User:Tsteven1/sandbox

History
The geological and archeological findings revealed by the hills of Beachy Head serve to highlight the limitations of human pride and scientific accomplishment. The consideration of geological theories is as much an intrinsic part of Beachy Head as the “daily task” of the peasant who, “Unheeding such inquiry”, “cultivates” the land (398), or the “herdsman” who “Watches his wether flock”, or the studies of “some lone antiquary”; who “on times remote… / ...Loves to contemplate”.

Mortality
The images of nature described in Beachy Head become inseparable with that of death. Wallace states:"With allusions pointing in every direction, with historical and scientific speculations competing with landscape description and lyrical recollection, the heterogeneous matter of 'Beachy Head' nonetheless can be understood as threaded through by conceptions of a deep earth, of deep time, and of continual exchanges of energy and form through these containing spatial-temporal structures. Living becomes not-living and then living again, animals now petrified are taken for (very large) humans, and the piled-up earth is riddled with the bodies of people becoming earth."Furthermore, Beachy Head rhetorically plays with the circular concept of time and mortality. Wallace states, “The poem never closes these conjectures, these wanderings, never redraws the boundaries it dissolves, leaving open the borders between flesh and stone, life and not-life, transforming through and within deep earth and deep time”. And though unclear, the image of death lingers throughout the poem with the stranger-poet character, who along with the other characters “seems to be neither definitively alive nor definitively dead”.

Nature
In the poem, Smith plays with Romantic Pastoral Poetry; her descriptions of the lands in Beachy Head are in line with the Romantic concept of Pastoralism. In her footnotes she describes the land as “Arcady”, an idealized, pastoral land. However Crowley argues that Smith subverts readerly expectations on how these characters interact with the world around them. Throughout Beachy Head, Smith comments on “the slave trade, the Roman Empire, the beginning of time, and the war with France as well as addresses characters such as a shepherds, herself (as a retired poet), and a rustic hermit”. Although much of the scholarship on Smith and her work seems to recognize these themes and characters as representations of her views of Romantic period politics, as well as being part of pastoral poetry, Crowley argues that her portrayal of these three vagabond characters in relation to nature “evoke[s] the traditional pastoral mode” of Romanticism and simultaneously subverts it.

Smith’s Beachy Head also challenges the idea of flawless rural life commonly found in traditional pastoral literature and subverts these traditional Pastoral themes by instead presenting a more “realist” portrayal of rural life through its characters. According to John M. Anderson, writer of "Beachy Head: The Romantic Fragment Poem as Mosaic,"“Smith explores the Petrarchan oxymoron of un-pastoral shepherds.” He argues that the Shepherd is “neither the passive, suffering observer nor the pastoral fantasy of innocence,” further illustrating how her characters on the fringes of society counter Romantic pastoral conventions.

Sections of the poem contain speculation on geology and science. “An early worshipper of Nature’s shrine, / I loved her rudest scenes”; the speaker begins to wonder about the genesis of the nature that is “so early loved”. The “strange and foreign forms of sea-shells" cause her to question the origins of the world and reject any explanations as vague theories of science. Because these speculations do not affect the “herdsman of the hill,” they appear to be all the more irrelevant. The archaeological pursuits and discovery of the enormous elephant bones is also an important factor. Additionally, condemning ambition and military glory as being vain and transient, the speaker invites the reader to turn to a pastoral scene which celebrates the co-existence of shepherds, flowers and birds.

