Fitting the battle of life

Last time I promised some comments on the first poem in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets.

It is the first sonnet that is as good a place as any to begin; what it says is important in a sequence like Elegiac Sonnets, as it sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Smith is evidently acutely aware of this, as Sonnet 1 contains many hints about her concerns as they appear in many other sonnets. The very first line, for instance, introduces the Muse who appears directly in eight further sonnets, and indirectly in others, introducing the focus in many sonnets on poetry as an art, and this same line mentions “my earliest hours”, already emphasising what will be the highly personal nature of the sonnets. Interesting to note also is the final line, which Smith annotates as reference to “Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” 366th line.” However, the line reads (as she also notes) “He best can paint them [woes] who shall feel them most.” Smith’s paraphrase, “If those paint sorrow best – who feel it most!” changes the mascline pronoun to a gender non-specific one; giving the original quotation emphasises this difference, making her point stronger: that the female poet is here to stay. We also find nature and landscape making their first appearance of many in the collection, linked as a metaphor for melancholy; Smith’s melancholy is a “rugged path”, and “ills” appears in some editions as “hills”, and her “fantastic garlands” are made of “wild flowers”, such as grow off the beaten track.

The portrayal of the Muse in this first sonnet is a complex one; her “favours” are at once “dear” in the sense that they are valued highly, but also in the negative sense of expense: “how dear the Muse’s favours cost”, she says, if poets must feel melancholy more keenly than others. Indeed Smith plainly suggests that being a poet does heighten the emotional senses, “Points every pang, and deepens every sigh” that she feels. This is not a side that most would see, for the Muse’s is a “delusive art”, with outward shows of “fantastic garlands” that hide the “thorn” that festers “in the heart”. This “thorn” is not just in the heart; that it is “Reserve[d]…to fester” suggests that the Muse is deliberately targetting the poet, keeping the feelings that accompany her misfortunes in place to rot, making the situation worse. It is not that the Muse is creating the situations themselves; she hasn’t placed the poet on the “rugged path”, merely “Smiled on” it and “bids soft Pity’s melting eye / Stream o’er the ills she knows not to remove”; the Muse is asking Pity to produce tears, rather than doing anything to solve the situation. All of this renders quite ironic the Muse’s opening epithet, “partial”, suggesting some kind of benevolent force, as opposed the the picture that comes out by the end – merely reinforcing the “delusive” nature of her art, of course. We might question this portrayal, however, having read Smith’s comments in the ‘Preface’ of the first and second editions, wherein she tells the reader:

Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought.

Well, which is it, then? Is the Muse’s blessing really a curse, or does writing poetry soothe Smith’s woes? There are nearly a hundred sonnets in the collection, and I’m sure the answer’s in there somewhere.

So said someone of Charlotte Smith, on whose Elegiac Sonnets you no doubt are aware I am writing an essay at the moment. This is the first sonnet in the collection, and really rather confirms this epithet.

THE partial Muse has from my earliest hours
Smil’d on the rugged path I’m doom’d to tread,
And still with sportive hand has snatch’d wild flowers,
To weave fantastic garlands for my head:
But far, far happier is the lot of those                                     5
Who never learn’d her dear delusive art;
Which, while it decks the head with many a rose,
Reserves the thorn to fester in the heart.
For still she bids soft Pity’s melting eye
Stream o’er the ills she knows not to remove,                     10
Points every pang, and deepens every sigh
Of mourning Friendship, or unhappy Love.
Ah! then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost,
If those paint sorrow best–who feel it most!

I shall post some thoughts on this sonnet tomorrow.

This is more of a discursive, get-my-thoughts-down-quickly post. Apologies to anyone who isn’t at all interested in this.

This mainly comes from my recent work on (you guessed it) Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. Now, this is a collection of some hundred-odd poems, and to be quite frank, I’m not going to write an essay that includes all of them. I don’t even want to have to read them all, to find out which ones are easy. So, I sat down with the book and a bit of paper, and noted down which ones dealth with, for instance, the art of poetry (so looking for reference to the Muse, to poetry, other poets, etc).

Without paying for a research assistant, I don’t want to do this myself. It’s a tedious task that takes up time that could be spent doing other things, like actually reading and responding to the poems themselves. Oh, and then of course I need to find poems by other authors, or other poems by the same author in different books, that treat the same subject. Admittedly, often there will be introductions that give you some kind of overview of a writer’s context, but what if you’re not reading an edition aimed at students? An older edition, perhaps, or a website?

What we need - and by ‘we’ I mean lazy literature students like myself, and by ‘need’ I mean ‘could do with to let us be even lazier’ - is some kind of metadatabase of poetry. Google are already digitizing books and making them searchable, but I’d like to see this go further. Why show you the whole book, when you need only the one chapter on the history of the sonnet for your essay? For poetry, it should suggest other poems that are similar - sorted by importance. Poems by the same author on the same subject would be ranked highest, and then other authors, those closest chronologically ranked highest. Some kind of weighting could be factored in to show a known connection - we know Wordsworth read Smith, so perhaps he should rank higher than Shelley, for instance.

