Beachy Head, Smith’s last poem, was published in 1807, after her death, as the first poem in a collection entitled Beachy Head, Fables, and Other Poems. Smith had lived near Beachy Head for a large part of her life, as is apparent from her clear affinity with its landscape. This affinity is coupled with an alertness to the place as a potentially dangerous one by virtue of its vulnerability to any potential attack by Napoleon’s French forces and its reputation as the site of many suicides.1 Smith also uneasily balances natural and nationalist histories along with personal and political meditations. Smith’s ‘compelling and baffling poetic experiment’ reveals her significance to the Romantic period as a whole;2 the fractured versions of the self and the fragmentary conclusion to the work show her experimenting with Romantic selving in a way that anticipates and guides her inheritors.
Beachy Head’s double vision insists on maintaining an ambitious balancing act where antitheses never collapse into an artificial union. ‘Wandering sublime thro’ visionary vales, / Where bright pavilions rise, and trophies, fann’d / By airs celestial; and adorn’d with wreaths’ (86–8),3 Smith also tracks ‘The fishermen, who at set seasons pass / Many a league off at sea their toiling night’ (100–1). Smith conjures a scene ‘when the Omnipotent / Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills’ (6–7), even as she resists the lure of such myth‐making by her attention to the local and the particular. Though Smith occasionally mouths the patriotic words required by contemporary fears of a potential French invasion, with her affirmation that England, unlike the ‘enervate sons of Italy’ or the ‘Iberian’ (146, 147), would never ‘put on / Degrading fetters’ (149–50), Beachy Head mostly frees itself from such nationalistic restraints, concerning itself with juggling of multiple perspectives, jostling selves, and competing representations of the landscape.
Despite frequent criticism from scholars who consider Smith’s autobiographical laments to ‘border on the unseemly’,4 her apparently self‐referential interlude in Beachy Head earns its place in the poem. Anticipating Wordsworth, Smith reveals an adept use of the confessional mode cloaked in contemplative blank verse. Contrasting her country past with her urban present, the poem uses memory to reclaim the ‘Haunts of my youth! / Scenes of fond day dreams, I behold ye yet!’ (297–8), in a triumphant stay against the pain of exile from her untroubled infancy. Asking and stating
who is happy? Happiness! a word
That like false fire, from marsh effluvia born,
Misleads the wanderer, destin’d to contend
In the world’s wilderness, with want or woe—
Yet they are happy, who have never ask’d
What good or evil means. (255–60)
Smith celebrates ignorance, looking ahead to Wordsworth’s later and more equivocal reminiscence of his ‘glad animal movements all gone by’ (‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, 75),5 but the accumulated pathos of Smith’s speaker uttering such words comes from her earlier Elegiac Sonnets and their sustained lament about her speaker’s troubled life.6 Mourning, however plangent, does not take over the poem for long. Celebrating the landscape, Smith’s speaker styles herself ‘An early worshipper at Nature’s shrine’, recalling how ‘I loved her rudest scenes—warrens, and heaths, / And yellow commons, and birchshaded hollows’ (346–8), bearing out Jacqueline M. Labbe’s characterization of Smith as shaping ‘a poetic self [who] is always outdoors, always unhoused, always seeking shelter’.7 Anticipating Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, Smith’s earlier prospect poem rings with questions and intuitions as she absorbs and reflects on nature. Smith questions both material facts and nature’s design.
Magisterially condemning human aspiration, she demands: ‘Hither, Ambition, come! / Come and behold the nothingness of all / For which you carry thro’ the oppressed Earth, / War, and its train of horrors’ (419–22). Defying any potential nihilism, Smith’s dedication to nature lends power to her disdain for ‘Ambition’. Declining to expound upon this theme, Smith passes to a portrait of the hermit, completing her movement from the wide frame of the historical vision to a localized portrait of his life and death. Smith intimates how this portrait of the hermit verges on self‐portraiture, where his doomed love combined with his love of nature forms the mainstay of his song. Hastening to remind the reader that ‘The visionary, nursing dreams like these, / Is not indeed unhappy’ (655–6), Smith’s poetic self‐consciousness wins out, rescuing her sketch of the hermit from seeming unwittingly autobiographical or mawkish. Despite his suffering, Smith insists on his continued sympathy with society as ‘he still acutely felt / For human misery’ (690–1) notwithstanding his chosen exile from the world. Painting her hermit as one who had saved people from their suicidal impulses, people who ‘liv’d to bless the hermit of the rocks’ (709), Smith stops short of fleshing out her presentation of the hermit, writing no elegy for his death. Offering no more than the certainty ‘That dying in the cause of charity / His spirit, from its earthly bondage freed, / Had to some better region fled for ever’ (729–31), the speaker closes the poem with an affirmation, but one that does not memorialize or eulogize the dead man. Estranging rather than enchanting, Smith’s final poem closes with a haunting ambiguity that sidesteps consolation or closure.