SOURCE: Anderson, John M. “In the Churchyard, Outside the Church: Personal Mysticism and Ecclesiastical Politics in Two Poems by Charlotte Smith.” In Seeing into the Life of Things: Essays on Literature and Religious Experience, edited by John L. Mahoney, pp. 195-209. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Anderson explores Smith's use of the conventional tropes associated with religious poetry to address social and political concerns.]

Much of what we call great poetry, the poetry that stands most securely at the center of the canons of literature however much change may occur on its fringes, owes its stability to the fact that it is grounded in a foundation of shared narratives, genres, and tropes acquired in the course of a classical education. Writers who have been denied access to such an education (for reasons, most usually, of race, class, or gender) have often grounded their work in another, more broadly accessible tradition—that of the scriptures and of religious experience in general.¹ This tradition is, however, a hazardous source of raw materials because it partakes of revealed Truth; the very qualities which may make religious subjects attractive to “minor” poets—the certainty of its seriousness, the familiarity and at the same time the mystery of its imagery, and the strictly dogmatic conventions of religious expression (as opposed to the profound individuality which often characterizes individual religious experience)—may lead sophisticated readers to shy away from this poetry.² Such readers may give religious poetry superficial attention, may judge according to prejudice and thus never distinguish the valuable from the worthless. Thus, little magazines in The Poets' Market that receive floods of unsolicited submissions often seek to reduce the numbers by including in their advice to contributors the phrase “No Religious Poetry, Please.” In the end, a canonical bias against religious poetry has necessarily contributed to the historical exclusion of important underprivileged poets, including women poets. The immense critical effort at present to restore to the canon important women poets of the past will necessarily involve re-reading, reconsidering, and perhaps appreciating for the first time much notable religious poetry.

A fine example is Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), who—besides being the author of a series of popular (often political) novels—often wrote poetry about religion. She never paraphrased the scriptures, as many of her contemporaries did, but the religious questions she addresses range from the social role of the church to psychological portraits of a woman's struggle between faith and despair. These are, of course, two quite different aspects of religion, and Smith addresses them in very different poetic forms—the one in an epic of powerful rhetoric and subtle political ideas, and the other in sonnets of psychological insight. We have remained too long unaware of the important social concerns, the complex ambiguities, the epic strength and lyrical passion of Charlotte Smith, who, as a religious poet, looks forward to George Eliot and Emily Dickinson.

These writers were not given to sweeping summary rejections like Shelley's “The Necessity of Atheism” or Keats's “Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition”; still less did they invent alternative mythologies in the manner of Blake. Their associations with established religion, as a social fact and as a source of language and imagery, went far too deep for such a response. Like Eliot and Dickinson, Smith underwent a complex struggle with the established church and defined a position for herself outside orthodoxy. Like Shelley's, Smith's reasons were certainly political, shaped by her support of the ideals of the French Revolution. Yet she places the most prominent explicit statement of her position—the ending of her epic The Emigrants—in the strongly apolitical imagery of an isolated soul finding completely sufficient communion with her God in nature.

The passage in question consists of only thirty-three lines, in a poem of nearly nine hundred. But the contemporary cultural significance of these lines is clear from the overwhelming critical response they received. Though other passages were more often quoted by critics—especially the action sequences which eventually made up the “fragment” that Smith later excerpted from her most ambitious poem—none received more critical comment. The reviewer for the British Critic, for example, expressed strong displeasure at considerable length:

we lament that the gifted powers of imagination should be so grossly perverted, and we cannot but suspect that vanity (which absorbs all other considerations) predominates in the mind of a writer, who can court applause by the affectation of a criminal singularity. … This writer makes it her boast, that for her part she needs no exhortation to piety, since the works of creation serve her for that purpose. And, let us ask, what good heart do they not influence in the same manner? … Yet the genuine philosopher will not be content with silent meditation among hills and rocks: living, as he does, in social intercourse, he will join in social worship.

(406)

This critic suggests ironically that Smith is affecting to avoid the crowd precisely in order to “court [its] applause.” While the whole context of The Emigrants makes it clear that this “apolitical” passage does have political reverberations—that Smith has perhaps set herself apart from the crowd partly in order to address the crowd—the purpose is not to “court applause” but to commune with God. A rather more careful reading of the passage is clearly called for.