The only problem is, such a database would require a vast amount of work. All books currently digitized would need cutting up into individual poems, chapters - perhaps so far as paragraphs (which would return Wordsworth’s ‘There are in our existence spots of time’ verse-paragraph out of Book XI of the Prelude). And then tagging: form, style, period, author, subject (this would be a little subjective). I don’t know how it would work. I’d just like it to! It would also help to make concordances and other geeky English things like that.

Maybe there is something already quite like this, maybe not. Perhaps I should spend my summer scanning out-of-copyright books and making my own database. But maybe I shall just wait for Google Books to come out of beta.

I was quite happily making notes on Charlotte Smith’s sonnets the other day, sitting in my room with just that book. Thinking I should probably add to my essay some kind of critical response to her work, I searched the library catalogue for books that might be of value, as is only normal. The ones I ended up getting out were one on ‘Romanticism, lyricism and history’, and one on the history of the sonnet. first one was pretty good, having a chapted devoted to Smith with a lengthy discussion of her Elegiac Sonnets, the subject of my essay. It did, however, reference a couple of other works - Coleridge’s Introduction to the Sonnets (1796) and Leigh Hunt’s The Book of the Sonnet (1867). Now, the quotations from these works seemed very good, and were apparently part of longer discussions about sonnets (unsurprisingly, given their titles). Writing an essay on a collection of sonnets as I am, I thought it might be prudent to read these quotations in their original context. Could I find them in UCL’s library? No.

Now this makes my life a little easier - less work to do, I suppose. But it really got me thinking about the sonnet, and Charlotte Smith’s place in the sonnet’s history. Why my library doesn’t have the complete works of STC I don’t know, but that’s beside the point. It also makes my life easier because I don’t get distracted by an exploration of a secondary source, but then that’s half the fun of English - intertextuality, which is a big pompous word describing the connections between texts, the conversation that goes on in between the pages of books in a library.

If intertextuality were a real conversation between books, I wouldn’t be able to work in a library. The noise would be deafening. It’s bad enough trying to keep myself focused on the one author when there are so many others writing about her, being influenced by her, but if that were a tangible noise in the library…imagine listening to the noise inside a conch shell, multiplied tens of times. It’s still not as loud as the talking between books.

Sometimes the conversation is really gripping, if you manage to catch a good one, like the one between Coleridge, Hunt and Charlotte Smith. The problem was, I had one whole side of the conversation and snatches of the other side, which were being reported in a completely different conversation altogether. This isn’t helpful. I could understand the gist of what Coleridge and Hunt were saying, but only according to the book I was reading. The next sentence after ‘Charlotte Smith is an alright poet’ could have been ‘But her sonnets are rubbish’. I need the other half of the conversation.

At other times the conversation between books is uninteresting. I’m sure there are people who would like to know what Smith has to say about Goethe’s Werter, but I’m not one of them. I’m more interested in her own melancholy (or at least, what is implicitly presented as her own), not her response to someone else’s presentation of melancholy, through no fault of Goethe’s. These sonnets (’Supposed to be written by Werter’) only count for 5 or so of the roughly 100 sonnets overall, so it’s no great loss. They don’t come particularly near the beginning or end to make them remarkable, so I am assuming it’s safe for me to gloss over them in my essay.

Of course the conversation you follow may well lead you on to far different pages than you begin. For instance, Coleridge’s discussion of the sonnet touches on Smith and also another poet. Why not go from Smith to Coleridge, and from Coleridge to this other poet, this other poet to another? It would be a little like literary leap-frogging, writer to writer. The web of connections would be ridiculous, though I am sure I’ve seen a website that does attempt something like that (I’ll find it tomorrow).

My point is, English can be a very discursive subject, if you let it run away with you. Sometimes it takes a little discipline (ignoring Goethe) or just blind luck (not finding Coleridge’s essay) to stay focused.

So I decide to write an essay on Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets ( first edition pub. 1786), which is a wonderful sonnet sequence I thoroughly recommend a read of. There are some really interesting ideas in there, and she had an influence on later Romantics including Wordsworth (who read the fifth edition while in his final year at Cambridge, and visited her on his way to France).

However, an essay on her poems isn’t just an essay on those poems. Oh no. Imagine my horror at the prospect of writing an essay that could include (in a vague order of importance):

• a discussion of her (100+, depending on how I’m counting) poems,
• a discussion of her poems in relation to other elegies and sonnet sequences (notably Petrarch, as she takes a lot from him)
• a discussion of her influence on later Romantics treating the same subject (think melancholy, think nightingales)
• an exploration of the feminist elements to her work (so think also some Mary Wollstonecraft).
• a look at Goethe, for the five sonnets ‘Supposed to be written by Werter’ (this isn’t going to happen as the library’s copies of the Sorrows of Werter are all in stores, and reference-only. I’m not going to read the whole thing sitting in the library under armed guard!).

All this in 3-4,000 words, constituting 1/160th of my overall degree (16 tutorial essays over 2 years is one module out of ten). Great. Time to knuckle down!