5 - Mourning Complete?: Beachy Head

Summary

Beachy Head is the end of a journey. It is one of a collection of posthumously published poems by Smith and composition began around 1803, although her correspondence suggests that it underwent revision until just before her death in 1806. The eponymous landmark signals the end of the literal journey taken by travellers between France and England, a journey that Smith figuratively made throughout her writing career. The poem is arguably the least autobiographical of any of her work. There is a brief reference to her ‘guiltless exile’ (BH, l.288) from ‘these upland solitudes’ (BH, l.283), the author's move from Sussex to London, but the poem does not have the sustained, albeit mediated, self-referentiality of the Sonnets or The Emigrants. There are echoes of the historical voice of Helen Maria Williams, that as we will see moves between the grand narrative voice of historians like Robertson and the moral, arbitrating voice of female historians like Macauley. As Theresa Kelley has persuasively argued in her reading of Beachy Head, Smith grafts together two historical models: the first a classical, linear model, focusing on ‘politics and statecraft’ (reminiscent of the histories of Gibbon, Robertson and Hume); the second focusing on ‘personal experience, eyewitness accounts, and even spectatorial sympathy [that] disrupted the protocols of classical historiography’. She welds together the ‘prospect’ view of the male historian and what Marx would call ‘history from below’. She does not do so seamlessly, however, and the gaps between the narrative voices, the clash of historicist discourses, her tendency to engage with and then abandon different kinds of knowledge, are the most striking and perplexing aspects of the poem.

Although there is less of ‘Smith the author’ in this poem than in her earlier work, the poem's location, on Beachy Head, obviously summons up the landscape of the author's childhood on which she dwells in such a melancholy fashion throughout the Elegiac Sonnets. Here, Beachy Head and the Sussex landscape stand for more than the author's history, however. The history embedded beneath the ‘stupendous summit’ of this ‘rock sublime’ is biblical, global, national, domestic and minutely local.

HISTORICAL BREAKDOWN

The attempt to hold all these histories together breaks down in a series of formal and thematic splits and dissonances throughout the poem.