Though, like Wordsworth's nuns, she never fretted at working within the narrow room of the sonnet,³ Smith, in her poetry, is rarely comfortable indoors. Like Dickinson, she rejoices in a free and solitary thought beyond the strictures and the censure of conventional society. But Dickinson would find this freedom and solitude in the confines of her room; Smith repeatedly finds it outdoors.⁴ The church inspires in her a kind of moral claustrophobia.

Smith concludes her long poem with a kind of verse Last Will and Testament, and she thus reflects upon her own death, upon the reputation which will outlive her. She expects to be blamed, among other things, for her church attendance.

And if, where regulated sanctity
Pours her long orisons to Heaven, my voice
Was seldom heard, … yet ‘my prayer’ was made
To him who hears even silence; not in domes
Of human architecture, fill'd with crowds,
But on these hills.

(Emigrants, II.387-92)

Smith's conventional, female personification of “sanctity” here allows her to contrast this cool abstraction and her passionate self. The abstract regularity of “sanctity” is apparent in the structure of its “domes,” so geometrical in comparison to the unpredictable, natural shapes of “these hills.” The Emigrants is a political poem, and it is appropriately the church's exterior, political aspect that Smith objects to in these lines. She considers its interior, spiritual claims to mystical efficacy only by implication; these seem distorted by the oppressively regular forms that contain them.

She proceeds adroitly to a landscape imagery that is intricately designed to demonstrate that nothing essential is lost in moving beyond these forms.

                                                            I made my prayer
In unison with murmuring waves that now
Swell with dark tempests, now are mild and blue,
As the bright arch above; for all to me
Declare omniscient goodness.

(II.401-05)

The sea is the manifestation of God in these lines. Its atmospheric extremes are reconciled in the single concept of “omniscient goodness.” Smith emphasizes that her escape to the wilderness has not, in the end, removed her so far from the “crowds,” or from the conventions of church service. Like a preacher, she seems to have chosen a text, here from Psalm 65:7, which speaks of God stilling “the noise of the seas, the noise of their waves, and the tumult of the people.” As the Psalmist's words point out, the fickle and “murmuring waves” are not much different from the crowds Smith has tried to leave behind. And Smith, exercising what her critic called “a criminal singularity” by praying outside the community, presents herself praying in quite orthodox “unison” with this crowd, away from any “dome,” perhaps, but nevertheless beneath a church-like “arch.”

The “bright arch above” to which Smith refers is a uniform blue and thus seems here to indicate the vault of the sky, though in architectural terms. The word “arch” is more appropriate to the rainbow—certainly an apt image, scriptural, in this context. But the rainbow, a prismatic analysis of pure white light, is an image fundamentally at odds with the “unison” upon which Smith insists.

The ironic contradictions of language and of the speaker's positioning of herself in relation to the community become more pronounced in the lines that follow:

                                                                                          nor need I
Declamatory essays to incite
My wonder or my praise, when every leaf
That Spring unfolds, and every simple bud,
More forcibly impresses on my heart
His power and wisdom.

(II.405-10)

Pursuing a familiar argument against the corrupting intervention of language in favor of a pure direct experience of the Creation (an argument which has, despite its antiquity, come to sound so “Wordsworthian”), Smith continues to reject the community that shares the language in common, to champion instead the unspoken “impressions” made by Nature.

But like any such argument expressed in the very language it aspires to reject, this one cannot stand up to analysis. And Smith's speaker herself is less naïve than she may seem; she certainly chooses her examples shrewdly. Like the pure blue of the “bright arch,” the single green that suffuses a natural “leaf” surely presents a clearer message than the artificial leaves of books with their eternally striving blacks and whites; yet the one like the other requires reading, though being “forcibly impresse[d]” sounds like a more passive process. And buds do come across as “simple” though each contains within it the potential for both fruit and seed—and for all the forked twigs of future trees. Still more suspiciously ingenuous is Smith's selection of “Spring” for her examples. It is stacking the deck in Nature's favor, surely, to make no mention of Winter.

But this manipulated imagery serves a rhetorical purpose of demonstrating the poet's generous willingness to give Providence the benefit of the doubt. She must establish that she has the best intentions, for she is about to venture into still more explosive territory. Still writing in a sympathetic, unimpassioned tone, Smith seeks to distinguish between the praiseworthy moral and emotional essence of religion and the destructiveness that occurs when this essence is corrupted.

