Mimesis in Beachy Head: How Coastal Fragmentation Informs Charlotte Smith’s Poetry

Elia Kazan Fordham University Professor Zimmerman Romantics and Ecocriticism

Abstract:

After re-reading Beachy Head, I noticed that both the location of Beachy Head, and structure of Charlotte Smith’s poem, are fragmented in their own ways. This similarity of fragmentation led me to believe that human imagination (and its expression in art) is strongly influenced by our physical environment. In this essay I examine how Beachy Head can be seen as a place of fragmentation (partitioned, irregularly shaped, and layered), then I examine how fragmentation operates in Smith’s poem (structure, episodic memory, and change). I then connect the two, and propose the theory that perhaps the aesthetics, character, and content of her poem is in some ways mimicking her natural environment. Whether or not this is absolutely true, Smith’s poetry undeniably offers the opportunity to study human identity by way in which human imagination positions itself to the place and space it finds itself in. Three examples of fragmentation in Smith’s poem struck me as most significant: firstly, the structure of the poem being made up of 9 distinct parts; secondly, the fragmented sense of time represented by fossils and Smith’s own childhood memories; and thirdly, the inherent quality of change found in various entities of the poem, both human and non-human. At the end, this analysis supports a larger argument which is that because of this interconnectedness between physical environment and human imagination, there exists an urgent need to protect the environment in order for humans to thrive both physically and imaginatively.

Introduction Beachy Head is quite the place to let “Fancy” “go forth.” It is massive, desolate, historical and imposing. It is where sea meets land, or rather collides with, as the two struggle against one another. There are no trees, and with strong winds and extreme vertical cliffs can be a precarious place to stand about. Its white cliffs, and layers of stratum, are a testament to time and change on the Earth. Its residents, such as the shepherd, the peasants, the wanderer (whose “home was in the forest; and wild fruits / And bread sustain’d him” line 560) and the hermit are testaments to the symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment. With all these elements, the place serves as inspiration to Charlotte

Smith, to think about the natural environment on a large scale, its inhabitants, and those times where she “once was happy.”

Fragmentation is a theme prevalent in Charlotte Smith’s work not only in the description of the natural environment but also in the structure of her poem itself. As Kevis

Goodman writes in “Conjectures on Beachy Head,” “Smith’s poetry emphasizes the opposite movement of the dialectic: the critical parsing of abstraction, or the dissolving and separating of unity into number… Charlotte Smith delights in parting the elements”

(1000). We can see fragments in a number of ways. One way is the usage of footnotes, the effect of which fragment the flow of the poem. In these footnotes are references to both natural science texts and poetry that inform Beachy Head: “Smith builds her fragment of fragments, fashioning a mosaic of broken tiles. Often these tiles are from Smiths reading- it is important to recognize the extent to which even unacknowledged models and sources

1 inform this poetry, the extent to which this extracanonical work is rooted in literary tradition” (Anderson 551). These “sources” that inform her poetry, such as Robert

Percival’s An Account of the Island of Ceylon (note 5, page 164), or Gilbert White’s The

Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (note 2, page 176), or Oliver Goldsmith’s poetry in the line “Unprofitably gay” (221), all add to the fragmentary nature of the poem.

The footnotes fragment the narrative structure by adding detail and supplying information that is distinctly separate yet connected to the poem overall. In such footnotes, Smith breaks the reader’s attention away from her romantic poetry and offers either factual explanation supplements her descriptions (such as taxonomical and botanical names).

Beachy Head, in this fragmented way consisting of both poetry and prose footnotes, forms an assemblage of distinguishable materials (which also reveal the range and depth of Charlotte Smith’s own education). The fragmentary footnotes make Beachy Head a fragmented piece of poetry, and in many ways this fragmentation mimics Beachy Head, which is a fragment of land jutting out into the sea, consisting of various elements of the sea, the shore, and the cliff, and made up of elephant bones and sea-shells from creatures of the past, and inhabited by various living beings.

