Celebrating Charlotte Smith, the Fancy, Flights

By Karla Kelsey

This celebration of the Romantic poet, Charlotte Smith’s long poem “Beachy Head” is also an investigation of, into, and through the particular faculty of the mind known as “the fancy.” Discussion of this faculty flourished during the Romantic period of poetic and philosophic writing and is often contrasted with the more popular and, in terms of the literary tradition, aesthetically preferred mode of the mind, the imagination. Although the fancy, as a critical term, has fallen from aesthetic discourse, vibrant traces of it remain in critical works such as Lyn Hejinian’s “Happily” and Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption.” Both of these works celebrate the lineage of the fancy in the non-mimetic, flickering mode of mind and language evident in contemporary avant-garde writing.

Writing on a topic such as “the fancy” provides an enticing challenge, for to approach a work of the fancy with a thesis about how it does or does not operate is rather like pinning down a bird and taking a scalpel to its wings in order to discover how it feels in flight. I, and my readers, might learn something about the physiology of the bird that encourages it to fly, but this is the wrong method to use to gain knowledge and experience of its flight. In questioning the method with which to pursue the fancy, I began to believe that I would have to become a nightingale to investigate a nightingale’s relation to its song.

And, so, I have tried to pursue the fancy in the mode of the fancy, a mode that allows the mind to flit over the objects[1] it encounters, undirected by individual motive or directed intention. This mode of fancy, although often ignored by traditional treatments of Romantic texts, is evident throughout the tradition, such as in section 27 of Keats’s “Isabella; Or, The Pot of Basil:”

So the two brothers and their murder’d man

Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream

Gurgles through straiten’d banks, and still doth fan

Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream

Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan (192)

Here, language bears the pattern of fancy when Keats releases concentration from a particular “object” (the “two brothers and their murder’d man” riding to Florence) and allows language to flit along with the stream for 3 lines, gurgling and fanning for no apparent reason.

This mode of writing—or apprehending the world—allows for an emphasis of focus to be placed on the world in front of one, rather than on oneself and on an agenda. In the “Isabella” example, the speaker’s agenda is to move the characters along in a timely fashion and, thus, fulfill the narrative of the poem. It almost seems to be due to an errancy in editing that we get so much information, so much flitting along with the stream. However, it is in virtue of these flitting “mistakes” that fancy encourages a generous mode of seeing and knowing, and this generosity makes the fancy an appropriate mode to employ when looking at texts. Although my agenda certainly cannot be erased from my criticism, I can attempt a form of writing that focuses on, and is formed by, the text in front of me.

And, so, in service of musing over Charlotte Smith I have tried to model my mode of writing on her mode of writing. As Smith formulates a verse paragraph for each new subject, I have created a section for each “object” (idea or element of Smith’s work) that I treat. Treatment by section makes sense in terms of an investigation of the fancy, for it provides some containment of possible lines of flight but does not clip fancy’s wings with ultimate theses or chain her up with absolute connections.

In addition, as Smith makes use of footnotes to expand her poem beyond the verse-body that contains it, I use footnotes to weave my sections together with one another as well as with a larger web of ideas. The use of footnotes offers a free sort of synthesis and connection. Flights of fancy leave trails that cross one another; footnotes serve as beams of light illuminating connections offered by this project.

Relationship with the World I: Transfiguration or Relation?[2]

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant establishes a gap between the way things appear to us and the way that they are in and of themselves, opening up an array of problems concerning the subject’s relationship to the world (Crockett, 51). If the way that things appear to us differs from the way that they are in and of themselves, it follows that we “do” something to the world when we perceive it: our consciousness changes the world. What, exactly, we do to the world when we perceive it, and how we do it, are questions that lead us to the terrain of the imagination and the fancy, each of which implies a distinctly different way of using language and a distinctly different mode of being.[3]

Proponents of the imagination such as Coleridge (and Kant) propose that the imagination is the fundamental force in the process of perception. In his essay “On the Imagination,” Coleridge famously defines this force as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM…at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify” (516). The human, as an imaginative animal, unifies the elements he perceives in the world along with the ideas that are in his mind, transforming them into a whole. Created by man, this “whole” constitutes the “world as it appears to us” and is the world that Man can formulate knowledge about.

