Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening
Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening
by Charlotte Smith (1749 – 1806)
Date of poem: 1798-1800
Charlotte Smith, born Turner (born May 4, 1749, London, England and died Oct. 28, 1806, Tilford, Surrey, England), English novelist and poet, highly praised by the novelist Sir Walter Scott. Her poetic attitude toward nature was reminiscent of William Cowper’s in celebrating the “ordinary” pleasures of the English countryside. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Smith
Biographical Detail:
« Charlotte Smith wrote Elegiac Sonnets in 1783 while she was in debtor’s prison with her husband and children. William Wordsworth identified her as an important influence on the Romantic movement. She published several longer works that celebrated the individual while deploring social injustice and the British class system. » https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charlotte-smith
The Romantic Movement:
The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience.
The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was thecriterion by which it was to be judged.
The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering thatAlexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being.Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,” but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.”
Form : A sonnet
From the Italian sonetto, which means “a little sound or song," the sonnet is a popular classical form that has compelled poets for centuries. Traditionally, the sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, which employ one of several rhyme schemes and adhere to a tightly structured thematic organization. Two sonnet forms provide the models from which all other sonnets are formed: the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean.
Rhyming Structure:
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
Note: The Petrarchan division between octave and sestet
The first 8 lines: looking down and around at the sea, and an anchored boat.
The last 6 lines: looking towards the shore and ending with a two-line philosophical tone/warning.
Poetic Techniques (points to look for and consider):
Tone/Attitude: Thoughtful, reflecting, descriptive.
Contrasts in diction:
Negative connotations in word choices like: brood, dark, mute. mislead, dubious etc.
Positive connotations in word choices like settles, relieved, surf, fairy-fires, light, lightly etc.
Contrasts in image :
- • the mute vapours versus the noise of life at sea
- • the black shadow of the night and the brooding vapours, and the ship lights
- • the very concrete images of shores, oceans, seamen and land
- • the very fanciful images of fairy fires and the symbolic references to pilgrims, reason and life's long darkling way.
Personification :
Note, the huge vapours are « brooding. »... which is a very human attribute (to brood: think deeply about something that makes one unhappy, angry, or worried)
Also, the « night on the ocean » lies « dark and mute (mute can be human, insofar as one refrains from speech or cannot speak ; mute can also mean characterized by an absence of sound; quiet.)
Alliteration :
repercussive roar = has an onomatopoeic effect (read aloud and you'll see you can hear the surf rising up in a rush of noise)
rugged foot of rocks remote: again, read aloud. Sounds very dramatic – the reader has to open his mouth wide and the assonance in rocks and remote feels quite airy.
Lucid line and light surf on the level sand (and later, life's long)– the lelele sounds soothing and straight, like the line itself.
Fairy fires = the alliteration couples these words together, making it sound normal fairies have fires!). The « fefe » sounds mysterious and whispery !
Simile :
The « ship-lights » shine « like wandering fairy fires ». Question : do « fairy fires » wander ? Wilo-the-wisps do, think of the Disney film Brave.
A will-o'-the-wisp, will-o'-wisp or ignis fatuus (Medieval Latin for "foolish fire") is an atmospheric ghost light seen by travellers at night, especially over bogs, swamps or marshes. It resembles a flickering lamp and is said to recede if approached, drawing travellers from the safe paths.
Understanding the symbolism of the closing lines (the light of the boats is like the « light » of reason):
In this definition, the fairy fires save the travelers but in the poem they « mislead the Pilgrim. »
So, if « Reason » misleads the Pilgrim, with his « dubious ray, » does that mean we should follow our hearts not our heads, our imagination rather than our logic.
If so, this poem proves its own point... as the description – so typical to poems of the Romantic literary period – is far more interested by the imaginative and mysterious beauty of the scene and by the feeling it evokes than by the reason and the logic of the scene.
Given the poem is written in such a stylised, intelligent manner – and is so respectful of literary expectations – the reader is lulled into accepting the speaker's theory... wouldn't you agree?
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