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Fragmented Structure of the Beachy Head

Smith attempts to understand the fragmentation of Beachy Head by contemplating how it was formed. In an attempt of “Fancy,” Smith tries to understand how Beachy Head was divided. She describes the “convulsion of Nature” that quite literally fragments Beachy

Head as a landmass apart from Europe:

And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. (5-10)

In footnote 2 (page 163), Smith explains how she is not assured that the two landmasses

(Great Britain and continental Europe) were once connected, or that they were non- fragmented. In this sense, fragmentation seems to be intrinsic to Beachy Head. In other parts of the poem, Beachy Head is represented as a fragmented place, such as the “cavern” where the hermit lives (673), or as an isolated headland away from “England’s Capital”

(485).

Beachy Head, as a coastal setting, can certainly be defined as fragmented because it is where land breaks to meet the sea, and this creates its rocky surface and an irregular shape. It could be further argued that it has a fractal pattern because of this irregularity.

Benoît Mandelbrot, a famous scholar of mathematics, defined fractal as including not only a fragmented nature, but irregularity as well: “I coined fractal from the Latin adjective fractus. The corresponding Latin verb frangere means ‘to break:’ to create irregular

3 fragments. It is therefore sensible ... that, in addition to "fragmented" ... fractus should also mean ‘irregular’” (Mandelbrot 1). The coast of Beachy Head aptly deserves the description of fragmented and irregular; it is where the land breaks off, and meets the sea. It is a place where the force of the sea collides with vertical cliffs, which causes the rocky coast to break apart further. Similarly, Beachy Head is poem that is fragmented and irregular, and this mimesis reveals a working relationship between environment and the human.

Fragmented Structure of Beachy Head

Kari Lokke writes how “Beachy Head moves quite spectacularly from a sweeping and panoramic cosmological, geographical and historical vision, to a regional portrait of the Sussex downs, to a series of village vignettes, before concluding with the single and isolated figure of ‘the lone Hermit’” (45). What Lokke is capturing here is the overall fragmentation of the poem. The reader is forced to migrate along these distinguishable and separable fragments of the poem, with little or no introduction. In fact, the poem starts off in the essentially fragmentary structure in medias res; “ON thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! / That o’er the channel rear’d, half way at sea / The mariner at early morning hails, / I would recline, while Fancy should go forth” (1-4). In a highly fragmented way, without any preamble, the poem immediately commences with the narrator speaking atop

Beachy head and describing the scene around here, where she hears the mariner “at early morning hail[s],” and see the sunrise, the birds “seek[ing] their food” and “the lone shepherd, and his baying dog / Drive to thy turfy crest his bleating flock” (27-28).

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As Beachy Head is suggested as a non-linear poem, I argue this is because the poem mimics the fragmentation of the actual Beachy Head. It is important not to overlook the non-linearity of the poem, caused by its distinct sections and footnotes. Heather

Crickenberger adds to the conversation about the poems non-linearity as a sort of meditation “like one’s mind in a contemplative state, her poem does not stay on track, trudging toward a predetermined purpose, but leaps forward and backward in time, circling back on itself like a meditation.” (Crickenberger 2). The poem starts off describing Beachy

Head and the sunrise/sunset in the first two verses, but then quickly transitions, in a highly fragmented way, to the human history of England which was invaded and conquered by the Normans. Smith further adds a tangent about English and French naval forces fighting in the Battle of Beachy Head. Even the human history, analogous to the fragmented nature of Beachy Head itself, is fragmentary in and of itself: the English were not the sole, undisturbed inhabitants of the place; their cultural history was fragmented by the invasion of the Normans.

As we move forward in the poem, the non-linearity continues. In lines 167-254,

Smith returns to the landscape of Beachy Head and its inhabitants, and writes about the

“simple scenes of peace and industry,” and the purity and freedom of the hind (farm assistant) living their life in simplicity and in devotion to their labour. Smith swiftly moves along by contemplating “Happiness” and her own experiences growing up in “these upland solitudes.” Then we arrive to the oft-quoted scene where Smith finds sea-shells. She contemplates how these fragments of the sea could arrive in such a place high above the

5 sea-level: “Or did this range of chalky mountains, once / Form a vast bason, where the

Ocean waves / Swell’d fathomless? What time these fossil shells / Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown” (382-885). From here, Smith, in a highly fragmented fashion, fast forwards to the depiction of the “wanderer of the hills” (442) and then to the forlorn

“stranger” who laments his lost lover. The “stranger’s” love songs, like verses of Smith’s poem, are fragmentary as well: “love songs and scatter’d rhymes / Unfinish’d sentences, or half erased” (line 573-574). His “scatter’d rhymes” and “unfinish’d sentences” are not unlike Smith’s fragmented poem.