However, the imagination is not the only mode of perceiving and processing the world. Although usually included in discussions of the imagination as part of the imaginative process, we can abstract the fancy out from this process and consider it as a mode of mind in and of itself. According to the German philosopher Schelling (who, like most late eighteenth century thinkers includes “Phantasie” under the broader umbrella of the imagination) the fancy does not transform objects of perception, but rearranges them into new relationships with one another (Engell 182). It is perhaps through this process of rearrangement, and through looking at the world in a new and startling order, that knowledge of the world, as it is in and of itself, can be attained. [4]

This way of knowing the world is quite different from the way proposed by the imagination; where the imagination creates a new, whole world and forms knowledge around this creation, the fancy does not deal with a new creation of the world. This problematizes the imaginationist’s reading of Kant wherein the world that we can know is the world that we create with our imagination, and is necessarily a transformed world. The fancy proposes a reading of Kant wherein the “world as it appears to us” is not a new creation; rather, it is the world as it is in and of itself but seen only in pieces and at a glance; rearranged but not transfigured.

Footnotes toward Language

Charlotte Smith’s use of footnotes creates an immediate physical and mental impact on her readers. The footnotes create such an impact not only in terms of their content or what they imply about Smith’s poetics, but in terms of the patterns they produce upon simply opening up her Collected Works to a page of “Beachy Head.”[5] The recognizable pattern of poetic form (left margin ruler-straight, right margin a mountain ridge, a wave) gives way to the prose of the footnotes, immediately calling attention to the text as a conglomeration of language.[6] By immediately problematizing the (default) appearance of poetry, Smith prevents her readers from engaging with the language of her work as if it were a transparent, “imaginative” interface with the world. Where the visual pattern that a blank verse poem makes on a page is rendered nearly transparent because it fits neatly into reader expectations and has been so well absorbed into the poetic tradition, the pattern that “Beachy Head” makes on the page is disruptive, awkward, and obvious.[7]

The pressure to engage with the materiality of the poem does not lessen once one becomes accustomed to the overall look of Smith’s pages, for the frequency with which the notes puncture the text constantly disrupts the reading process. There are 62 footnotes in the 730 lines of poetry. Since notes interrupt the reader approximately every 10 lines, it is impossible to become absorbed in either a linear line of flight through the poem8 or the rhythms of a fairly regular iambic pentameter.9 The breaking of poetic form that happens almost turns the poem into a collage rather than blank verse.

Another effect of the footnotes is that the reader of the poem gets to decide when (and if) they want to divert from the “official” text and read the “marginalized” text at the bottom of the page. This freedom allows the reader to have his or her hand in the creation of the experience of the text rather than receiving the text as a unified whole, ready for consumption. Regardless of the method the reader employs (whether they read each note as they finish each attached line or finish the verse paragraph before looking at the notes) reading “Beachy Head,” unless one ignores the notes entirely, is a volatile, languaged experience.10

The fact that the footnotes vary greatly in length and moderately in style accentuates the volatility of the notes and complicates the poem in terms of aesthetic notions of symmetry. Smith does not allot words (and space) to her footnotes according to an aesthetic notion of how her poem should look or sound. She allots them pragmatically, according to what kind of point she wants to get across. Some of her notes are short and terse such as the note for line 23: “Terns. Sterna hirundo, or Sea Swallow. Gulls. Larus canus. Tarrocks. Larus tridactylus.”11 Other notes, such as the note for line 126 are, in their 6-point font, at least ¾ of a page long.12 The length of such notes casts into question the traditional primacy of the central text, for the formal etiquette of the page pushes the notes to the bottom of the page and dictates that they are to be written in a much smaller font than the rest of the work. But Smith’s footnotes overturn this domination of formality; her longer footnotes push the body of the work upwards, transgressing the page with a near blackness produced by tiny, single-spaced type.

