As sardonically witnessed by Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the Romantic period saw ‘Sonnets on sonnets crowd’1 into the literary arena. Charlotte Smith was a major innovator of this poetic trend, with her Elegiac Sonnets of 1784 running into ten editions. Her poetry earned praise from Wordsworth, who heralded her as late as 1833 as ‘a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’.2 Increasingly, critics have attempted to rescue Smith from this gloomy prognosis, re‐evaluating her and many of her female peers as central figures in the formation of some of Romanticism’s most important innovations, such as the rehabilitation of the sonnet form and the metrical tale.3 Smith’s mastery of the formal possibilities open to the poet, alongside the personal quality of her sonnets, enraptured contemporary readers. As Jacqueline Labbe writes, ‘Smith does not simply enact or represent the pressures attendant on being a woman writer in the Romantic period; she exploits them’.4 By underscoring her femininity even as she challenges its limitations within contemporary society, Smith performs her status as a female poet while refusing to allow it to stifle her creative freedom. This poetic self‐confidence coexists with her mournful subject matter as her sonnets display artistic independence even as they bemoan her emotional state. By combining allusions to Petrarch, Milton, and Metastasio (amongst others) with her individual voice, Smith’s sonnets seemed ‘utterly personal’ even as they spoke to her educated appreciation of poetic tradition.5
Stuart Curran’s pithy analysis of Smith’s poetry suggests the importance of self as a theme of her writing: ‘Charlotte Smith made a virtual career out of self‐pity. She rises from it in her novels, but it is the obsession of her poetry and, to judge by her letters, of her life.’6 Yet, as the same critic points out in the introduction to his edition of her poetry,7 of Smith’s ninety‐two sonnets, thirty‐six are spoken by other voices, embedded into the sonnet sequence nearly seamlessly. Smith’s use of other voices questions the boundaries of selfhood, subsuming the difference between self and other as all speakers are united in grief. The opening sonnet of the collection immediately sets the tone sustained throughout, as Smith determinedly individualizes her grief: ‘Ah! then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost, / If those paint sorrow best—who feel it most!’ (‘Sonnet I’, 13–14).8 Alluding to the private pain of the speaker, Smith performs a double gesture: she writes herself into her poem, even as the line recalls Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, as she points out in her footnote. Rather than presenting herself as overshadowed or silenced by her poetic predecessors, Smith capitalizes on their work to deepen and enrich the self.
Sonnet III, ‘To a nightingale’, shows Smith uniting with her predecessors, notably Milton and Petrarch, by addressing the nightingale. Yet Smith is not content to rehearse the same themes as her poetic forefathers, instead addressing three sonnets to the nightingale (Sonnets III, VII, and LV) that underscore a troubling identification between the ‘songstress sad’ (‘Sonnet III’, 13) and the poet herself. In the case of Sonnet III, as Luca Manini argues, Smith departs sharply from Petrarch’s emphasis,9 choosing to spotlight the suffering self over Petrarch’s meditation on the vanity of mortal things. Opening with questions that seek to discover the cause of ‘this mournful melody of song’ (III.4), the octave, though divided into two, shows the poet seeking to decipher, or translate, the causes and meanings of the bird’s distress.
Pale Sorrow’s victims wert thou once among,
Tho’ now released in woodlands wild to rove?
Say—hast thou felt from friends some cruel wrong,
Or died’st thou—martyr of disastrous love?
Ah! songstress sad! that such my lot might be,
To sigh, and sing at liberty—like thee! (III.9–14)
Drawing on the biographical knowledge she placed before the reader in the prefaces to the sixth edition and volume II of her Elegiac Sonnets, the reader is offered tantalizing clues to the cause of Smith’s woes. The questions seem less speculative than leading, each intensifying the sense that Smith’s personal circumstances spark her ‘song’. Smith does not use the content alone to suggest the ‘domestic and painful nature’ (‘Preface to the Sixth Edition’, 6) of her difficulties. Her careful use of form is calculated to direct the reader to reach the correct conclusions; the off‐rhyme of ‘rove’ and ‘love’ is deliberately jarring, reinforcing the implication that Smith herself is the ‘martyr of disastrous love’. But Smith is careful to demonstrate that such domestic vulnerability does not breed artistic weakness. The inclusion of a sestet suggests that she keeps her sonnet consistent with the Petrarchan model, yet the rhyme scheme departs from his example. Incorporating the couplet into a sonnet which was almost modelled on the Petrarchan sonnet, Smith builds in a surprising and snapped‐shut ending, where the poet subtly claims in her work the longed‐for liberty of the nightingale. Sonnet VII, ‘On the departure of the nightingale’, and Sonnet LV, ‘The return of the nightingale. Written in May 1791’, show Smith ridding the sonnet of the Petrarchan octave in favour of using the Shakespearean form throughout. Having refashioned Petrarch’s sonnet in her own image in her first sonnet to the nightingale, Smith confidently anglicizes the following two poems, making Shakespeare’s form seem Smith’s choice.
