"Beachy Head": The Romantic Fragment Poem As Mosaic

Abstract

T wo-thirds of the way through her triumphal late poem Beachy Head, Charlotte Smith introduces a stranger-a visionary poet whose interpolated lyrics will make up about half of the remaining lines of the poem. This figure clearly belongs to that class of quasi-autobiographical figures that populate so much of Romantic and pre-Romantic poetry; he recalls Thomas Gray's Bard and foreshadows Shelley's Alastor or Hemans's Properzia Rossi. Smiths poet makes his home where hard by / In rude disorder fallen, and hid with brushwood / Lay fragments gray of towers and buttresses. Among the Smith adds, often would [this visionary stranger] muse (lines 507-10). Beachy Head is itself a majestic fragment, like Shelley's The Triumph of Life left enticingly unfinished. But the introduction of this stranger, dwelling by choice among the ruins, suggests that the fragmentary form of this poem is not entirely an accident-that Smith was attracted to the idea of constructing a ruin, of using fragments expressively. Indeed, when Smith revised her epic The Emigrants (1793) for republication, she selected out of it only a couple of vignettes that appeared, not otherwise altered, under the title Fragment Descriptive of the Miseries of War.' The striking fragments she selected are among the most memorable lines from this poem, and the emotional impact of the poetry is perhaps greater in this more abbreviated form-though removed from the larger context of the epic, the political and social importance of her vignettes becomes muted.2 Understandably, Stuart Curran does not include the Fragment in his new edition of Smith's poetry, but