                    Saint-like Piety,
Misled by Superstition, has destroy'd
More than Ambition.

(II.415-17)

The simplicity which finds its strength in purity, Smith suggests in an aphorism so filled with allegorical figures that it seems oracular, can easily become the simplicity of naïveté. This is an argument which seems unexceptionable when it is applied to any sect other than one's own, and Smith allows her readers to think here of the misled Catholics, rather than to apply the observation closer to home. Yet this depiction of over-zealous true-believers can be applied to excuse, or at least explain, the excesses of one's own community, religious or political. Smith erases the distinction:

                                                                      the sacred flame
Of Liberty becomes a raging fire,
When License and Confusion bid it blaze.

(II.417-19)

With these lines, Smith returns to the explicitly political focus of The Emigrants, and indeed the remainder of the poem is wholly political, though it takes the form of a prayer.

Having examined the adroit political positioning which Charlotte Smith the epic poet achieves in an explicitly religious passage, it is the more enlightening to examine the subtle metaphysical explorations pursued by Charlotte Smith the writer of sonnets. Immediately before the passage I have quoted from The Emigrants, Smith gives a brief demonstration of the orthodox piety which she is about to bring into question; she paraphrases Thomas Gray's famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “‘I gave to misery all I had, my tears’” (II.386). One of her Elegiac Sonnets again recalls the Gray poem, but from the heightened remove of an almost Gothic context.

In comparison to The Emigrants, which remained out of print from its first publication in 1793 until Smith's collected poetry was published two hundred years later, Elegiac Sonnet XLIV, “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex” (which I shall refer to for the sake of brevity as the “Middleton” sonnet) has been reprinted rather often. It is one of the most prominent poems in recent anthologized selections of Charlotte Smith's work. Though it is not among the eight Smith poems selected by Dale Spender and Janet Todd for their 1989 anthology, it is one of the seven in Roger Lonsdale's landmark anthology of the same year, and Jennifer Breen includes it among the four Smith poems in her 1992 anthology.⁵ Here is the text of the poem, including Smith's footnote.

Press'd by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides,
          While the loud equinox its power combines,
          The sea no more its swelling surge confines,
But o'er the shrinking land sublimely rides.
The wild blast, rising from the Western cave,
          Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed;
          Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,(∗)
And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!
With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore
          Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
          But vain to them the winds and waters rave;
They hear the warring elements no more:
While I am doom'd—by life's long storm opprest,
To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.

^∗Middleton is a village on the margin of the sea, in Sussex, containing only two or three houses. There were formerly several acres of ground between its small church and the sea, which now, by its continual encroachments, approaches within a few feet of this half-ruined and humble edifice. The wall, which once surrounded the church-yard, is entirely swept away, many of the graves broken up, and the remains of bodies interred washed into the sea; whence human bones are found among the sand and shingles on the shore.⁶

A superficial reading of these lines might tempt us to dismiss them lightly as sentimental. They create perhaps a melancholy mood, a frisson of horror even—but little more than the fireworks of a minor poem. More considered rereadings lead to the recognition of something more profound. This is a considerable religious sonnet, worthy of the tradition of John Donne. The “Middleton” sonnet is a small masterpiece of compression, in which the poet has underscored her meanings with every resource available to her: the ambiguities and allusive reverberations of her language, the sound patterns created by that language, and the imagery it evokes. Ezra Pound would someday call these aspects of a poem logopoeia, melopoeia, and phanopoeia, respectively, but in favor of a simpler—though less precise—terminology, I will call them sense, sound effects, and imagery. Though these characteristics of the poet's art all function simultaneously, I will artificially untwist the strands in order to examine them each thoroughly.