There is more to say however about these “scatter’d rhymes” and “unifinish’d sentences.” Dahlia Porter explains how “In the final 200 lines… Smith inserted two poems she originally listed separately in her proposed table of contents, ‘Shepherd of the hill’ and

‘The wood walk’…typographically and formally distinct from the rest of the poem, these inset fragments foreground the editorial practices that underwrite Smith’s compositional practice” (44). Quite literally, Smith’s verses in Beachy Head are a collection; “Smith extracted bits from her sonnets, novels and children’s books and integrated them into

Beachy Head, making it a composite stitched together from pieces of her earlier works”

(Porter 42). These extracted “bits” are also revealed in the footnotes which refer to her supplemented readings on natural science texts and other readings.

We can see that the meaning of fragmentation is complicated when we consider it is something intentional. It was intentional made as a composite to create something larger than each part. “With these poetic disruptions, Smith makes explicit that Beachy Head is a

6 product of collecting, and that in producing it, she was engaged in threading and binding, editing her works, producing her own Variorum” (Porter 45). If Smith’s poetry has an intention at all, it could be that this “collection” of fragmented verses was intended, in an attempt to romanticize about the natural environment, it is named after, to suggest a greater understanding of the natural environment, namely that it is fragmented, and made up of many parts that need to all be considered in order to fully comprehend its meaning.

None of the poem’s fragmentation, including the various digressions and tangents of the poem, are unintended. The use of fragmentation gives the poem a nature that reflects the nature of Beachy Head: like Beachy Head, Smith’s Beachy Head is a collection of both human and natural histories. The poem, like Beachy Head itself, includes history: In lines

398-418, the herdsmen are depicted as “idly reclining” on top of a turfy knoll, or burial mound, where beneath “Rest the remains of men”, and a few lines down Smith mentions the “enormous bones” of an elephant that was unearthed. The sea-shells (374), as previously noted, adds to the sense of Beachy Head’s fragmented history as including the ancient, prehistoric, the non-human. It only makes sense that a place such as Beachy Head, with its fragmented human and natural history illustrated by the use of human burial grounds and animal fossils, would be represented in a poem such as Beachy Head whose disparate and non-linear components render it highly fragmented.

Lastly, Beachy Head is formed in blank verse, meaning verse without rhyme. This structure further adds to the “fragmented” sense of the poem because each line, without rhyming with the next, operates in this sense as independent and distinguished.

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The Fragments of Memory

Smith uses fragmentation not only in the structure of her poem, but also in the form of both human memory and natural history, all with the purpose of exploring and understanding the natural environment. Naturally, time and space are supposed to restrict a person to a singular place. But Smith’s use of memory transcends both limitations: “The fragmentary nature of this narrative technique enables Smith to free herself from the bounds of both time and space, achieving a simultaneously panoramic and penetrative perspective, which lends unity to the poem’s fragmentary form and supplies Smith with a vehicle for digression” (Crickenberger 1). Smith uses memory as a means to better understand Beachy Head. Beachy Head has a past that needs to be considered in order to comprehend its nature, and Smith uses memory of both human and natural history to achieve this comprehension.

In Beachy Head, human history is contemplated in a variety of ways. But to what purpose? I am suggesting that human history is integral to Beachy Head as a means of explaining not only the evanescence of humanity, but the impermanence of the natural environment as well. In other words, Smith uses fragmented memory as a way of looking at nature to better understand the impermanence of its elements. Smith considers the fragmented memory of the Norman invasion, and the conquest of England while sitting

“High on her throne of rock,” but this lasts only for 50 lines, and quickly the momentum of the poem shifts to “simple scenes of peace and industry” (169). My argument about memory as something fleeting is demonstrated by this shift: the consideration of the

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Normans and the battles on English terrain is certainly a memory associated with Beachy

Head, but such memories are only fragments of the past that can be quickly overtaken by admirations of the “simple scenes of peace and industry” in the present moment. More acts of fragmented “remembering” occur, as the narrator reflects of “scenes of fond day dreams… Where t’was so pleasant by thy northern slopes” (298-299), and “recollects” of the “delight I felt / Among these cottage gardens” (342). These by-gone realities have become mere memories, or fragment things of the past, similar to the fossil shells or elephant bones. But these fragment memories seem to have purpose in Smith’s poem; they can be viewed as reminders that nothing is permanent, that everything is bound to change and end, and that one should cherish the simple moments they have, lest they should “with fond regret…recollect e’en now / In Spring and Summer, what delight I felt / among these cottage gardens” (340-342).

