9. Corresponding Poems

Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century

CHAPTER NINE

Corresponding Poems

Seward rejected Charlotte Smith’s model of a chain, in which she rings changes on a single mood, in favor of what she considered Milton’s precedent, sonnets written on particular occasions. In Smith’s cycle, her personal state of being gives rise to her verse; any and all occasions inspire variations on her theme. One might speculate that Smith’s drive to explore her personal ontology took precedence over formal considerations, such as adherence to a stricter rhyme scheme. For Seward, as we have seen, formal considerations were paramount and perhaps influenced her preference to write about particular occasions, setting her personal experiences in social and historical contexts. Seward’s correspondence apparently inspired many of her occasional sonnets. In this chapter, I explore the way Seward shaped epistolary exchanges into sonnets reflecting not only her inner feelings but also the moral and critical reflections occasioned by the events chronicled in her letters. One example is sonnet 59, “To the Right Honourable Lady Marianne Carnegie, Passing Her Winters at Ethic House on the Coast of Scotland, with Her Father, Lord Northesk, Who Retired Thither after the Death of his Excellent Countess, Written February 1787” (Original Sonnets 61). Years before, Seward had volunteered to provide blood to Lady Marianne’s mother so that Dr. Darwin could perform a transfusion, but luckily, Lady Northesk recovered without needing the transfusion. Seward followed her life with understandable interest until learning from Lady Marianne that the former patient had died. In a letter dated March 21, 1785, Seward replied, inquiring about the manner of her mother’s death. Commenting on Lady Marianne’s intention to remain secluded with her father throughout the harsh Scottish winter, she assured the young woman that her letter “convinces me that [you have] a mind whose tastes, pursuits, and sensibilities, preclude the irksome lassitude with which retirement is apt to inspire people at [your] sprightly time of life. Ah! Dearest Madam, may the consciousness of cheering the declining years of a beloved father gild the silent hours, when the rocks frown around you in solemn sternness, and the winds of winter are howling over the ocean!” (Letters 1:32).

If Seward’s dates are to be trusted, she must have gone back two years later to her copy of this letter, perhaps struck by its image of a young woman choosing self-exile on the gloomy Scottish coast with her widowed father. Since by 1785 Seward herself was supervising the care of an aging father, Lady Marianne’s situation must have touched her as comparable but as having more pathos owing to her correspondent’s youth. The first nine lines of the resulting sonnet recapitulate her encouraging observation:

Lady, each soft effusion of thy mind,
Flowing thro’ thy free pen, shows thee endu’d
With taste so just for all of wise, and good,
As bids me hope thy spirit does not find,

Young as thou art, with solitude combin’d
That wish of change, that irksome lassitude,
Which often, thro’ unvaried days, obtrude
On Youth’s rash bosom, dangerously inclin’d

To pant for more than peace.—Rich volumes yield
Their soul-endowing wealth.—Beyond e’en these
Shall consciousness of filial duty gild

The gloomy hours, when Winter’s turbid Seas
Roar round the rocks; when the dark Tempest lours,
And mourn the Winds round Ethic’s lonely towers.

Seward’s sonnet changes her letter’s confident assertion that Lady Marianne’s epistolary style alone confirms her superior “tastes, pursuits, and sensibilities.” Here, the young woman’s expressions are characterized as “effusions,” her thoughts flowing unimpeded and undisguised through her pen in the enthusiastic manner typical of sensibility. The very word seems to guarantee Lady Marianne’s “taste … for all of wise, and good,” since she has so artlessly confided in her mother’s friend. After lifting the phrase “irksome lassitude” directly from her letter, Seward dramatizes the danger lurking in such an isolated situation. Tediousness is apt to inspire “Youth’s rash bosom … / To pant for more than peace.” In the letter, Seward says merely that Lady Marianne’s style guarantees her capacity to surmount the irksomeness of retirement. In the sonnet, however, Lady Marianne’s style has become a series of effusions, suggesting a sensibility that might tend in its enthusiasm toward rashness. One thinks of the overly sensible heroes and heroines Ann Jessie Van Sant has characterized as opportunities for stirring sensations in their readers (117). The image of her panting bosom, as she gasps “for more than peace,” depicts a physical response to her surroundings typical in descriptions of sensibility as a double-edged sword. Lady Marianne is frank, expressive, and eager, but those very qualities make her vulnerable to dangerous inclinations. Seward does not specify precisely what change an isolated young woman might wish or even pant for, but the implication points toward emotional needs that might spill forth, like the effusions from her free pen, unless Lady Marianne disciplines herself.

Seward turns toward her sestet by recommending books for their “soul-endowing” ability. But the books are isolated at the poem’s center, possibly like the young woman herself in her father’s library. The only true solution is for Lady Marianne to channel her strong feelings toward her widowed father, the purpose of her wintry sojourn on the bleak coast. Only “consciousness of filial duty” will “gild / The gloomy hours, when Winter’s turbid seas / Roar round the rocks.” The sonnet closes with one of Seward’s infrequent pairs of rhymed lines, but the lines are neither an epigram nor a couplet, however. Instead, they contain the sonnet’s only striking image, that of the winter storm lashing the Scottish coast. We recognize that the storm represents the external source of Lady Marianne’s temptation: it enforces the tedium of “unvaried days” spent in isolation. But the storm also represents Lady Marianne’s potentially tempestuous emotions, battering the solitary young woman’s peace of mind. Only clinging to her purpose, recollecting the importance of “filial duty,” will shed a ray of light on the dark sea, or sustain her commitment. Seward has taken the final image in the passage quoted from her letter, a benediction as Lady Marianne undertakes her lonely sojourn in Scotland, and polished it into a metaphor for the emotional dangers latent in seclusion.

