Charlotte Smith (1749–1806), whose “I Can in Groups These Mimic Flowers Compose” appeared as Poem of the Day in April 2022, is credited with the revival of the sonnet in England. Admittedly, since the form’s importation into English in the 16th century, it’s hard to find any long stretch in the English poetic tradition where the sonnet is notable for its absence.

Still, the great poets of the early eighteenth century — Swift, Dryden, Johnson, Alexander Pope — did tend to run on, as the Sun’s poetry editors have noted before. The poetic gestures of the Augustan era were large ones. The sonnet, that era’s poets seem to have felt, was far too economical a form to contain the poems they wanted to write. So perhaps it is fitting to note that the return of the sonnet was one of many emblematic swings of the pendulum.

It’s easy to blip over a poet such as Smith in the same way that it’s easy to lose a Victorian novelist such as Elizabeth Gaskill in a field that included Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and George Eliot. While her 1784 “Elegiac Sonnets” might constitute a landmark in the return of the sonnet to prominence in English poetry, it’s a landmark eclipsed by the Romantics.

Coming in a wave at the turn into the nineteenth century, armed with a conscious desire to reform the rhetorical artifices of the Augustans, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their successors carried the sonnet back in on their general tide, all but obliterating the footprints of a relatively minor figure such as Charlotte Smith. 

Still, today’s poem, with its ludicrously long title, reminds us again that her work is worth knowing. Though that title might prime us to expect a comic poem, and though we might be tempted to roll our eyes at the decidedly un-arch earnestness that follows instead, this Shakespearean sonnet evinces a sympathetic engagement with its difficult subject: at least with the idea of the lunatic on the headland, if not with the lunatic himself.

If the poem’s speaker declines to walk on the headland — and we don’t know that she doesn’t walk there, but we also don’t know that she does — what she does is to lay bare something about herself. A lone woman, walking along a cliff above the sea, she might have been physically vulnerable. Instead, the sonnet renders her emotionally vulnerable. In her envy of the lunatic, as she imagines him, unable to comprehend “the depth or the duration” of his unhappiness, she confesses a bottomless unhappiness of her own. 

Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic
by Charlotte Smith

Is there a solitary wretch who hies
  To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
  Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
  Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies
  Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
  I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
  From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.