Change as an Inherent Quality of

Fragmentation Found in both Beachy Head and Beachy Head

Change, and impermanence, are themes that are prevalent throughout Beachy Head.

I also want to explain how they persist in Smith’s other works, most notably Elegiac

Sonnets. Change and impermanence are represented not only in the nature depicted in the poems, but in the structure of the poems as well. The first 117 lines of Beachy Head commence with the beginning of the day describing the sunrise and ending describing the sunset; there is no stagnation. Very quick is the change from “when the glorious sun / Just

9 lifts above it his resplendent orb” to when “the last ray shot upward” and “the early moon distinctly rising.” The position of the sun is constantly moving, from sunrise to sunset, and again back to sunrise. Even the “fleet of fishing vessels” and the “ship of commerce” are not stagnant; they are moving as swift as the pace of the poem. As Smith moves through the poem, the reader is forced to move with her, as she is “advancing higher still” and supplies a larger view of the surrounding lower area. Physically her movement is changing as she ascends Beachy Head quite literally. Interesting as well is how the characters who live most intimately with nature, such as the peasant farmers and shepherds, are also most aware of how nature constantly changes: “While to his daily task the peasant goes, /

Unheeding such inquiry; with no care / But that the kindly change of sun and shower / Fit for his toil the earth he cultivates” (395-398). The peasant is not concerned about the fossils, but about the changes in “sun and shower” which directly impact his agriculture.

Smith shows that impermanence is something shared or common between humans and the environment. For example, the people of Beachy Head are analogized to the clouds above it; both are impermanent, and passing: “All, with the lapse of Time, have passed away…Even as the clouds…soon forgotten” (434-439). Just as the “pirate Dane” swept through the vale, or the savage native lived in the woods, or “centurion” who once “planted the Imperial Eagle,” the clouds above Beachy Head once “Cast[ed] their broad shadows on the downs” only to sail away and be “soon forgotten.” The invaders pass came and went, passing away as quickly as the clouds above in Beachy Head. The usage of ruin imagery also helps to explain this theme of impermanence: the “stranger” chooses their home

10 among the ruins of the “castellated mansion” and it is among the ruins “often he would muse” (509). More imagery of impermanence is used when the narrator explains the shift in human occupancy in Surry:

The Conqueror’s successors fiercely fought, Tearing with civil feuds the desolate land. But now a tiller of the soil dwells there, And of the turre’s loop’d and rafter’d halls Has made an humbler homestead- Where he sees, Instead of armed foemen, herds that graze Along his yellow meadows; or his flocks At evening from the upland driv’n to fold- (497-504)

Where once conqueror’s fought and the land was “desolate,” the land takes on an agricultural function and is home to a “tiller.” The sense of change is unrelenting. The natural elements in Beachy Head are described as impermanent; the setting sun with its

“ruby tints” and “sapphire gleams” finally dips below the horizon, sea-critters become

“sea-shells”, elephants become buried bones, and the clouds drift away “soon forgotten.”

By using description of impermanent human forces, such as longer forgotten invaders, and passing aspects found in nature such as clouds and sunsets, Smith is implicitly conveying the notion to her reader that impermanence is something inherent to both human lives and nature. This understanding of commonality undoubtedly functions to enhance the relationship between humanity and nature by developing empathy, which in turn should result in humans protecting nature.

Lastly, this analysis of fragmentation would not be complete without extending its findings to Elegiac Sonnets, where Smith uses the ideas of fragmentation, memory and

11 impermanence as a way of explaining the connection between human lives and nature.

Smith analogizes impermanence for example as something of both natural and human in essence. In Sonnet II, Smith describes “the Close of Spring” where “the garland’s fade” and the change in season. She analogizes (and laments) nature’s change in season to human’s change from childhood to adulthood. The loss of youth in nature’s Spring is made parallel to the loss of “the fond visions of thy early day / Till tyrant Passion, and corrosive

Care / Bid all thy fairy colours fade away!” (10-12). Impermanence is also figured into the

Nightingale in Sonnet VII, that must “Depart” or migrate as spring arrives, and it other various sonnets change in the season or in natural elements is reconciled by change in

Smith’s life stages, or even her mood for example. These examples of fragmentation (also suggested by the very nature of a collection of sonnets), memory and impermanence serve as gentle reminders that human beings and nature are fundamentally one and the same.