Seward’s vocabulary of sensibility renders her sonnet somewhat opaque today. She capitalized on the resemblance between Lady Marianne’s situation and those of heroes and heroines in many fictional plots, including her own Louisa. As Susan Staves reminds us, sentimental novels were populated with heroes and heroines forever sacrificing personal happiness to accommodate their parents, especially their fathers (Literary History 379). Such plots now hold little appeal. But we can still admire the skill with which Seward turned her friendly letter into a dramatic, if encouraging, admonition. As in sonnet 16, Seward floats her pauses for fluidity yet contracts many words to achieve complementary nervousness. “Effusion,” centered in the first line, introduces the long “u” sound that continues through four rhymed words in the octet, leading inexorably to “Youth’s rash bosom,” the off-rhyme of “effusion” and “bosom” reinforcing the sonnet’s focus on late adolescent passions. “Duty” not only echoes the long “u” but stands, in the sestet, as the antidote to unbridled effusion tested by “gloomy hours.” The dominant “u” thus knits the sonnet together while emphasizing sense as well as sound. Seward, finally, borrows her letter’s image of the good conscience gilding the “silent hours, when the rocks frown around you.” She no doubt recognized the contradiction implied by her final evocation of howling winter winds. In the sonnet, conscious duty gilds “the gloomy hours,” shining light on Lady Marianne’s dark vigil, while the winds mourn rather than howl, as if in concert with the bereaved father and child.

Many of Seward’s sonnets can be similarly identified as artful versions of ideas first expressed in her letters. It seems barely credible that Seward would have revised early letters to resemble the sonnets. Another example is sonnet 53, “Written in the Spring 1785 on the Death of the Poet Laureat” (Original Sonnets 55). In a letter dated May 27, 1785, Seward remarked to Court Dewes, “So we have lost the poet laureate. I always thought Mr. Whitehead’s abilities too considerable for that rhyming drudgery; and now a yet greater bard undertakes the labouring oar of the boat which is to row our Monarch over one of the Pierian rivers” (Letters 1:69). In the sonnet, Seward’s rather sardonic observation becomes a meditation on the paradox of Thomas Warton’s appointment. That Warton, who had achieved fame not only as a poet but as a scholar noted for perspicuous criticism (Seward had recently praised his edition of Milton’s occasional poems), would agree to produce annual panegyrics for the royal family seemed tragic. Her witty reference to rowing the monarch over the Pierian river is replaced with the image of a galley slave consuming his vitality and probably compromising his integrity:

The knell of Whitehead tolls!—his cares are past,
The hapless tribute of his purchas’d lays,
His servile, his Egyptian tasks of praise!—
If not sublime his strains, Fame justly plac’d

Their pow’r above their work.—Now, with wide gaze

Of much indignant wonder, she surveys
To the life-labouring oar assiduous haste
A glowing bard, by every Muse embrac’d.

O, Warton! Chosen Priest of Phoebus’ choir!
Shall thy rapt song be venal? (ll. 1–10)

Seward’s reference to the laureate’s “Egyptian tasks” implies a metaphoric version of the life-consuming labor exacted of hapless ancient slaves. It also recalls the lives expended in building the pyramids, those enduring tributes to now-forgotten rulers. Will Warton’s laureate productions resemble those tombs, grandiose monuments built at the cost of human lives? Or, in the present case, at the cost of Warton’s principles? “What needs for this the golden-fringed Lyre,” demands Seward. In this sonnet, the laureateship seems a waste of honor as well as of poetic talent. Seward even omits the reference to the Heliconian spring, source of inspiration. The laureateship represents Warton’s demotion from “Priest of Phoebus’ choir,” respected critic and editor, to slave of flawed human regents.

I have deliberately chosen three sonnets usually overlooked in critical discussion to show how Seward mined her letters for inspiration and how artfully these poems demonstrate her sonnet principles. Sonnet 57, “Written the Night Preceding the Funeral of Mrs. Charles Buckridge” (Original Sonnets 59), was prompted by the irony of a young acquaintance “in the first year of her marriage, and apparently in the most florid health” dying after a brief illness (Letters 1:247). Although Seward claimed to have written the sonnet before the letter to Sophia Weston dated January 15, 1787, which was written after the burial had taken place, it is more likely that she pared down the epistolary description. She described setting out to visit a friend on a cold, starlit night and passing the Buckridge home.

I observed the chamber of the deceased, where both the shutters were open, to be extremely light, and the shadows of several people, walking about the room, were visible on the ceiling. As I stood contemplating the awful scene, I heard the knocking of hammers, that were sodering [sic] up the coffin. The lines from Shakespeare’s description of the martial field, the night before the battle of Agincourt, rushed upon my recollection:

“While, from the tents,

The armourers, accomplishing the knights,

With busy hammers closing rivets up,

Gave dreadful note of preparation.” (Letters 1:249)

In the sonnet, Seward recapitulates her description of the cold winter evening and particularly of witnessing

in the late bridal chamber, the clear ray

Of numerous lights; while o’er the ceiling stray

Shadows of those who frequent pass beneath

Round the PALE DEAD.—What sounds my senses grieve!

