Today’s Poem: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic

He has no nice felicities

Abbott Handerson Thayer, Cornish Headlands, 1898 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

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

by Charlotte Turner Smith

Is there a solitary wretch who hies
   To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
   Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
   Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies
   Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
   I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
   From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.
═══════════════════════

The poet and novelist Charlotte Turner Smith (1749–1806) is credited, among other things, with the revival of the sonnet in England. Admittedly, beginning with the form’s importation into English in the sixteenth century, and working our way forward from there, it’s hard to find any particularly long stretch in the English poetic tradition where the sonnet is notable for its absence.

But the great poets of the early eighteenth century — Swift, Dryden, Johnson, Alexander Pope — did tend to go on, often in heroic couplets, many of them, one after another. The poetic gestures of the Augustan era were large ones, in imitation of the great Latin poets, chiefly Virgil, Ovid, and Horace. So perhaps it is fitting to note, in the poets who followed them, that a return to the sonnet was one of many emblematic swings of the pendulum.

George Romney, Charlotte Turner Smith, 1792 (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s easy to blip over a poet such as Smith in the same way that it’s easy to lose an Elizabeth Gaskill in a field of Victorian novelists that also includes Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and George Eliot. While Smith’s 1784 Elegiac Sonnets might constitute a landmark in the return of the sonnet, after its brief absence, to prominence in English poetry, it’s a landmark soon eclipsed by the rise of the Romantics. Coming in a wave at the turn into the nineteenth century, armed with a conscious desire to reform what they viewed as the rhetorical artifices of the Augustans, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their successors carried the sonnet back in on their general tide, all but obliterating the footprints of Charlotte Smith.

Still, today’s poem, with its long and ponderous title, reminds us that her work is worth knowing. Though that title might prime us to expect a comic poem, and though we might be tempted to roll our eyes at the decidedly un-arch earnestness which follows instead, this Shakespearean sonnet constitutes a sympathetic engagement with its difficult subject: at least with the idea of the lunatic, if not with the lunatic himself, in a comfortless emotional universe of chiding sea and sighing wind.

If the poem’s speaker declines to walk on the headland — and we don’t know that she doesn’t walk there, but we also don’t know that she does — what she does accomplish is to lay bare something about herself. A lone woman, walking along a cliff above the sea, she might have been physically vulnerable. Instead, the sonnet uncovers her emotional vulnerability. In her envy of the lunatic, as she imagines him, unable to comprehend “the depth or the duration” of his unhappiness, she confesses, implicitly, a bottomless unhappiness of her own.

---

---