| Beachy Head | |
|---|---|
| by Charlotte Turner Smith | |
&sq=crain_ford&lang=en&file=File:Beachy_Head_1807_Title_Page.png) Title page of the first edition | |
| Written | 1806 |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Meter | iambic pentameter |
| Rhyme scheme | blank verse |
| Publication date | January 1807 |
| Lines | 742 |
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 seniment, 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.