Beachy Head

            On Monday I downloaded my professor’s essay: “Form and Loss in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets”. It wasn’t required but for future essays it might be a good idea to see how she likes to write them.

            It had been so warm the previous day that I was worried that I’d overdressed for my bike ride to class, but the temperature had dropped and so my extra layers were comfortable.

            The classroom was a mess when I arrived. I had to spread the desks out, raise the shades, throw away some garbage, raise the projector screen, find a table for Professor Weisman’s desk that didn’t look like someone had spilled their sticky lunch on it, put two lecterns together and dig some chalk out of my backpack to replace what had been stolen again.

            The professor told us that she was going for a root canal that afternoon.

            She was dismayed by the lack of attendance to her class because she goes to a lot of trouble to prepare her lectures and there were only 18 in attendance out of 40. She wanted our opinion as to whether she should take attendance and deduct marks for absence. I told her that since there are no participation marks then it wouldn’t make sense to deduct marks for non-participation. She said that in the fourth year seminars that she teaches there are participation marks and she takes attendance but that’s because the classes are smaller. She opined that taking attendance for a class of 40 is too much.

            We looked at Charlotte Smith’s long poem, “Beachy Head”. It was published posthumously in 1807 and some critics speculate that it is unfinished. Professor Weisman thinks that it is complete.

            Smith tries to establish a strong cultural voice for herself by writing both sonnets, Latinate and learned scientific footnotes, on botany, ornithology and geography, which had been elements of the high cultural preserve of men. She was a voracious reader and she was learned, erudite and scholarly, but not taken seriously. Her prefaces were apologetic.

            Beachy Head is a prospect poem like Tintern Abbey. A prospect poem starts off with the poet overlooking a natural landscape. In a Romantic prospect poem the natural scenes are invested with meaning because of the imaginative vitality of the poet. The activity of the mind is given primary attention.

            She’s at the top of Beachy Head, which is one of the first land points in England from France, though not as close as Dover.

            There are no geological similarities between southern England and northern France other than the chalky cliffs of Beachy Head.

            She is addressing the cliff she’s on and looking across to France.

England was at war from 1793 to 1815. War is an unnatural disunity.

Smith believed that a massive concussion, or earthquake had separated England from France but it was really a massive flood from a glacial lake.

The word “sublime” is contrasted with “beautiful”. That which is sublime is often terrifying and has ennobling grandeur and majesty like cascading waterfalls and cliffs.

The poem is in iambic pentameter, the most soothing and the closest to human speech.

Smith defines herself against the example of Wordsworth. She seems to be speaking of herself.

She is on top. “I would recline” is in the subjunctive. She is assuming ease by reclining.

I suggested that in reclining she makes herself as low as possible and yet she is still on top. She did not climb to get there but she is at the high point unobtrusively. She’s claimed the summit at the meridian of the sun. The enormous horizon that she sees can only be viewed from a height, both physically and culturally. People on the sea are beneath her.

Her aspiring fancy wanders sublime.

Time is sped up.

The poem is localized in time and place. She is specifying details of visionary fancy with localization.

She personifies contemplation and herself as the genius of contemplation.

Memory retraces the history of England.

Her footnotes are a supplement to her poetic vision. She fuses fancy with learned discourse.

She moves from history back to the prospect and to a peaceful, pastoral place but then inserts human criminality into it. The shepherds have to be criminals in order to make ends meet.

What is the significance of the interruption of the pastoral with the criminal?

I wrote that she’s placed a serpent into Wordsworth’s type of pastoral paradise. The one hut made of sea flints and not pastoral material is the home of the dealer in contraband. The fact that he braves snowstorms to perform his criminal tasks suggests desperation and necessity. She seems to be saying that the pastoral is not a secure setting.

Some have suggested that Wordsworth deliberately suppressed the evidence of industry in the setting he was describing in order to maintain the pastoral mood. The smoke from factories may have been visible from his point of view.

Smith takes her poem beyond the pastoral and departs from convention. It is contextualized by war.

From line 282 to 389, beginning with “I once was happy” she speaks about herself and the growth of her mind, much like Wordsworth. She would have read Tintern Abbey. Her work is more detailed, less sanitized and more contextualized than Wordsworth’s. We don’t get footnotes in Tintern Abbey.

Beginning with line 506 she talks about the hermit. Solitude is distinguished from being active and engaged like a poet sharing a prospect. She has a vision of unsanitized and unaestheticized poetic insight but still an aesthetic product of high culture. It’s not that it’s not consoling, because there is a lot to be consoled about.

At this point Professor Weisman gave us back our term papers. I got another A, though at 85% I just squeaked in. It was a much more ambitious paper than my previous one though. In this one I juggled and tied together sixteen poems while in the other I just talked about one. Her note said it was “Intelligent and interesting, with very fine textual analysis and critical thinking.

But she also said that I was capable of writing a stronger intro. I am not!

I didn’t stop at the supermarket on the way home but I probably should have because I’m running out of grapes.

That night I marinated a rack of pork ribs with ginger, garlic, soy sauce and honey and roasted them in the oven. I had two ribs with a potato, chopped onion and gravy while watching Peter Gunn.

In this story some hoods force their way into Mother’s after closing time. The staff is still there and one of the hoods asks Edie if she’s Edie Hart. She says she is and he shoots her in the shoulder. He says to “tell Peter Gunn that the three years are up” and then the hoods leave. After seeing Edie in the hospital, Gunn visits Lieutenant Jacoby, who’s still there from being shot two episodes ago. Jacoby tells Gunn that a man named Grayco, who Gunn put away for three years, just got out last week. Gunn goes to a club that Grayco used to co-own. The jazz trumpet player Pete Candoli is playing there. He questions the owner and is asked to leave. He punches the bouncer when he tries to force him out and then he leaves. Gunn goes to see Wolfgang, a man with a thick German accent who makes a living teaching English diction. When Gunn arrives Wolfgang is busy trying to teach his parrot Sam how to pronounce words properly. The parrot says, “Hi Pete!” when it sees Gunn. Wolfgang tells Gunn that Grayco is waiting for him at the River Warehouse. When he arrives the voice of Grayco calls from above and directs him up a ladder into a loft. One of the rungs on the ladder breaks but Gunn manages to hang on. At the top he finds the voice is from a tape recorder. Meanwhile a man on the ground knocks the ladder away so Gunn can’t get down with it. The man below starts shooting and Gunn fires back. Gunn jumps to avoid a bullet and winds up dropping his gun. He begins throwing heavy items down at his assailant. Gunn drops a heavy netting of rope on the gunman, jumps to some other netting hanging from the rafters and then drops to the ground. He jumps the man and they fight. Gunn is knocked backward. The man is about to throw a barrel at Gunn when he finds his gun and fires at the man’s shoulder. He’s about to force him to tell him where Grayco is when a policeman tells him to drop it. Gunn is arrested, which is odd, since altercations like this happen in every episode and the cops don’t seem to care. Gunn is told they will book him if he doesn’t back out of his war with Grayco, so he agrees. But when Gunn gets home one of Grayco’s men is waiting and he takes him to an amusement park that’s closed for the night. He meets Grayco on the merry-go-round. Grayco's man tries to hit Gunn from behind but Gunn throws him into Grayco, who falls back and lands against the switch that turns the merry-go-round on. Grayco fires at Gunn but shoots his own man in the back. They fight among the horsies as they go up and down until finally Gunn knocks Grayco off the ride and punches him until he's unconscious.