Smith’s footnotes cover a variety of material and range from information geological and historical to botanical and ornithological, accentuating the materiality of her text in virtue of the notes’ inconsistencies and variety. For example, if we read just Smith’s notes on page 232, we will find information on the correct pronunciation of the word “anémone,” a personal account of finding seashell fossils in the hills, and reference to “Mr. White’s” theory that the ocean used to cover the hills of Beachy Head. These notes show that the passage of verse that they notate comes from a variety of sources, some of which are textual such as Smith’s note on the phrase “beamy adamant” used in line 51. The note clarifies what the poeticism “beamy adamant” refers to by pointing us to a definition, “Diamonds, the hardest and most valuable of precious stones,” accentuating the materiality of the poem because definitions are by nature objects of language. The variety and materiality of Smith’s sources undercut any impulse to read the verse above them as a tranquil, unified recollection of an emotional moment.

And, as if the two types of language (poeticism and definition) weren’t enough, Smith then sends the reader on to another text. “For the extraodinary exertions of the Indians in diving for the pearl oysters” she tells us, “see the account of the Pearl fisheries in “[Robert] Percival’s The View of Ceylon [An Account of the Island of Ceylon (1803; 2^nd ed. 1805)]” (219).13 If we were at all tempted to become absorbed in the moment in the body of the poem where “the Earth hides within her glowing breast/ The beamy adamant, and the round pearl/ Enchased in rugged coverings” and take an imaginative dive into the ocean, Smith’s note sending us out to the bookstore for Percival’s View would surely stop us.

Relationship with the World II: Language

Language is irrecoverably attached to consciousness. Trees do not, obviously, grow naturally with labels of “cottonwood” or “oak;” we bestow these names upon them so that we can talk and think of them when we are no longer among their groves. But here arises the difficulty of naming and of language; when we say “cottonwood” and “oak” are we “really” referring to those trees, that grove? Users of the language of imagination, such as Leibniz, who propose that the imagination creates wholly new images that seem to be natural and “real,” (Engell 173) might contend that we do not refer to those trees. Instead, we build new objects—call them language trees—and refer to them. However, according to Leibniz, these trees have meaning beyond “mere language,” for via the powers of language and the imagination, a writer gives this grove a sort of physical being akin to a “real” grove. A reader of the imagination, absorbed in these trees, can enter this grove to walk under the shade of their leaves.14

But the language of the fancy proposes no such creation or absorption, for it cannot transform the ontological status of an object of the mind (such as a visual image of a grove of trees) into an object of the world. A grove of trees is a grove of trees—and language is, alas, language. But if the fancy does not create, what does it do? As a faculty in and of itself, what it “does” is not, at first glance, too impressive: it “rearranges” what is readily found in nature, gathering together disparate elements in leaps from ideas to the world to images and to language (Engell 175).15 During this “first glance,” these capacities do not seem impressive because they do not make anything. As a poetics, this incapacity to create new objects is traditionally read as a failure because the viewer of the object is not presented with anything new. Rather, the viewer is presented with “old” materials rearranged and un-synthisized.

However, contra tradition, works such as “Beachy Head” show that this capacity for rearrangement (as opposed to representational creation) is an attribute rather than a detriment. The rearrangement of materials can startle the viewer/reader into seeing new similarities between disparate elements, or show the viewer a new aspect of the “old” object.16 And as I propose in “Relationship with the World I,” working through the rearrangement of materials constitutes a different form of knowledge, one that is based on working with language on a material, not just a referential, level. As Picasso and Braque, in their “synthetic” cubist work, employ actual bits of newspaper, sheet music, tobacco wrappers, and other materials in their collages, Smith works the fragments of language that she finds around her into her poem. When we notice that the newspaper in a cubist collage is an “actual” newspaper, rather than a painted image of a newspaper, we engage with it on a different level, for we are not beholding an image that imaginatively refers to newspaper, but the actual material newspaper itself. Smith’s overt use of textual material invites us to engage with her poetry on the physical, material level of text placed against text as well as on the level of imagination, where we step through the markings on the page to her windswept perch. Furthermore, the lack of unity evident in a language of the fancy is, itself, an attribute. Since the connections between disparate elements are not given to the viewer, the viewer must use his or her faculties of the fancy and of the imagination to create connections. If a new object is to be created, it is the viewer’s capacity of mind that must facilitate the creation.

