Huge Vapours Brood Above the Clifted Shore
Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night o'er the ocean settles, dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen, in the anchored bark, that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone,
Singing the hour, and bidding "strike the bell."
All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar, the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim; such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends, in life's long darkling way.
Commentary
clifted (adj): having clefts or fissures; split
As I’ve remarked in the past, it is often the last line that makes or breaks a poem. Nor is this assigning it an undue prominence - as in today’s piece, the poet often deliberately structures his or her poem to hinge upon the ending1, where the hitherto meaningless or disconnected images resolve, as if by magic, into a focused and coherent whole. A lovely theory, which has produced some great poems, but likewise a dangerous one to follow, since when it fails, it can fail all the way, taking the entire work with it.
I’m not entirely sure, though, in which category to place ‘Huge Vapours’. It starts off as a nice piece of descriptive writing; vivid and observant, if a trifle ‘overwritten’2. And in the best poetic tradition, it segues into a conceit that at once overlays the surface meaning with a metaphor, ties together and explains the particular images the poet chose to focus upon, and wraps the whole up rather neatly. On the other hand, though, the transition is slightly abrupt, and the sense of revelation was pleasant but not stunning, lacking both the deliberate cleverness of the metaphysicals and the carefully setup twist that later poets have used to good effect. Nothing concrete, just a vague feeling that it didn’t do quite enough.
Formwise, this was a delightful work - the rhyme scheme and metre faithfully follow those of the Shakespearean sonnet, but the stanza boundaries are far more fluid, making a refreshing change from the usual formality of the typical sonnet. The Spenserian hexameter in the final line was likewise unexpected, and went a long way towards balancing the ending against the rest of the poem.
On the whole, I’d give it a positive verdict - it is, as I’ve said, both evocative3 and enjoyable, with some very nice imagery. And perhaps as importantly, it is a poem that improves with rereading - it does take a couple of passes to grow on you4, but the effort is worth it.
the aid of the e word
grip me either immediately or not at all. today’s is a rare exception.
— Martin
Biography and Assessment
Smith, Charlotte
née Turner
b. May 4, 1749, London, Eng.
d. Oct. 28, 1806, Tilford, near Farnham, Surrey
English novelist and poet, highly praised by the novelist Sir Walter Scott. Her poetic attitude toward nature was reminiscent of William Cowper’s in celebrating the “ordinary” pleasures of the English countryside. Her radical attitudes toward conventional morality (the novel Desmond tells of the innocent love of a man for a married woman) and political ideas of class equality (inspired by the French Revolution) gained her notoriety, but her work belongs essentially with that of the derivative 18th-century romantic tradition of women novelists.
Smith’s husband fled to France to escape his creditors. She joined him there, until, thanks largely to her, he was able to return to England. In 1787, however, she left him and began writing to support her 12 children. Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, which she had published in 1784, had been well received, but because novels promised greater financial rewards, she wrote, after some free translations of French novels, Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789). Desmond appeared in 1792 and was followed by her best work, The Old Manor-House (1793). Toward the end of her life, she turned to writing instructive books for children, the best being Conversations Introducing Poetry for the Use of Children (1804).
– EB
On the Sonnets ...
"Their powers either of invention or expression are nothing, save in the
ability to reject what is false and superfluous; yet that single merit is
a thing so necessary to excellence, and so rare, that everybody likes the
sonnets because nobody doubts their being in earnest ..."
– The Book of the Sonnet (1867)
”[a] very trifling compliment is paid Mrs. Smith, when it is observed how much her Sonnets exceed those of Shakespeare and Milton …”
– Gentleman’s Magazine (1786)
[no comment -m.]
The elegance, the polish, the taste, and the feeling of this highly gifted lady, may no doubt be traced in Mrs. Charlotte Smith’s poetry. But for her invention, that highest property of genius, her knowledge of the human bosom, her powers of natural description, her wit, and her satire, the reader must seek in her prose narratives.
– Mis)
“Charlotte Smith was the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic.” – Stuart Curran, ed. and intro. Poems of Charlotte Smith (1993)
Links
There’s a wonderful Charlotte Smith page (from which the above assessments were taken) at http://cc.recorder.ca/~bouray/a-main.htm