“Saved by the historic page”: Charlotte Smith’s Arun River Sonnets

KEITH HASPERG “Saved by the historic page”: Charlotte Smith’s Arun River Sonnets T he importance of history in charlotte smith’s poetry has attracted much attention in recent years. With discussions usually focus­ ing on the two mature works, The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807), a portrait has emerged of Smith as a kind of author-historian with diverse interests in natural and political histories. Scholars ofher work have yet to note the topic’s significance in her earliest poetry, and no sustained analysis of its initial appearance as a subject of serious interest for Smith has been offered hitherto. Although over the course of her career she would gradually depart from the restrictive sonnet form for the freedom of blank verse in order to explore ideas of greater complexity and depth, her earliest sonnets contain the genesis of her unique melding of local history and emotional inflection that she helped popularize in loco-descriptive verse. Of primary interest are her sonnets to the Arun River. First published in the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1786, they memorialize locally-born poets William Collins, William Hayley, and Thomas Otway, and demon­ strate that Smith was interested both in the history of her Surrey homeland and in the poet’s role as chronicler of local legends. In the absence of any existing study into how Smith presents the issue of history in these poems, a brief overview of them is organized thematically at the outset ofthis essay and is followed by a discussion of their engagement with various poetic traditions. In the Arun River sonnets, Smith celebrates the literary history of her surroundings at Woolbeding House, an ancient stone-built home in Sus­ sex, near Midhurst, where she resided with her family for roughly two years.1 She and her children moved to Woolbeding in the spring of 1785, after having spent several difficult months in Normandy in an effort to flee 1. Smith and her children moved back to England from Normandy in the spring of 1785, first settling in Sussex and soon after at Woolbeding House. Florence May Anna Hilbish, SiR, 53 (Spring 2014) 103 104 KEITH HASPERG her insolvent husband Benjamin’s creditors.2 The series consists offour po­ ems. Sonnets xxvi and xxxil describe the poet’s perception of the ghost­ like presence of Thomas Otway, who was born in nearby Milland in 1652, with his father serving as rector ofWoolbeding’s All Hallows Church. Son­ nets xxx and xxxm pay tribute to Sussex-born poets William Collins and William Hayley, as well as Otway, and praise the region as enchanted for poetic creation.3 Smith describes Otway, Collins, and Hayley as poets of her own sensibility, whose presence can be felt by their present-day “kin­ dred spirits” through the land.4 In the four sonnets, the process by which these kindred spirits preserve the life stories oftheir famed ancestors, partic­ ularly Otway’s, is one of Smith’s primary themes. In particular, the Arun sonnets focus on the endurance and fortitude of the poets’ life stories. The topic of how the past is preserved—both ver­ bally and on the historic page—also recurs in these and in the later Sonnet xlvi, “Written at Penshurst in Autumn 1788.” The latter work is her early poetry’s most extensive and overt exploration of the artist’s role as histo­ rian, but its relevance to the sequence is lost on us unless we grasp the sig­ nificance of the Arun sonnets written two years earlier. In Sonnet xxvi, “To the River Arun,” she describes a process of verbal storytelling, in which the tale of Otway is handed down through time and becomes a kind of local lore. On thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn, No glittering fanes, or marble domes appear, Yet shall the mournful Muse thy course adorn, And still to her thy rustic waves be dear. For with the infant Otway, lingering here, Of early woes she bade her votary dream, While thy low murmurs sooth’d his pensive ear, And still the poet—consecrates the stream. Beneath the oak and birch that fringe thy side, The first-born violets of the...