Nostalgia & Melancholia
In relation to nostalgia, Shelley points out that Smith grew up in the countryside and came to know the land quite well. As a result, the poem Beachy Head:"...expresses her nostalgia and longing for the sense of freedom and unity of being that she associates with this childhood landscape, as well as her continued love for the many manifestations of life there that she has always taken delight in and observed so closely. This evocation of place, then, is very much bound up with the poet's own life, encompassing memories of childhood as well as mature reflection upon those memories and an expanded sense of vastness and complexity of life, social and natural, viewed from this vantage point, this “rock sublime.”"In other words, the poet's life and consciousness converge with place as an expression through a natural scene that becomes a social, spiritual, and psychological landscape. "Moreover, according to the author of 'Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807,” Donna Landry points out that Beachy Head vacillates between ennobling the struggle against hardship of the rural poor and criticizing the luxuries of the rich, which brings nobody happiness. Little does the 'sturdy hind' or the 'labourer, whose pick-axe smooths / The road,' recognize how unhappy is the 'child of Luxury,' who 'flies from place to place / In chase of pleasure that eludes his grasp”."In terms of melancholia, Hunt points out, “Beachy Head presents melancholia in a much more abstract sense, musing on the state of the world, time and mankind's sorrows from atop the Sussex cliffs”. These cliffs provide a powerful position from which to express melancholia, considering Beachy Head is well-known for suicide.

Science
Though the term “Green Language” was coined by Raymond Williams in his groundbreaking work The Country and the City (1973), it can be applied to Charlotte Smith’s writing in regards to Beachy Head. Landry states:"According to Williams, what White produced in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1788-89) was 'a new kind of record, not only of the facts, but of a way of looking at the facts: a way of looking that will come to be called scientific'  Because the scientific and the literary diverged for Williams, he pursued the literary strain in isolation from the scientific one."However, Smith decidedly combines both science and poetics into her unfinished magnum-opus, Beachy Head. According to Landry, Smith’s combined use of poetics and “green language” or ecobiological rhetoric makes Beachy Head both “botanically exact and scientific yet charged with feeling”.

War
War and its history are major themes in Beachy Head.Charlotte Smith begins her historical overview in the fourth stanza. She starts with William the Conqueror’s invasion of England, “when from Neustria’s hostile shore / The Norman launch’d his galleys”. Smith delves into the history of the Normans and their migration and conquest of England and parts of Europe, including Italy and Sicily. Smith writes: Of Scandinavia the undaunted sons

Whom Dogon, Fier-a-bras, and Humfroi led

To conquest: while Trinacria to their power

Yielded her wheaten garland; and when thou,

Parthenope! within thy fertile bay

Received the victors- These conquests are covered by Smith in extensive and highly detailed footnotes.

Smith compares the Norman invasion of England, Sicily, and Italy with whom she saw as their contemporary equivalent - Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, writing, “But let not modern Gallia form from hence / Presumptuous hopes, that ever thou again, / Queen of the isles! shalt crouch to foreign arms. Beachy Head was indeed, as the English feared, a likely beachhead for the anticipated French invasion of England. Smith details further the disastrous “Battle of Beachy Head” (1690), where the allied English and Dutch navies were defeated by the French, leaving control of the channel to French forces: “Thy [England’s] naval fame was tarnish’d, at what time / Thou, leagued with the Batavian [Dutch], gavest to France”.

Briefly mentioned in the thirteenth stanza are “the mail’d legions under Claudius”. Smith’s own footnotes confirm this to be the legions of Emperor Claudius who added Britain to the Roman Empire. Smith expands upon the armies of Claudius in the next stanza as well, where she speaks of “the centurion, who on these wide hills / Encamping, planted the Imperial Eagle”.

References to war continue in the fourteenth stanza, where Smith speaks of “War, and its train of horrors… By which the warrior sought to register / His glory, and immortalize his name”. Smith’s own footnotes expand upon her reference to “The pirate Dane, who from his circular camp / Bore in destructive robbery, fire and sword”. Smith claims, “The incursions of the Danes were for many ages the scourge of this island”.

According to the writer of "Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807”, Donna Landry points out that Into the second decade of war with France, Smith imagined England as divided from the Continent most thinly by the Channel at this very spot. She imagined Beachy Head as indeed a beachhead in British operations abroad. But for Smith, Beachy Head was also a place remote enough to rank among Nature's "rudest scenes," within which she could escape to the green world: An early worshipper at Nature’s shrine,

I loved her rudest scenes-warrens, and heaths,

And yellow commons, and birch-shaded hollows,

And hedgerows, bordering unfrequented lanes

Bordered with wild roses, and the clasping woodbine

Where purple tassels of the tangling vetch

With bittersweet, and bryony inweave.