Poem of the Day: ‘I Can in Groups These Mimic Flowers Compose’

The novelist and poet Charlotte Turner Smith (1749–1806) married at 15, under duress, largely to ease her father’s straitened financial circumstances. In the course of a frequently turbulent marriage, she bore 12 children, six of whom lived to survive her. In 1783, on her husband’s being remanded to debtor’s prison, Smith took up residence with him in his incarceration and there produced the first of her 10 novels. Although prolific as a prose writer, she hoped that her literary reputation would rest on her Elegiac Sonnets. This 91st of those sonnets, adhering to the Shakespearan ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme, resists the impulse of the ekphrastic poem to dwell on a work of art. Instead, the sonnet highlights the triviality and futility of artistic endeavor in the face of human loss.