The poem's most immediate impressions are probably visual. Smith has chosen a visually striking scene—the scattered bones of the churchyard, laid bare by the raging sea, lying white in the moonlight—made more striking by the juxtaposition of antithetical images. The “warring elements” of wind and water rage in stark contrast with the serenity of the moon above and the “grassy tombs” below. And the vastness of the sea and sky emphasizes the vulnerability of the little churchyard and its “village dead.” This scene, which might have served as a subject for any number of Romantic painters—a Delacroix, say, or a Turner—is made still more Romantic by the addition of the melancholy figure of the speaker in the final couplet, whose whole life is epitomized as a “long storm.” If this depiction of sublime nature has a religious significance, it is surely one of despair, a dark night of the soul. Yet this speaker is contemplative. A final striking contrast made visible by the picture Smith paints here is that between the insistent, intrusive physical world and the brooding, self-aware, interpreting mind that gazes “with envy on [the bones'] gloomy rest.”

The imagery of this sonnet presents a moody study of contrasts, then, emphasizing the irreconcilable elements of the scene. The despair that these images convey arises from their striving, contradictory polarity. But this polarity is on the surface of the poem. Its sound effects, which work on a profounder and perhaps less conscious level, produce exactly the opposite effect. They weave these disparate elements together in intricate patterns which emphasize their unexpected similarities. Much of the religious power of the “Middleton” sonnet is the result of the subliminal workings of its unifying musical quality; to understand its religious depth, therefore, it is important first to examine in detail the sound effects by which Smith implies a divine order underlying and pervading the chaos of her visible world.

There is far more rhyming, far more sound effects of every kind, in the “Middleton” sonnet than the sonnet form requires. The poem begins, for instance, with a kind of ABBA form within the first line: Press'd, Moon, mute, arbitress. The painstaking brickwork of such patterning establishes a firm, resisting foundation—a consoling foundation of sounds which has little to do with rationality—within and upon which the poem's violent action and argument swirl. This patterning pervades the poem, from its first word, “Press'd,” which rhymes with its last word, “rest.” It must be noticed that these boundary-marking words rhyme, furthermore, in a particular way. The sound of rest is simply Press'd without its opening letter—an effect familiar from those “echo” poems in which the rhyming words diminish.⁷ And the meanings of these two words are as nearly opposite as are their positions at the beginning and the end. The moon's pressing provides all the motion in the poem; the “rest” (a word which incidentally recalls the “remains”—all that is left—which Smith mentions in her footnote as well as “Rest in Peace”) brings that motion to an end. It is a kind of musical “rest” as well, a silence. The moon is characterized as “mute”—an adjective which reflects audibly back on the noun with both alliteration and assonance. This silence characteristic of the governing moon is important in a poem of sound effects, where silence is a sign of both death and resurrection.

But before it reaches this final “rest,” the poem is full of music. Smith employs both alliteration and assonance to great effect throughout. Consider the abundance of v's in lines 5-11. The rhyming nouns cave and grave (5, 8)—which “rhyme” in their sense as well as their sound—are rhymed again with wave and rave (10, 11)—and to this overflow is added Drives, heaving, village, and vain. And this v-sound returns in the final line—where it is used for the first time to describe an internal state, envy. This unusual, evocative, reverberating consonant provides a unifying note that vibrates quietly but insistently beneath the poem (and beneath the surface hiss of the equally insistent alliteration on the letter s). This musical constant softens the modulation when the sonnet shifts from the wide range and the wild noise of the octave to the hushed, reflective focus of the sestet.

Note the long-i sounds in the first five lines—all four of the rhyme words for the first quatrain—tides, combines, confines, rides; while and sublimely, wild and rising. With the first word of line 6, Drives, this sound suddenly ceases, to reappear only twice, as highlighting in the Rembrandt-gloom of lines 6-12: silent and whiten. In stark contrast, the sound appears three times in the penultimate line: While, I, and life's. Moreover, each of these words is essential. While marks the shift of meaning at the beginning of the couplet; I introduces the speaker for the first time; and life's explicitly expands the poem's specific imagery to a general application. A similar echo, again providing a darker contrast for the bright long-i, occurs when the interior rhyme of doomed and gloomy in the final couplet picks up the sound of the “moon, mute” in the opening.

The sounds and sights that the sonnet presents are emphatic, perhaps even verging on the melodramatic, but Smith creates all these effects in a nearly conversational tone which argues at last for an aesthetic of realism.⁸ None of the images or sound effects seems unnatural or calls attention to itself in the manner of Smith's Della-Cruscan contemporaries. The same understated realism applies to the sense of the “Middleton” sonnet. Especially in her footnote Smith insists upon the “two or three houses” of the village, and its “small,” “humble” church. This subdued presentation of the subject does nothing to diminish the poem's symbolic aspirations. It is appropriately set in a place called Middleton, beside a “half-ruined church,” for it pivots quite thoroughly between a literal, materialistic, empirical expression of a melancholy longing for death on one hand, and on the other a metaphorical, allusive expression of hope in transformative resurrection.

