith's position as an authority in areas ranging from historical contexts, to geological insights, and scientific examinations of wildlife. Smith's invocation of herself as an expert has been considered particularly impressive since these notes were composed after she sold her personal library, and thus the many facts and quotations included are based solely on her own memory; some quotations are, as a result, not word-perfect, but in general Smith's notes are remarkably accurate. By introducing academic topics, the notes also extend the boundaries of poetry, tying science to poetry in a symbiotic relationship. The combination of approaches mirrors the poem's presentation of the cliff itself as, in one scholar's words, "complex, many-layered, unfinished, and caught up in a continuous process of becoming", by describing the landscape in multiple ways simultaneously.
Poetic speaker The first half of the poem is narrated from a first-person perspective. Although the speaker is never named, the narrating style is arguably similar to that which is used in the footnotes, suggesting it could be interpreted as Smith herself. The speaker looks at the events at Beachy Head in several perspectives. Some scholars emphasize the omniscience of the speaker, transcending human perspectives, while others see limits to what the speaker is able to describe or examine the speaker's individual personality as a person of sensibility.
The poem uses apostrophe throughout to address the subjects it describes, including personified concepts like ambition. The opening apostrophe to the cliffs of Beachy Head is similar to the poetic invocation of a muse common in epic poetry. As the speaker continues to address Beachy Head, the landscape develops a personality within the poem that changes it from a backdrop to almost a character in its own right. Ultimately, Beachy Head is presented "not as an instrument to be exploited and gawked at for sentimentalism's sake, but as a 'lively' companion to be sympathized with".
Background
Threats of French invasion