A Botany of Fancy

Traditionally viewed, the concept of nature produced by the Romantic poet has been “read” as an awe-inspiring force that the poet contends with by engaging with nature and then “recollecting” and “transforming” it into a poetic object. This transformation, performed by the powerful (imaginative) mind of the poet, masters nature and puts it to use as a metaphor for “man’s” encounter with the world exterior to himself.17 Interpretations of this sort of Romantic encounter have been used to formulate traditional views of Romantic subjectivity and the Romantic poetics of imaginative transformation and domination.

In the essay “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith,” Judith Pascoe compares Smith’s relationship with nature—“examined with her eyes two inches from its petals”—with the relationship with nature generally associated with Romantic poets (203). This relationship to nature does not attempt to transform nature. Rather, it is more like a botanist’s relationship to nature, which, in the late 1800s, was a relationship based on careful note-taking and sketching of specimens, both of which served as descriptions kept for the purposes of identifying plants (Pascoe 194). This method of note-taking and “sketching” is evident in the verse paragraph which covers lines 345-357:

An early worshipper at Nature’s shrine,

I loved her rudest scenes—warrens, and heaths,

And yellow commons, and birch-shaded hollows,

And hedge rows, bordering unfrequented lanes

Bowered with wild roses, and the clasping woodbine 350

Where purple tassels of the tangling vetch*

With bittersweet, and bryony inweave,*

And the dew fills the silver bindweed’s cups—*

I loved to trace the brooks whose humid banks

Nourish the harebell, and the freckled pagil;* 355

And stroll among o’ershadowing woods of beech,

Lending in Summer, from the heats of noon

A whispering shade; while haply there reclines

Some pensive lover of uncultur’d flowers,

Who, from the tumps with bright green mosses clad, 360

Plucks the wood sorrel, with its light thin leaves,*

Heart-shaped, and triply folded; and its root

Creeping like beaded coral; or who there

Gathers, the copse’s pride, anémones,*

With rays like golden studs on ivory laid 365

Most delicate: but touch’d with purple clouds,

Fit crown for April’s fair but changeful brow.

_______

* vetch. Vica sylvatica.

* bittersweet. Solanum dulcamara. bryony Bryonia alba.

* bindweed. Convolvulus sepium.

* harebell. Hyacinthus non scriptus. pagil. Primula veris.

* sorrel. Oxalis acetosella.

* anémones. Anemóne nemorosa. It appears to be settled on late and excellent authorities, that this word should not be accented on the second syllable, but on the penultima. I have however ventured the more known accentuation, as more generally used, and suiting better the nature of my verse. (Smith 231-232)

Like a botanist with a box of colored pencils, Smith’s description includes notations of color (“yellow commons,” “purple tassels,” etc) shading (“overshadowing woods,” “whispering shade”), and the spatial relationship of the parts of plants (the sorrel’s “light thin leaves” are “triply folded” near its “root”). The description uses very little (if any) metaphor and, like a scientist, keeps as close to “reality” as possible.