The Lone Character as a Symbol for Fragmentation

Further developing the connection between humans and nature in Smith’s poetry is the “lone” character- whether the shepherd, the stranger, or the hermit- because each mimic the “loneliness” or isolated essence of Beachy Head. As a coastal headland, Beachy Head can be seen as a place and space that is isolated from the mainland and thus symbolically lonely. The usage of lone characters in Smith poem can function to mimic this fragmentation and suggest a sense of commonality in both the human to the non-human.

The purpose of this fragmentation can be as simple as Smith’s communication to her

12 reading audience the idea that nature itself is fragmented and that all of its many parts must be considered if one is to have a total understanding of nature. All of these “lone” characters live closely with the natural world, and with such proximity their character’s function as a bridge between the human and non-human.

The “lone shepherd” appears in the first verse, driving his flock along. Next is the

“stranger,” who lives very intimately with nature: “His home was in the forest; and wild fruits / And bread sustain’d him” (560-561). He sings songs lamenting his lost lover while

“stertch’d upon the mountain turf” and his songs are heard by the peasants in the vale below. He is connected with nature in thought: “And as above him sail the silver clouds /

He follows them in thought to distant climes”, and further imagines himself “in some island of the southern sea”, maintaining his isolated presence. Finally, the hermit, who lived as an isolated figure in a cavern in Beachy Head’s cliff, could tell “when tempests were approaching” (696). His memorial is “Chisel’d within the rock” and he becomes a fragment, or part of Beachy Head.

Conclusion

The use of fragmentation in Smith’s Beachy Head- in the fragmented structure, memories, and impermanence of human and non-human entities- arguably gives rise to a stronger understanding of the natural environment that the poem’s narrator not only senses, but imagines in retrospect. In this sense, the fragmented natural landscape interacts with

13 and informs the poet’s imagination, and Beachy Head, if studied in this light, can reveal a deeper understanding of the interplay between natural environments and human imagination. If we fail to see this interplay, which reveals itself in the mimesis-relationship between Beachy Head and Beachy Head, I argue that we would harmfully achieve what

Raymond Williams fears as an “alienation of ourselves” (84). In other words, the fragmentation of Beachy Head’s natural environment, and the fragmentation within the poem as well, reveal the “multiplicity of things, and of living processes” (Williams 68) and show that both the natural environment and human imagination function in tandem. This powerful notion found in the interplay between Beachy Head and Beachy Head (that the natural environment having a strong impact on human consciousness) can be extremely empowering when deciding to take action to protect and nurture the natural environment we find ourselves in. The result would be a protected and nurtured human imagination, and the possibilities of such an imagination are limitless.

Works Cited

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Anderson, John M. “‘Beachy Head”: The Romantic Fragment Poem as Mosaic.” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 4, Forging Connection: Women’s Poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism, 2000, pp. 547-574.

Crickenberger, Heather Marcelle. “Wandering Around in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head.’” Blogspot.com, http://wanderinginbeachyhead.blogspot.com. Date of access: April 15, 2019.

Goodman, Kevis. “Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Ground of the Present.” ELH, Vol. 81, No. 3, 2014, pp. 983-1006.

Lokke, Kari. “The Figure of the Hermit in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head.” Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, edited by Jacqueline Labbe, Routledge, 2016, pp.45- 56.

Mandelbrot, Benoît B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1983.

Smith, Charlotte. “Beachy Head.” Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, edited by Claire Knowles and Ingrid Horrocks, Broadview Press, 2017. Pp.159-190.

Smith, Charlotte. “Elegiac Sonnets.” Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, edited by Claire Knowles and Ingrid Horrocks, Broadview Press, 2017. Pp.57-122.

Porter, Dahlia. “From Nosegay to Specimen Cabinet: Charlotte Smith and the Labour of Collecting.” Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, edited by Jacqueline Labbe, Routledge, 2016, pp. 29-44.

Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso Editions, 1980.

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