For now the busy hammer’s stroke appals,
That, “in dread note of preparation” falls,
Closing the sable lid!—With sighs I hear

These solemn warnings from the House of Woes;
Pondering how late, for young NERINA, there,
Joyous, the love-illumin’d Morn arose. (ll. 5–14)

Seward retained the most striking image from her letter, the shadows of attendants hammering shut the coffin. In the letter, the noise recalls a passage in Henry V in which the same sound denotes final preparations before a dreaded battle. In the sonnet, Seward wisely omitted the Agincourt context, paring her quotation, which now refers only to the sound of ominous, irrevocable preparations. Seward incorporated the bridal imagery found elsewhere in the letter, which now creates a tragic sense of irony in her sonnet. The letter’s anecdote, for example, refers only to “the chamber of the deceased”; in the sonnet, she observes “the late bridal chamber.” The bright lights shining the night before Nerina’s funeral, assisting those who shut her coffin, contrast poignantly with the final line’s evocation of her awakening in the same room as a bride, when “joyous, the Love-illumin’d Morn arose.” Likewise, the “Shadows” straying about the chamber are those of living undertakers, while their object, “the PALE DEAD,” will rise no more until the end of time. While it is conceivable that Seward hurried home after her visit and composed this sonnet, it is likelier that she first wrote her epistolary description to Weston, then tightened and revised her recollection into this fine sonnet, part of the century’s great tradition of memento mori verse.

A different example comes from another letter to Weston dated September 3, 1789. A year before, “the brilliant Sophia” had “commenced Babylonian” (Letters 2:108), moving to London. Ensuing letters in which Sophia shared literary gossip and news of the latest theatrical productions enticed Seward to visit. Seward repeatedly declined the invitations Sophia extended, pleading her need to attend her ailing father. Thanking Weston after Sophia’s most recent invitation, she explained that “I am fixed, by my apprehensions, here, like the needle to its magnet; holding constant, though trembling residence” (Letters 2:321). Instead of paring an epistolary description, as in “Written the Night Preceding the Funeral of Mrs. Charles Buckridge,” Seward retained only one phrase as the culmination of sonnet 78 (Original Sonnets 80). The letter is gracious but emphasizes only her filial duty. The sonnet is much more explicit about the allure of both Sophia and London:

Sophia tempts me to her social walls,
That ’mid the vast Metropolis arise,
Where Splendor dazzles, and each Pleasure vies
In soft allurement; and each Science calls

To philosophic Domes, harmonious Halls,
And storied Galleries. With duteous sighs,
Filial and kind, and with averted eyes,
I meet the gay temptation, as it falls

From a seducing pen.—Here—here I stay,
Fix’d by Affection’s power; nor entertain
One latent wish, that might persuade to stray

From my ag’d Nurseling, in his life’s dim wane;
But, like the needle, by the magnet’s sway,

My constant, trembling residence maintain.

As in Seward’s other sonnets, we find the flowing sentences and floating pauses contrasting with elided vowels, as well as personified abstractions functioning as shorthand references to London’s many cultural attractions. Sophia appears a kind of siren; like London, which offers “soft allurement,” Sophia tempts with “seducing pen.” While Seward merely thanked Weston before declining her invitation, the sonnet describes the city as a powerful “temptation,” beckoning the poet come and participate in all the intellectual, aural, and visual stimulation characteristic of a “vast Metropolis.”

Seward uses the traditional octet-sestet structure to particular advantage in sonnet 78. The octet describes a scene of considerable appeal to the homebound poet, the falling and rising register of the initial “-alls”/“ise” rhyme scheme duplicating the tug-of-war within the writer’s mind as she contemplates Sophia’s invitation. In the sixth line, however, Seward begins her turn of thought, as she turns her eyes from London and her heart from persuasion. Sophia has become less a hostess than a satanic figure, proffering “gay temptation” through her “seducing pen.” The potential evil of desertion is emphasized by the phrase’s position at the beginning of the eighth line, followed by Seward’s adamant repetition of her commitment to stay “here—here.” Despite all provocations, she will remain “fix’d” by her “ag’d Nurseling,” resisting even a “latent wish” to depart. Her final lines almost repeat her letter’s comparison of herself to the needle of a compass, now artfully opposing Sophia and London and the attractions of the octet to a greater attraction, her father and the duties entailed by “Affection’s power.” One wonders whether Weston read the sonnet and resented its implied equation of her gracious invitations with Satan’s seduction of Eve. Perhaps Seward risked casting her sonnet in this way because, as she often complained to Weston, Weston had little discernment in poetry. Regardless, Seward saw the potential of her epistolary refusal for a beautifully crafted sonnet that incidentally casts herself, as she did for her correspondent in “To the Right Honourable Lady Marianne Carnegie,” as the era’s favorite sentimental heroine, the self-denying daughter. As Teresa Barnard has observed, Seward in fact traveled and participated in social engagements as often as she liked throughout her father’s decline, leaving him in the care of trusted servants (Anna Seward 37). Seward therefore engages in artful self-representation, in sonnet 78, to a greater degree than readers at this date might suspect.

Seward believed herself to be emulating Milton by writing occasional sonnets instead of a chain. Thomas Warton’s edition, which she praised even as she deplored his acceptance of the poet laureateship, contained only twenty-three sonnets, no more than two on any single topic or to a single addressee. Seward, however, wrote several clusters of poems, some of which might constitute a chain had she not deliberately scattered them so that they would not appear in sequence. Two sonnets, sonnet 67, “On Doctor Johnson’s Unjust Criticisms in His LIVES OF THE POETS,” and sonnet 68, “On the Posthumous Fame of Doctor Johnson” (Original Sonnets 69, 70), arose from Seward’s controversial efforts to discourage idolatry of “the Great Cham” after his death in 1784. Seward’s conviction that Johnson behaved invidiously toward other living authors led her to engage in what was practically a one-woman offensive against his near canonization. For her pains, she has been described as naive, misguided, spiteful, and obsessive, to name just a few of the disparaging epithets leveled at her, from her lifetime until today.¹ Seward’s campaign to enforce public awareness of Johnson’s flaws was indeed quixotic. With hindsight, we recognize that contemporary Britons were engaged in building their pantheon. Having enshrined Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, they welcomed the opportunity to honor a great scholar and critic. The national ethos was not favorable to Seward’s efforts. On the other hand, Seward’s persistence was neither obsessive nor unfair from certain perspectives. For example, despite his patronage of some women writers, Johnson omitted women from his Lives of the Poets and excoriated any woman who transgressed the bounds of strict propriety. His measured responses to contemporary writers, which seem judicious to us, probably seemed niggardly to Seward. She believed that the doctor’s critical praise would have turned the balance in favor of an author and materially increased his or her prospects. As Thomas F. Bonnell has recently argued, Johnson had been engaged to write biographies for The Works of the English Poets precisely because of his fame and influence (135–40). Her own positive responses to certain writers, moreover, were those of an enthusiast, as when she told Whalley that a passage in one of Hayley’s juvenile poems, “Epistle from Mary to William,” is “picturesque poetry, in its highest possible perfection—nor are any of Pope’s lines more richly harmonious” (Letters 2:205). A person so generous in her opinions of favored publications, not to mention readiness to evaluate texts passage by passage, was not likely to endorse Johnson’s habits of hasty reading and unvarnished responses.

Seward’s two sonnets on Dr. Johnson’s posthumous reputation distill multiple reiterations of her argument. “On Doctor Johnson’s Unjust Criticisms” recapitulates her proof of Johnson’s envious temperament, Boswell’s reported admission when he visited Lichfield while researching his biography. Writing to Hayley in April 1785, Seward recalled Boswell’s attempt to distinguish between “envy and literary jealousy.” When she called his distinction “sophistic,” Boswell argued that Johnson, a critic, would not likely have envied poets, especially dead poets. He proposed that Johnson’s rigor “proceeded from real want of taste for the higher orders of verse, his judgment being too rigidly severe to relish the enthusiasms of imagination” (Letters 1:62). Seward’s opportunity came, however, when Boswell proceeded “unawares” to acknowledge that “Johnson had been galled by David Garrick’s instant success, and long éclat, who had set sail with himself on the sea of public life,” adding that

it was a little cruel in the great man not once to name David Garrick in his preface to Shakespeare! And base, said I, as well as unkind.—He was galled by Garrick’s Prosperity, rejoined Mr. Boswell. Ah! Said I, you now, unaware, cede to my position. If the author of the Rambler could stoop to envy a player, for the hasty splendour of a night of obscurity, must, in the end, prove as the meteor of an hour to the permanent light of the sun, it cannot be doubted, but his injustice to Milton, Gray, Collins, Prior, &c., proceeding from the same cause, produced that leveling system of criticism, “which lifts the mean, and lays the mighty low.” Mr. Boswell’s comment upon this observation was, that dissenting shake of the head, to which folk are reduced, when they will not be convinced, yet find their stores exhausted. (Letters 1:63)

Seward’s account is worth quoting at length because it records what she believed to be her rhetorical triumph over Johnson’s champion. According to Seward, she trapped Boswell into admitting that Johnson was motivated by envy, not only toward Garrick but all the poets he had disparaged in his Lives of the Poets. We now agree that Johnson’s criticism was not disinterested; that, for example, his aversion to Milton’s political principles influenced his remarks on that poet. While we may not agree with Seward and may find her diatribes tedious, she was justified in protesting that Johnson was not an irreproachable human being or critic. In this reported conversation, she thought she got the better of Boswell, reducing him to speechlessness after he gave her an opening, “unawares,” to introduce her clever analogy comparing Garrick and Johnson to a meteor and the sun. Boswell, by implication, acceded to her logic in claiming that, if Johnson’s “cruelty” to Garrick resulted from envy, then his critical analyses of Milton, Gray, Collins, and Prior proceeded from the same cause. Her final (mis)quotation of a line from James Thomson’s Agamemnon (4.2.54) completed her argument by implying the hubris of a man who had taken on the role of a literary god, damaging posthumous reputations with impunity.² Here, Seward demonstrated her ability to prevail in debate against the acolyte of a man famed for his propensity to “talk for victory.” Of course, if Boswell indeed shook his head as she describes, the gesture may not have indicated defeat. Boswell may have shaken his head in disbelief at Seward’s conviction. Or he may have shaken his head to indicate that further discussion was impossible with someone so adamant. Seward interpreted Boswell’s head shake as capitulation, however. The remembered triumph must have cheered her when, in the early 1790s, her published criticism of his Life of Johnson, accompanied by further asseverations of the great man’s malignancy, evoked from Boswell a sarcastic, dismissive printed response.³

“On Doctor Johnson’s Unjust Criticisms” offers a succinct version of the memorable 1785 conversation. Seward begins in medias res following Boswell’s “offstage” excuse that Johnson had little taste for the arts. Seward scoffed at such comments, believing that Johnson’s sublime writing style proved the contrary:

Cou’d aweful Johnson want poetic ear,
Fancy, or judgment?—no! his splendid strain,
In prose, or rhyme, confutes that plea.—The pain
Which writh’d o’er Garrick’s fortunes, shows us clear

Whence all his spleen to GENIUS.—Ill to bear
A Friend’s renown, that to his own must reign,
Compar’d, a Meteor’s evanescent train,
To Jupiter’s fix’d orb, proves that each sneer,

Subtle and fatal to poetic sense,
Did from insidious ENVY meanly flow,
Illumed with dazzling hues of eloquence,

And Sophist-Wit, that labor to o’er-throw
Th’ awards of AGES, and new laws dispense
That lift the mean, and lay the MIGHTY low.

While the letter preserves an exchange, undoubtedly pruned to emphasize Seward’s victorious role, the poem reenacts Seward’s argument as a dramatic speech. From the indignant opening question and her adamant reply, Seward confronts readers with verse meant to demonstrate her own capacity for both logic and eloquence. Her use of the exclamation and question, of dashes, italics, and small capitals demand vocal performance (and probably received it, by the poet herself, in her drawing room). The sinuous “s” and “w” sounds of the octet imitate Johnson’s supposed “writhing” in jealousy over Garrick’s success, while other uses of consonance, such as “plea” and “pain” in the third line, support her dismissal of Boswell’s excuse. Among examples of assonance, the drawn-out “e” sound centered in line 5 skillfully highlights her accusation that Johnson reacted with spleen to genius. Her careful placement of caesuras after “no,” “plea,” and “GENIUS” mark the progress of her argument toward the supposedly irrefutable claim that surely Johnson must have understood the difference, like that between a meteor and a planet, between his and Garrick’s achievements and therefore should have refrained from envying the actor’s fame. Her original metaphor for Johnson’s reputation, “the permanent light of the sun,” has become “Jupiter’s fix’d orb,” emphasizing the doctor’s colossal status and his position as veritable father of Britain’s literary gods. At the heart of the sonnet, the metaphor reinforces the paradoxical coexistence within Johnson of intellectual greatness and small mindedness. As the eighth line turns toward Seward’s denunciation of Johnson’s envy, persistent “s” sounds reinforce the “sneers” associated with his criticism. The sonnet concludes with the phrase that supposedly left Boswell shaking his head, incapable of further reply. Seward does not specify Johnson’s critical depredations within the poem, consigning her examples to a footnote. Instead, she denounces Johnson’s abuse of his capacity for the “splendid strain” (l. 2), turned instead into “eloquence,/And Sophist-Wit” employed to blacken the reputations of some poetic “ancients” while extolling others who little deserved such praise (such as Yalden and Blackmore) at their expense. The reference to Agamemnon now reinforces the earlier comparison of Johnson to Jupiter, as well as the implication that the doctor was a false god, subject ultimately to the same critical vicissitude he inflicted on others.

Seward’s “On the Posthumous Fame of Doctor Johnson” likewise took its genesis from letters (and presumably conversations) in which she insisted that justice demanded acknowledgment of Johnson’s flaws. Sonnet 76, “The Critics of Dr. Johnson’s School” (Original Sonnets 78), originated in a comment she made to Whalley in a letter dated February 1, 1786: “Critics are also starting up, producing books abounding with the spawn of Johnsonian envy, unsupported with Johnsonian ability, and unadorned with Johnsonian wit” (Letters 2:123). The corresponding sonnet opens with a dramatic verbal gesture: “Lo! Modern Critics emulously dare / Ape the great Despot” (ll. 1–2). Seward probably decided that the rhetorical repetition of “Johnsonian,” clever in her letter, was insufficiently vivid for her sonnet. The sestet instead invokes multiple images to convey her point that Johnson’s current imitators lack “the great Despot’s” brilliance:

Spirit of Common Sense! Must we endure
The incrustation hard without the gem?
Find in th’ Anana’s rind the wilding sour,

The Oak’s rough knots on every Osier’s stem?
The dark contortions of the Sybil bear,
Whose inspirations never meet our ear? (ll. 9–14)

Here, Seward has delayed the sonnet’s turn until the beginning of its sestet, a calculated delay followed by a peroration as dramatic as the sonnet’s exclamatory opening. As Seward piles up her metaphors, she enforces them with assonance, as in “endure”/“incrustation,” “find”/“rind,” and “Oak’s”/“Osier’s.” Her by now inescapable point, that Johnson’s followers reproduce his harshness without his knowledge or cleverness, culminates in the final image of a writhing but uninspired Sybil. Although Johnson was, and is still, viewed as an oracle by admirers, Seward insists his putative inheritors have no wisdom to share, despite their adoption of his magisterial style.

Today, few readers instinctively associate sonnets with critical battles such as Seward’s. In Milton, however, she would have found her precedent. Milton’s sonnet 11, “On the Detraction which Followed upon My Writing Certain Treatises,” defended his authorship of Tetrachordon, one of several publications questioning England’s stringent divorce laws. Assailed by conservative, and in his opinion, ignorant, critics, Milton “wished he had not wrote this work in English,” according to Warton’s note in his edition (342). Seward, similarly embattled and as self-righteous as Milton, followed him in crafting several sonnets of critical assault rather than of amour. The majority of Seward’s sonnets, however, develop more traditional themes. Picturesque landscapes, for example, were among her passions. Seward delighted in scenery, even glimpsed vicariously through letters such as Whalley’s descriptions of his continental rambles. Some of her sonnets seem ripostes to Smith’s gloom. Sonnet 15, “Written on Rising Ground near Lichfield” (Original Sonnets 17), for example, extols the consolations of nature. Where Smith consistently found in the natural world an inadequate mirror of her suffering, Seward found compensation even for woes greater than her own:

The evening shines in May’s luxuriant pride,
And all the sunny hills at distance glow,
And all the brooks, that thro’ the valley flow,
Seem liquid gold.—O! had my fate denied

Leisure, and power to taste the sweets that glide
Thro’ waken’d minds, as the soft seasons go
On their still varying progress, for the woe
My heart has felt, what balm had been supplied?

But where great NATURE smiles, as here she smiles,
’Mid verdant vales, and gently swelling hills,
And glassy lakes, and mazy, murmuring rills,

And narrow wood-wild lanes, her spell beguiles
Th’ impatient sighs of Grief, and reconciles
Poetic Minds to Life, with all her ills.

Like Smith, Seward fails to specify her cause for woe, although the date appended to the sonnet, May 1774, suggests her continued suffering over Saville, compounded by the departure of Honora Sneyd after her marriage less than a year before. If accurate, the date makes it impossible for this sonnet to have been a response to Smith’s, published ten years later. The contrast between the two women’s reactions to nature, however, is striking. Seward’s poem does not claim despair, as do Smith’s poems; her grief is not even obdurate. Read with Smith’s in mind, the sonnet questions how a poet who claims a passionate affinity with the natural world could fail to experience consolation amid its beauties. Truly “poetic Minds” are reconciled “to Life, with all her ills” through communion with nature.

Seward describes a glorious but familiar scene of a spring evening near her home. The setting is emphatically beautiful in comparison with the wild, tempestuous locales favored by Smith. The setting sun gilds surrounding hills, and brooks punctuating the valley glisten as well. As the speaker contemplates the landscape spread out before her, she wonders momentarily what her grief might have been had she no “Leisure, and power to taste,” the changing attractions of the seasons. In a spot so lovely, the natural world itself supplies a balm otherwise unattainable. Seward describes her gentle native landscape, with its green valleys, low hills, lakes, and streams, as the antidote to fruitless grief. For Seward, it is the landscape itself that is her healer, whereas for Wordsworth it is memories of past excursions that spur comforting memories as he gazes out upon the Wye Valley in “Tintern Abbey.” Unlike Smith, who in sonnet 31, “Written on Farm Wood, South Downs, in May 1784 “(31), describes a spring vista that can delight only “the hind—whom no sad thought bereaves / Of the gay season’s pleasures!” (ll. 7–8), Seward wonders how “poetic Minds” can fail to find some pleasure in the scene, despite life’s ills. She repeats her initial description in the sestet, as if inviting readers to contemplate the scene themselves and emulate “poetic Minds” by experiencing its healing power. Seward’s confidence in nature’s ability to assuage grief might therefore set her apart from Smith and other Romantics such as Wordsworth whose emphasis was often on their own minds and indeed on the impossibility of fully escaping the boundaries of the ego. Even Keats, the prophet of negative capability, confessed in “Ode to a Nightingale” his inability to escape, more than momentarily, from his “sole self” (l. 72). In sonnet 15, Seward assumes that sensible or “waken’d” minds can be beguiled or enchanted by nature, healed of their woes while feasting visually on seasonal glories. Her attitude reminds us of Anne K. Mellor’s observation that women Romantics often rejected their male Romantic-era counterparts’ preoccupation with such concepts as the autonomous self and the transcendent imagination, extolling instead the rational (female) mind and domestic relationships (Mothers 86–87). From Mellor’s perspective, Seward’s sonnets may have more in common with the writings of many contemporary women than do those of such a recognizably “Romantic” writer as Smith.

Another appealing landscape sonnet anticipates Wordsworth’s descriptions of his boyhood in The Prelude. Sonnet 7 describes Seward’s early childhood rambles around Eyam, Derbyshire, from which her family moved when she was seven. Like the boy Wordsworth, she was evidently permitted to roam. She imbibed the magnificent scenery, which became her lifelong passion:

By Derwent’s rapid stream as oft I stray’d,
With Infancy’s light step and glances wild,
And saw vast rocks, on steepy mountains pil’d,
Frown o’er th’ umbrageous glen; or pleas’d survey’d

The cloudy moonshine in the shadowy glade,
Romantic Nature to th’ enthusiast Child
Grew dearer far than when serene she smil’d,
In uncontrasted loveliness array’d.

But O! in every Scene, with sacred sway,
Her glances fire me; from the bloom that spreads
Resplendent in the lucid morn of May,

To the green light the little Glow-worm sheds
On mossy banks, when midnight glooms prevail,
And softest Silence broods o’er all the dale.

Very much like Wordsworth’s descriptions of himself roaming the Lake District, Seward’s memories portray a child exploring the riverbanks, gazing “wildly” at the surrounding peaks before education or maturity intervenes between the setting and her pure wonder. As also in Wordsworth’s verse, nature acts as a supplemental mother, the “Romantic” setting encouraging Seward’s blossoming enthusiasm or sensibility. Seward claims to have been nurtured on the sublime: the “vast rocks,” “steepy mountains,” “umbrageous glen” and mysterious, moonlit glade, are all manifestations of nature at its most terrific or impenetrable. The sonnet’s octet recalls this precious seed time, when rugged sublimity, going beyond the beautiful, the serene, or the simply lovely, endeared itself.

Seward’s sestet, however, confesses that all natural scenes fire her imagination. Early-morning blooms and midnight glowworms alike are precious. The sonnet’s close implies that nature acquired a godlike power over Seward’s mind during those infant rambles. Nature’s “sacred sway” carries some of the sense of divine immanence or natural transcendence proclaimed by her younger contemporaries, although the Anglican Seward most likely intended only to assert the powerful sensibility infused in her by frequent experience of sublimity. “Sacred sway” may also imply that God acts through nature to inspire Seward’s imagination. Her final image suggests a continuum of nature from the beautiful to the sublime. The just-opened blossom, shining in the clear morning air, is juxtaposed with the tiny glowworm shining in the obscure “midnight gloom.” Today, it is difficult to read this poem without thinking of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” ode. In a classic reading, Geoffrey Hartman describes the ode as a poem about the poet’s fear of “a decay of his ‘genial’ responses to nature” and his fear “that this decay has affected his powers of renovation” (274). Hartman explains that by the ode’s conclusion, the poet has achieved regeneration of his response to nature, the prerequisite to mature love of man (277). “To me the meanest flower that blows” evokes “Thoughts / that do often lie too deep for tears” (ll. 205–6), confides the relieved poet. In her sonnet, Seward expresses no sense of diminishment from her childhood intimacy with nature. Rather than loss, she experiences gain as a result of maturity—appreciation for the beautiful as well as for the sublime. The blossom and the glowworm inspire equal fascination, comparable joy. The sonnet portrays Seward as a complete poet, still alive to childhood visions of splendor but also capable of minute discernment. To invoke yet another Romantic poet, one more her contemporary, she like Blake can “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a heaven in a Wild Flower” (ll. 1–2). The craggy heights that thrilled her as an infant have instilled as well her love of the evanescent and minute.

Sonnet 7 perfectly illustrates Seward’s remark that such poems should have a “harmonious and impressive close, provided it be not epigrammatic or detached, but connected with the subject” (Letters 4:145). This sonnet’s conclusion does not carry the reader back into the poet’s mind but outward into the natural world the poet inhabits. While Seward portrays herself as a privileged being, an “enthusiast” from infancy, her sestet illustrates her comprehensive love of nature by invoking the blossom and the glowworm, not her psychological processes or memories. Seward is at once an eighteenth-century poet of sensibility and an incipient Romantic, but more the former than the latter. She despised Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” for example, remarking to Walter Scott in 1807, “Surely if his worst foe had chosen to caricature this egotistic manufacturer of metaphysical importance upon trivial themes, he could not have done so more effectually.” More pleasing to her was Wordsworth’s “Sonnet upon Westminster Bridge,” which she found “beautiful, unaffected, and grandly picturesque” (Letters 6:367). Two further examples illustrate Seward’s distinctive approach to landscape; one is a personal meditation like sonnet 7 and the other resembles a landscape painting, the artist herself removed from the scene.

Sonnet 11 describes the pleasures of shady retreats on summer days:

How sweet to rove, from summer sun-beams veil’d,
In gloomy dingles; or to trace the tide
Of wandering brooks, their pebbly beds that chide;
To feel the west-wind cool refreshment yield,

That comes soft-creeping o’er the flowery field,
And shadow’d waters; in whose bushy side
The Mountain-Bees their fragrant treasure hide
Murmuring; and sings the lonely Thrush conceal’d!

Then, Ceremony, in thy gilded halls,
Where forc’d and frivolous the themes arise,
With bow and smile unmeaning, O! how palls

At thee, and thine, my sense!—how oft it sighs
For leisure, wood-lanes, dells, and water-falls;
And feels th’ untemper’d heat of sultry skies!

Here, Seward exploits well the potential opposition of sestet to octet. She revels in the tempting description of shady retreats, delaying the sonnet’s turn until the abrupt address to Ceremony in the ninth line. She also uses the floating pause to advantage, as her lines “rove” like the poet’s memory into the valley and along the brook, feeling the breeze, hearing the bees’ hum, catching the scent of honey. All her senses are alive to the scene, and the sonnet’s break, after she seems to invite us to listen to the thrush’s song, is even more jarring. Seward also uses onomatopoeia to great effect, as when describing “the pebbly beds that chide,” the consonants here stuttering like the ripples themselves as they splash over the stones. Likewise, the smooth “w” sounds in “west-wind,” followed by the low-register vowels and “m” muted by “sh” in “cool refreshment” emulate the wind’s effect, while the fifth line’s consonants, framing the elongated sound of “creeping,” captures the slowly approaching breeze. Seward’s sestet turns not only from this appealing scene but also from its specificity to the abstracted “Ceremony” in metaphorically “gilded halls” that surely dominated the lives of the poet and most of her genteel readers. The vague but no doubt perfectly understood description of “bow and smile unmeaning,” the rituals of formal visits, throw a pall over the sonnet even as they numb the poet’s and reader’s senses, so recently alive to natural beauty. The sonnet’s final lines invoke the pleasures of a leisurely stroll even as the poet “feels th’ untemper’d heat of sultry skies” in the stuffy drawing rooms of “gilded halls.” We read with sympathy, sharing the poet’s distress and longing. The sonnet does not boast the poet’s unparalleled suffering or unique horror in mundane company. In fact, the poem depends rather on shared memories of the relief offered by a cool dell on a sunny day. The very choice of abstraction for the contrasting drudgery of “Ceremony” presumes a community of readers likewise enchained to social rituals and longing, fruitlessly, for escape to spontaneous pleasures. We might think of Wood’s emphasis on Seward’s devotion to sociability even while we read her sonnet about wandering alone in the shaded glen. The sonnet’s very longing for solitude requires, of poet and readers, the counterexperience of society.

Another sonnet removes the poet from the landscape altogether. Soon after reading the Lyrical Ballads, and not long before publication of her sonnets, Seward described Wordsworth as “a poetic landscape painter—but his pictures want distinctness” (Letters 5:61). Sonnet 18, “An Evening in November, Which Had Been Stormy, Gradually Clearing up, in a Mountainous Country” (Original Sonnets 20), offers Seward’s version of a poetic landscape:

Ceas’d is the rain; but heavy drops yet fall
From the drench’d roof;—yet murmurs the sunk wind
Round the dim hills; can yet a passage find
Whistling thro’ yon cleft rock, and ruin’d wall.

The swoln and angry torrents heard, appal,
Tho’ distant.—A few stars, emerging kind,
Shed their green, trembling beams.—With luster small,
The moon, her swiftly-passing clouds behind,

Glides o’er that shaded hill.—Now blasts remove
The shadowing clouds, and on the mountain’s brow,
Full-orb’d, she shines.—Half sunk within its cove

Heaves the lone boat, with gulphing sound; and lo!
Bright rolls the settling lake, and brimming rove
The vale’s blue rills, and glitter as they flow.

Writing to a Mrs. Gell in December 1797, Seward remarked that “a flooded valley, beneath the cloudy lour of a wintry moon, is one of those terrible graces in scenery, which the survey of danger, and the consciousness of protection, always form to people of imagination. I gaze with pleasing awe on the swoln, the extravagant, and usurping waters, as they roll over the fields, and, white with turbid foam, beat against the bushes.” Unfortunately, she added, such “solemn luxury I can seldom taste” owing to physical debility. But “I have been in situations … when my mind could thus luxuriate in the prospect of scenic desolation” (Letters 5:27). “An Evening in November” no doubt resulted from such an experience.

“An Evening in November” describes the interstitial moment between storm and calm, the interval when the poet might best survey danger with the consciousness of protection. The poem opens on a pause, a caesura between the downpour and its moonlit aftermath. The verb “ceas’d,” emphasized by Miltonic inversion, captures the rain’s stopping as both act and absence. Once more, Seward exploits floating pauses and run-on lines to connote the storm’s departure, its lingering drip and whining wind. The scene is one of Burkean sublimity, complete with winds moaning through the “cleft rock, and ruin’d wall,” as in a scene from Rousseau, Goethe, or Radcliffe. A kind of pause within the pause, or caesura within the poem, occurs in the sixth through ninth lines, when a handful of stars “shed their green, trembling beams” through the parting clouds.⁴ Seward uses her customary technique of running her lines’ sense together, here for the purpose of emphasizing the moon’s gliding passage to the top of a hill. Because these run-on lines end the octet and begin the sestet, the sonnet seems to glide along with the moon. As strong winds blow away the last clouds, a full moon emerges triumphantly over the scene. As the poem closes, we hear the “gulphing sound” of a boat half-sunk in the late storm. “Heaves” is another masterful word placement, thrusting us into the twelfth line even as the little boat is pushed upward by the waves. Our last view is of the lake brimming from the late downpour, its waves glittering as they rush along in the moonlight. The pause is almost over. The storm has past and the night’s next phase succeeds. The lone reminders of the tempest are the half-sunk boat and the glittering, restless waves caused by the heavy rain. When the boat stops heaving in the brimming waves, when the moon shines on a placid lake, the interstice between storm and calm will have ceased like the recent rain.

“An Evening in November” perfectly fulfills one of Seward’s early statements about suitable topics. “An appearance in rural nature, a thrill of the spirit from affectionate recollections, or a sentiment, or a reflection, strikes us. It would do little towards the composition of an extensive poem, but it happily, perhaps, occupies the dimensions of a sonnet” (Letters 2:226). She captures a fleeting phenomenon, the interval between the cessation of a storm and the restoration of complete peace. Parting clouds, rising moon, dripping raindrops, and brimming waves occupy but a few minutes, the perfect “dimensions of a sonnet.” Yet Seward manages to endow her miniature landscape with a rising and falling action, from the heavy drops pouring from a roof to the subsiding waves. The sonnet even features a climax, when the moon rises between octet and sestet. The poet herself all but disappears except as the witness or verbal painter of the scene. We are not invited to regard, as in one of Smith’s or Wordsworth’s or even many of Seward’s other sonnets, the image as a metaphor for the poet’s state of mind. We might suspect that the poet felt an affinity for the scene she describes, but Seward does not claim or even suggest as much. There is no trace of ego in this poem; it is simply a record of profound observation. Although Seward projected her emotions onto the landscape in other poems, she refrains from doing so here. The resulting sonnet is a gem, perfectly free of the quality Seward detected when she called Wordsworth an “egotistic manufacturer of metaphysic importance upon trivial themes” (Letters 6:367). We experience the beauty of the moment with the poet, but she makes no attempt to impute human motives or meaning to the spectacle. For a rare moment in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era poetry, nature is permitted to speak for itself.

Seward was, of course, far from self-effacing, either in life or in most of her sonnets. Sonnet 5, “To A Friend, Who Thinks Sensibility a Misfortune” (Original Sonnets 7), celebrates her capacity for strong feelings. She makes an analogy to a person who lives near a river and who complains that she would rather live in a desert, because occasional floods follow heavy rains. The poet demurs:

Seldom the wild and wasteful Flood extends,

But, spreading plenty, verdure, beauty wide,
The cool translucent Stream perpetual bends,
And laughs the Vale as the bright waters glide. (ll. 11–14).

Despite periodic incursions of “wild and wasteful” emotions, sensibility is more often the “cool translucent Stream” nurturing imaginative creation. Sensibility, here, is nearly synonymous with fancy or genius, enriching its surroundings with the “plenty, verdure, beauty” of art. We glimpse Seward’s temperamental difference from Smith in the sonnet’s final line. When Smith describes a flood, in sonnet 44, “Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex” (44), the tide rips corpses from their graves. She then envies the corpses because, although exposed and ravaged, they are dead and so no longer suffer the ongoing humiliation and pain to which she is exposed. Seward imagines waves glittering in the storm’s aftermath, in “Evening in November,” or here, in the valley cleft by “bright waters,” seeming to laugh or rejoice in the sunshine after the flood recedes. Seward’s emphasis on “laughs,” secured by the line’s Miltonic subject-verb inversion, epitomizes her sonnet’s perspective. Sensibility is the source of deep joy, not only for the artist but for those enriched by her creations. We recognize that the nourishing stream is also the artist herself, reflecting the storms and calms of her environment but also brightening her culture as she glides through life. Seward cherishes sensibility because although her feelings are deeply painful at times, they constitute her distinction, her genius. We note, too, that the stream is not isolated but “plac’d ’mid fair domains” (l. 5), an intrinsic part of the valley. The role of the outcast wanderer is not for Seward. Her stream moves perpetually, but it glides amid fields conscious of, and presumably thankful for, its gifts. Coleridge and Byron evidently found in Smith the precedent for personae such as the ancient mariner, Childe Harold, Cain, and others torn by peerless suffering. Seward offered a consoling alternative, perhaps the only justification possible for a staunch Anglican, but her persona was less attractive to late-century iconoclasts, each of whom preferred Smith’s pose of sublime anguish. By reconsidering Seward’s sonnets in light of her principles and practices and in the context of late-century competition, however, we can appreciate the scope, artistry, and originality of her magnificent contribution to the sonnet revival.