Such ambiguities go to the heart of the poem. This sonnet is about the equinox, described as a powerful time of year—though an event of the solar, not the lunar calendar—but nowhere does it indicate which equinox is meant. The same word describes two quite different moments. Do we have here to do with the autumnal equinox, when all nature turns from light into darkness? Read with the right intonation, it is a spooky poem, and the traditional Christian holidays around the autumnal equinox, especially Halloween and All Souls' Day, fit it well. Or the vernal equinox, which marks the turning point from the death of winter's cold darkness toward the warm light of spring and life? The poem does not declare—it thus invites us to try each possibility. This equinox is not only powerful but “loud”—an odd adjective for the noun in any other poem than this.

Throughout the “Middleton” sonnet, the language revels in an almost Dickinsonian ambiguity. Let us take a single line (one which might have been written by Dickinson) as an example: “O'er the shrinking land sublimely rides.” The word shrinking is both a literal description of the land which is being reduced in size by the action of the waves and also a personification of the land as a sentient creature which can draw back in fear. The word sublimely is a precise term for the kind of aesthetic effect the sea is producing, erasing boundaries, defying comprehension—but it is a deeply ambivalent effect, one which fascinates by horrifying. Finally, rides is very curiously employed here. Perhaps the word is used according to this OED definition: “(8) To float or move upon the water”—though Smith's line reverses the imagery and lets the water “move upon” the land. But other definitions may tell us at least as much: (9b), for instance, is “Of heavenly bodies: to appear to float in space,” a definition which has much to recommend it, in a poem with such an explicitly sublunar setting (and the OED supports this definition with two citations from Milton about the moon). And the whole structure of the poem encourages support for (10) “To rest or turn on or upon something of the nature of a pivot.” The pivoting that is the central motion of Smith's sonnet is made possible by such verbal ambiguities.

But she avails herself of ambiguities of structure as well. Take the opening image of the moon, for example. Seen only glancingly and never mentioned again, it is the only gendered figure in the poem; like “sanctity” in the Emigrants passage above, the moon is female (this is, in any case, a traditional Western conceit, from Artemis onward). We have seen already that this moon's pressing brings about all the action in the poem. She resembles the poet, and her abrupt disappearance is mirrored by the abrupt appearance of the speaker in the final couplet. In many of Smith's sonnets the moon plays an important role.⁹ And here the moon causes the sea to rave, like the “lunatic” of another important Smith sonnet, “LXX,” “On being cautioned against walking on an headland overlooking the sea, because it was frequented by a lunatic” (Smith 61). That poem ends with Smith's speaker feeling the same “envy” for the lunatic as she feels here for the dead.

The Elegiac Sonnets as a whole provide one literary context for reading the “Middleton” sonnet—a context which emphasizes the tensions of its ambiguities. But for a religious understanding of the poem, there is clearly a still more important source, and not an unexpected one in a poem about a churchyard: the Bible. The Biblical story this poem most conspicuously recalls is a famous passage from Ezekiel, the allegory of the dry bones. “So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone” (37:7). It is a hopeful, resurrectional passage, in which God proceeds to promise “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel” (37:12). But if Smith recalls this passage, she complicates her allusion by reversing important details: the bones Ezekiel is shown are most emphatically very dry; those that lie beneath Smith's gaze are very wet; Ezekiel speaks of a noise, Smith of silence. And most remarkably, Ezekiel presents his parable as a triumphant erasing of ambiguity, of difference, “And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all; and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all” (37:22). Smith seems to find a definitive explanation as well, but it is despair. The only hope available in the “Middleton” sonnet is the possibility of ambiguity. The “grassy” tombs of line 7 evoke a proverbial image of the brevity of human life—but it is clearly at the same time evidence of the triumph of life over death, as poets from King David to Whitman have implied.

