The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

The sonnet as a form, after its great flourishing in the Renaissance in the hands of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, dropped out of fashion in the eighteenth century. It was, Samuel Johnson declared in his Dictionary (1755), "not very suitable to the English language." Its revival toward the end of that century�by Coleridge in the 1790s; Wordsworth (who wrote some five hundred sonnets beginning in 1802); and in the next generation, Shelley and Keats�was largely the result of Smith's influential refashioning of the sonnet as a medium of mournful feeling. Cole- ridge noted in the introduction to his privately printed "sheet of sonnets" in 1796 that "Charlotte Smith and [William Lisle] Bowles are they who first made the Sonnet popular among the present English"; but Bowles's Fourteen Sonnets of 1789, imitating those that Smith first published five years earlier (which by 1789 had reached a fifth edition), rode on a wave of popularity of the form that she had already established.

Coleridge in his 1796 introductory essay on the sonnet, using Smith as a principal example, remarked that "those Sonnets appear to me the most exquisite, in which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature." Subsequently, of course, the connecting of feelings and nature became a central theme and strategy in Romantic poetry, especially in the genre that has come to be known as "the greater Romantic lyric." But Smith's engagement with nature differs from Coleridge's and Wordsworth's in its quasi-scientific insistence on the faithful rendering of detail: it is not surprising to learn that she addressed a sonnet to the "goddess of botany." That close-up view of nature is rendered exquisitely in her last long poem, the posthumously published Beachy Head (1807).

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40 / CHARLOTTE SMITH

FROM ELEGIAC SONNETS

Written at the Close of Spring

The garlands fade that Spring so lately wove, Each simple flower, which she had nursed in dew, Anemonies,1 that spangled every grove, The primrose wan, and hare-bell mildly blue. 5 No more shall violets linger in the dell, Or purple orchis variegate the plain, Till Spring again shall call forth every bell, And dress with humid hands her wreaths again.� Ah! poor humanity! so frail, so fair, 10 Are the fond visions of thy early day, Till tyrant passion, and corrosive care,

Bid all thy fairy colors fade away! Another May new buds and flowers shall bring; Ah! why has happiness�no second Spring?

1784

To Sleep

Come, balmy Sleep! tired nature's soft resort! On these sad temples all thy poppies shed; And bid gay dreams, from Morpheus'0 airy court, Greek god of sleep Float in light vision round my aching head! 5 Secure of all thy blessings, partial0 Power! friendly On his hard bed the peasant throws him down; And the poor sea boy, in the rudest hour, Enjoys thee more than he who wears a crown.1 Clasp'd in her faithful shepherd's guardian arms, 10 Well may the village girl sweet slumbers prove And they, O gentle Sleep! still taste thy charms,

Who wake to labor, liberty, and love. But still thy opiate aid dost thou deny To calm the anxious breast; to close the streaming eye.

1784

To Night

I love thee, mournful, sober-suited Night! When the faint moon, yet lingering in her wane, And veil'd in clouds, with pale uncertain light Hangs o'er the waters of the restless main.

1. Anemonies. Anemony Nemeroso. The wood cradle of the rude impetuous surge?" Shake- Anemony [Smith's note], speare's Henry IV [Smith's note; "imperious surge" 1. "Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast / seal in the original]. up the ship boy's eyes, and rock his brains / In

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On Being Cautioned against Walking / 41

5 In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind Will to the deaf cold elements complain, And tell the embosom'd grief, however vain,

To sullen surges and the viewless wind. Though no repose on thy dark breast I find, 10 I still enjoy thee�cheerless as thou art;

For in thy quiet gloom the exhausted heart Is calm, though wretched; hopeless, yet resign'd. While to the winds and waves its sorrows given, May reach�though lost on earth�the ear of Heaven!

1788

Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex1

Press'd by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides, While the loud equinox its power combines, The sea no more its swelling surge confines,

But o'er the shrinking land sublimely rides.

5 The wild blast, rising from the Western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed; Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,

And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave! With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore 10 Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;

But vain to them the winds and waters rave; They hear the warring elements no more: While I am doom'd�by life's long storm opprest, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.

1789

On Being Cautioned against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic