Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head and the Lyric Mode

This article depicts a multimodal approach to teaching Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head that has proved successful in a sophomore-level survey. As a greater romantic lyric fragment of twenty-one blank-verse paragraphs with sixty-four footnotes and two embedded rhyming poems by the “stranger” poet, Beachy Head poses many difficulties for students. Ruwe identifies student difficulties with the poem’s form and content and suggests practical methods for overcoming these barriers. She provides a reading guide to the poem’s various sections and suggests ways to help students experience the poem’s auditory, visual, gestural, spatial, and linguistic design through a process akin to reverse engineering. The article includes student responses, handouts, and links to useful websites for a multimodal approach.