Smith’s statement of her artistic autonomy clashes with the sense of fate as immovable curse that she conjures throughout her sonnets. Yet Smith’s choice of the sonnet form comes to complement her content. The restrictions inherent to the sonnet form become limitations that mirror the poet’s entrapment by the immutable laws governing her life. Sonnet XII, ‘Written on the sea shore.—October, 1784’, shows Smith using the enclosed Petrarchan octave to enact the claustrophobic solitude that moves throughout the poem. Pathetic fallacy creates the sense of the poet as, in Seamus Heaney’s words, ‘lost, / Unhappy and at home’:10 Smith’s nature poetry does not offer nature as a palliative cure for despair, but rather represents nature as a fellow sufferer. Its ‘tempestuous howl’ (XII.4) and ‘deep and solemn roar’ (XII.5) resemble her human despair without blending with it. Smith insists on nature not as auxiliary to the self, but as a fitting Other which mirrors rather than depends on the ‘mournful temper’ (XII.8) of the self. Expecting no rescue, with ‘From whence no succour comes—or comes too late’ (XII.12), Smith predicts an anguished and exhausted end despite the ‘feeble cries’ (XII.13) of her sonnets.
Though Smith often alludes to the ‘artless’ quality of her sonnets, artlessness suggestive of her influence on Wordsworth’s sense of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’,11 she balances artlessness against an oblique affirmation of her poetic power. Sonnet XIX, ‘to Mr. Hayley, on receiving some elegant lines from him’, though careful to praise the dedicatee of her volumes, seems equally intent on declaring her own importance as a poet. The first line states, without feigned modesty, that ‘For me the Muse a simple band design’d’, and despite its appearance as ‘A garland form’d as artless as my song’, there is little doubt that the Muse herself has bestowed a gift upon the poet, a gift that seems more deserved than questioned. Despite the poem’s ostensible praise for Hayley as a poet, Smith draws attention to William Hayley as patron rather than poet, performing a similar move in her suppressed dedication to The Emigrants to William Cowper.12 Such esteem for her unique sonnet sequence, which saw her consciously embrace the ‘illegitimate’ Shakespearean model (three quatrains followed by a couplet) more frequently than the traditional ‘legitimate’ Petrarchan version (with its division into octave and sestet), allowed Smith the freedom to contend with her poetic peers, appropriating and rewriting their themes and forms to fit her own brand of personal poetry. Smith’s sonnets, which draw on predecessors from Metastasio to those ‘Supposed to be written by Werter’ (Sonnets XXI to XXV), evince a potent sense of her poetic power despite her personal sorrows.13 Merging with her alternate speakers, Smith takes over their voices, using Werter’s longing for death to combine with her own despair, asking the North Star to ‘leave me to despair and die!’ (XXIII.14). Despair becomes a guarantor of her status as a poet, and her apostrophe to Melancholy in Sonnet XXXII, like Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, sees it as a spur to creativity. Where Milton reflects on Melancholy, claiming that ‘These pleasures Melancholy give, / And I with thee will choose to live’ (‘Il Penseroso’, 175–6),14 Smith affirms the ‘magic power’ (XXXII.12) of Melancholy with more unmixed worship than her predecessor.
The death in 1795 of her daughter Anna Augusta, whom Smith refers to as ‘The loveliest, the most beloved of my daughters, the darling of all her family’, who was ‘torn from us for ever’,15 is a haunting loss referred to throughout the entire second volume of the Elegiac Sonnets (the sonnets are divided at LX). Though the sonnets rarely become overt elegies, the sadness that suffuses the volume seems still deeper as her memory refuses to fade, as ‘still to me Oblivion is denied, / There’s no Nepenthe, now, on earth for me’ (LXXXVIII, ‘To Nepenthe’, 13–14). Milton’s elegies become models for Smith as she alludes to his Sonnet 23 in ‘To the Sun’ (Sonnet LXXXIX) to draw a parallel between his loss and her own. The Shakespearean octave, with its forward momentum, initially seems to suggest the regenerative and recuperative powers of nature, but Smith, like Milton, refuses to feign consolation.
Celestial lamp! thy influence bright and warm
That renovates the world with life and light
Shines not for me—for never more the form
I loved—so fondly loved, shall bless my sight;
And nought thy rays illumine, now can charm
My misery, or to day convert my night! (LXXXIX.9–14)
Mixing rhyme schemes as the Shakespearean octave passes into a Petrarchan sestet, Smith refuses any solving couplet in favour of Milton’s desolation. Smith is cut off from the mortal world by her status as mourner, haunted by visions that can never be realized by the poet. Neither Milton nor Smith can use poetry to alter their states. Inconsolable despite her poetic power, Smith goes beyond ‘reiterated sorrows [that] are somewhat numbing’16 to achieve an intensely personal music while suggesting her status as Miltonic inheritor. The final sonnet in the sequence (Sonnet XCII, ‘Written at Bignor Park in Sussex, in August, 1799’) sustains and furthers her self‐presentation as a poet in nature, consigned to a misery that can never be mitigated despite her will. The ‘old paternal trees’ (XCII.4) that she views anchor her into both the specific moment and the location, Bignor Park, her childhood home, but the ‘dark shadows’ (XCII.5) gathering point up the continued threats to any hope for equanimity. Smith is already ‘crush’d’ (XCII.11), but, still more painfully, it is the absence of hope that marks the poetry:
…—Lo! the radiant star of day
Lights up this lovely scene anew—My fate
Nor hope nor joy illumines—Nor for me
Return those rosy hours which here I used to see! (XCII.11–14)
The repeated negatives reinforce the blank misery the poet must face, a misery that contrasts sharply with the early happiness she had felt. Adela Pinch’s observation that Smith’s sonnets are built around ‘the artful, pathetic phrase’ seems apt,17 but Smith’s ability to reinvigorate despair in each of the sonnets reveals the sustained artfulness which unites the Elegiac Sonnets into a coherent and impressive artistic whole.