There are a number of apocalyptic images in the poem—the sea rages beyond its limits, contrary to the promise God makes to Noah in Genesis 9:11. The dead leave their places of rest (see Matthew 27:52-53: “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection”), breaking the “silent sabbath of the grave!” The moon, which we learn in Genesis exists largely to mark holy days, is necessarily closely connected to the Sabbath. “Thus saith the Lord God: The gate of the inner court that looketh toward the east shall be shut the six working days; but on the sabbath it shall be opened, and in the day of the new moon it shall be opened” (Ezekiel 46:1). The Sabbath marks a boundary like the sea. “Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb. … And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?” (Job 38:8, 11).

But of course Christ breaks the Sabbath repeatedly. And he justifies this behavior by referring to a higher reality, in much the same terms as Smith will use in The Emigrants. “Or have ye not read in the law how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless? But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple” (Matt. 12:5-6). The Resurrection itself is presented in the Gospels not as a breaking of the Sabbath, but as superseding it. “In the end of the sabbath as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week” (Matthew 28:1). A number of places in the Gospels which deal with this issue seem particularly relevant to the poem. Christ himself used the question of the Sabbath to explore polarities very like those in which Smith has positioned her poem. “Then said Jesus unto them, I will ask you one thing: Is it lawful on the sabbath day to do good, or to do evil? to save life, or to destroy it?” (Luke 6:9). These dichotomies are very much in accordance with the prophets; Ezekiel presents God bemoaning priests who “have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them” (Ezek. 22:26). But the difficulty is the very ambiguity of the proof text. According to one interpretation it might be used to justify Christ's labors on the Sabbath; according to another it is the very passage to condemn them. In a fundamentally similar way, the same words which express the speaker's despair in the “Middleton” sonnet express her hope as well.

Charlotte Smith's religious opinions are impressively difficult to pin down in either of these poems. The subtly shifting rhetoric of her consideration of the church as a political entity is as ambivalent as the Negative Capability apparent in her psychological portrayal of religious experience. Her view from the inside out is as volatile and provocative as her view from the outside in. She never reaches the complacent or conventional stasis which we are too ready to expect of religious poetry. It is certainly time to expose the vivid bones of poetry long buried beneath such expectations; they may clatter unexpectedly together and take on new life.

Notes

1. Donna Landry characterizes the poems of one such group, eighteenth-century working-class women, as “a discourse elaborately coded and formalized: the same genres, modes, tropes, and preoccupations occur again and again, apparently without mutual recognition. … We can characterize this verse by the predominance of class-conscious georgic and pastoral poems, verse epistles to women, poems critical of marriage and of women's condition in general, poems in response to much-admired (usually male) poets, and versified narratives from the Scriptures” (13).

2. Roger Lonsdale writes, “The misrepresentation of the verse written by women in the eighteenth century of which I am most conscious is the limited space I have devoted to their efforts in the more ambitious or morally earnest genres, their pindaric odes, paraphrases of Scriptures, hymns” (xliv).

3. Wordsworth acknowledged that he read Smith's sonnets before composing his own.

4. Dickinson was never confined in her imagination, of course, and her poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—,” though it speaks of “staying at home,” is similar to Smith's in its outdoor setting, among other things.

5. See Spender 294-99; Lonsdale 367-68; Breen 39-42.

6. Lonsdale excludes the footnote, Breen restores it.

7. A more famous religious poet than Smith—George Herbert—is perhaps the most remarkable practitioner of this technique. In his “Paradise,” a poem in which the guiding metaphor is that of pruning, the rhyme words are themselves pruned: Grow, Row, Ow; Charm, Harm, Arm; and so on.

8. This aesthetic distinguishes the “Middleton” sonnet from such hypnotically “sounding” religious works as Gerard Manley Hopkins's “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” which use very similar devices more extremely to achieve much the same effect of religious unity.

9. Beginning with Elegiac Sonnet IV, “To the moon” (Smith 15) and continuing through LXX, “To the invisible moon” (Smith 69).

Works Cited

Breen, Jennifer, ed. Women Romantic Poets: 1785-1832: An Anthology. London: Dent, 1992.

British Critic. 1 (1793): 406.

Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1793-1796. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Lonsdale, Roger, ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Smith, Charlotte. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

Spender, Dale, and Janet Todd, eds. British Women Writers: An Anthology from the Fourteenth-Century to the Present. New York: Bendrick, 1989.