charlotte smith s elegiac sonnets: unfinished work

1. Charlotte Smith�s Elegiac Sonnets: Unfinished Work LIT 208 Week Three Angela Keane A.Keane@shef.ac.uk

3. Sonnet form and history Petrarchan: octave and sestet Amorous love Regular rhyme scheme Shakespearean/ Spenserean Three quatrains and a couplet Each part self-contained rhyme scheme Donne: secular love to divine love Milton: political sonnet

4. The Sonnet in the Early Eighteenth Century Not many Pope, Dryden, Swift: reject lyricism of sonnet for didacticism and satire �a symptom of the cultural distance the eighteenth-century imposed between itself and the Elizabethans, who were commonly understood to have been barbaric (Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986), p.29)

5. Smith�s literary influences Morbid aesthetic of gothic, medievalism Petrarch, Milton, Sidney Pope, Thomson, Shakespeare, William Mason, Thomas Otway, Ann Yearsley, Thomas Chatterton, Thomas Gray, Goethe

6. Making private sorrows public [when] I first struck the chords of the melancholy lyre, its notes were never intended for the public ear. It was unaffected sorrows drew them forth. I wrote mournfully because I was unhappy � And I have no reason yet, though nine years have since elapsed, to change my tone. (Preface to the Sixth Edition of Elegiac Sonnets (1790), The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran (1993))

7. Smith�s sorrows Genteel origins: St Jame�s Square, London; Bignor Park, Sussex Married at 15 to Benjamin Smith, heir to West Indian commercial enterprise (produce 12 children together) Father-in-law died in 1776; complicated will not resolved until after Charlotte Smith�s death Benjamin � debt-laden; sent to King�s Bench Prison (debtor�s prison) in 1783; Charlotte joins him there for 8 months Writes and publishes 1st edition of Elegiac Sonnets from King�s Bench Separates from Benjamin in 1787; turns to novel writing to earn money

8. St James�s Square

9. Bignor Park, Sussex

10. King�s Bench Prison

11. The Life in the Works? Smith emphasises her personal situation in her poetry and novels �performance� not �expression� �far from offering a sustained picture of personal sorrow, the Sonnets are a compendium of identities and voices, linked by an �I� who changes costume with ease, and stage-managed and directed by Smith� (Jacqueline M. Labbe, The Culture of Gender: Charlotte Smith, Poetry, and Romanticism (2003), p.54)

12. Elegiac Tradition Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1745) Thomas Gray, �Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard� (1751) The Epitaph Here rests his head upon the lap of earth 118����� A youth to fortune and to fame unknown. 119����� Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, 120����� And Melancholy marked him for her own. 121����� Large was his bounty and his soul sincere, 122����� Heaven did a recompence as largely send: 123����� He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, 124����� He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend. 125����� No farther seek his merits to disclose, 126����� Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, 127����� (There they alike in trembling hope repose) 128����� The bosom of his Father and his God.

13. Smith�s Sonnets The precedent of Young and Gray gave Smith �the confidence to assume that her depression, economic vulnerability and fears for her children are no improper subjects for one of the most historically privileged genres� : the sonnet (Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (1998))

14. Speakers and Addressees Speakers: often ageless, genderless The wronged friend; night-time wanderer; broken-hearted; grief-stricken Some voices of identifiable characters eg 21-25 in the voice of Werther Addressees: Person, objects, places, times, concepts: To a friend; the nightingale; the South Downs; the spring; hope

15. SONNET XXI. SUPPOSED TO BE WRITTEN BY WERTER.

16. Pastoral and alienation � SONNET IX. BLEST IS YON SHEPHERD, ON THE TURF RECLINED

17. SONNET LVII. TO DEPENDENCE. � 1��������� Dependence! heavy, heavy are thy chains, 2��������� ���And happier they who from the dangerous sea, 3��������� Or the dark mine, procure with ceaseless pains 4��������� ���An hard-earn'd pittance---than who trust to thee! 5��������� More blest the hind, who from his bed of flock 6��������� ���Starts---when the birds of morn their summons give, 7��������� And waken'd by the lark---"the shepherd's clock," 8��������� ���Lives but to labour---labouring but to live. 9��������� More noble than the sycophant, whose art 10������� ���Must heap with taudry flowers thy hated shrine; 11������� I envy not the meed thou canst impart 12������� ���To crown his service---while, tho' Pride combine 13������� With Fraud to crush me---my unfetter'd heart 14������� ���Still to the Mountain Nymph may offer mine.

18. Idealisation of rural life? Unlike Stephen Duck, Ann Yerasley, Mary Collier who document rural impoverishment Literary shorthand; pastoral projections of speaker�s desire

19. SONNET LXXXII. TO THE SHADE OF BURNS.

20. Authorship and melancholy No patron; wrote for subscription and market Publishers (Dodsley; Cadell and Davies; Robinson) paymasters and creditors Writing as alienated labour; reified

21. Authorship and melancholy Melancholy: from physiological (condition of having too much �black bile�) to temperamental (associated with �sadness and depression of spirits�, a �condition of gloom or dejection�, �a tender pensive sadness� OED) Visibility of melancholy in eighteenth century attributed to economic expansion and political �outwardness�; sensitive men turn inward

22. Smith as melancholic Rejection of �female� hysteria; adoption of �male� melancholia Melancholia as the refusal to mourn: [in mourning] � the loved object no longer exists and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object � when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again. Freud, �Mourning and Melancholia�, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans and ed. James Strachey (Hogarth, 1957), pp.239-258, p.244

23. Elegies? �Smith writes strange elegies because, instead of being able to renounce what she has lost, or to say farewell to the dead, she feels that she is entitled to have what she has lost restored to her� (Judith Hawley, �Charlotte Smith�s Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains�, Women�s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of A Canon 1730-1820, ed. By Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (1999), pp.184-198, p.195

24. SONNET LXXVIII. SNOWDROPS

25. Poetry as therapy �Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought� (Preface to the First and Second Editions of Elegiac Sonnets, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Curran, p.3) �poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility�, William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802)

26. Unhealthy poetry �The unmitigable woe with which Mrs Smith�s poems are filled, together with their factitious and second-hand phraseology, renders them unpalatable to a generation so much healthier than that in which they were produced.� (David Main, ed., A Treasury of English Sonnets (1880), p.358)

27. SONNET LXX. ON BEING CAUTIONED AGAINST WALKING ON AN HEADLAND OVERLOOKING THE SEA, BECAUSE IT WAS FREQUENTED BY A LUNATIC.