In contrast with the paradigmatic, Wordsworthian relationship with nature wherein what the poet says about nature expresses more about the poet’s consciousness than the nature before him, Smith places her focus on the world around her, rather than on herself. Although she does call overt attention to the role she plays in her relationship with nature in the lines “I loved her rudest scenes” and “I loved to trace her brooks,” these are the only phrases in which Smith mentions herself. The rest of the language is involved in the (botanical) project of describing the flora in front of her.18 This descriptive process of note-taking and “sketching” is interestingly aligned not only with Smith’s “poetical” treatment of plants, but with the gathering and re-arranging activities of the fancy.19 As the botanist gathers notes and samples, arranging them in an herbarium, the poet of the fancy gathers notes and images, arranging them in a poem.20

This notion of note-taking and gathering not only hinges together poetics and science, it also brings together a question of language’s relationship to “reality.” The botanist’s sketches, notes, and names of plants are all in service of identifying the actual species in the wild. In this sense, it seems as though the botanist tries to jump Kant’s gap between reality and consciousness of reality with sketches and notes, trying to capture elements of the world as it is in and of itself. But Smith, as a poet, knows that jumping this gap, in this way, is not possible. In her note to line 481, Smith tells us that “Description falls so infinitely short of the reality, that only here and there, distinct features can be given” (pg 238).21 If Smith does succeed in giving us some of the “distinct features” of reality, the facet of reality she succeeds in giving to us is the reality of language. This “reality of language” is a reality of names of things, names that do not translate into the things as they are in and of themselves.

The extended passage that I have quoted shows Smith’s “reality of naming” by giving us the scientific and common alternate names of plants in her notes. These notes not only prevent us from getting absorbed into her bower by interrupting the flow of the text, but they draw attention to the ontological status of the “flowers.” Smith’s “vetch” is not a growing vine but a common “name” for a botanical “sign,” “Vicia Sylvatica.” Her “bittersweet” does not grow outside of her window; it is a word.

Furthermore, the materiality—or textuality—of Smith’s work is not only relegated to footnotes;22 the botanical language in the body of the text is at times nearly identical to some of the well-known botanical texts of Smith’s time (Pascoe 147). For example, the lines stating that “Beachy Head’s” wood sorrel has “light thin leaves,/ Heart-shaped, and triply folded” bears an extremely close resemblance to Withering’s wood sorrel described as a “Stalk with 1 flower: leaves 3 together: leafits inversely-heartshaped hairy. (Arrangement of British Plants 2: 430)” (Pascoe 194).23 As botany was a particularly fashionable hobby of the time (especially for those people “feminine”), and the books that Smith used were fairly common, it is likely that Smith’s audience at least recognized the “tone” of such texts, if not the entries themselves. Not only would Smith’s language conjure up images of “heartshaped leaves,” it would also conjure up botanical texts along with the language and sketches therein.

Relation with the World III: Subjectivity

From the assertions of the first two “Relationship with the World” sections of this essay, which claim that consciousness forms our “version” of the world and that language is irrecoverably attached to consciousness,24 it is only a small step to take to get to the idea that poems—objects of language—can be looked at as maps of human subjectivity. And it is no small surprise that poetries involving different modes of consciousness (the imagination or the fancy), which lead to different ways of using language, produce different “maps” of human subjectivity.

This practice of map reading particularly makes sense when investigating a poetics of the imagination because the powers of the imagination are based on the idea that the singular consciousness of a perceiver synthesizes and creates for the reader a whole new world. Within the notion of poet-as-creator, a particular, discerning subjectivity is already assumed to be at the center of the imaginative process. If we accept this assumption, it follows that the kind of world created, the elements used in its creation, and the connections forged in service of its solidity would all show us things about the writer’s identity.25

Because the fancy is also a mode of consciousness, a poetics of the fancy can also be analyzed in this way, but it is important to differentiate the type of subjectivity that is assumed to be at the root of the fancy. Whereas the subject wielding the imagination takes in pieces of the world in order to transform them into a particular vision, the subject leaping in the mode of the fancy scatters itself across the array of possibilities the world offers, never settling, never making any one possibility its own.

This description of subjectivity bears a striking resemblance to the picture of subjectivity that we get in Deleuze’s late essay “Immanence: A Life.” The motion of mind and being that he describes as consciousness “traverses the transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused” and becomes a subject only when this motion-mind “is reflected on a subject that refers it to objects” (26). Translated into terms of this essay, we can read this form of ever-flowing consciousness as a form of the fancy. It is only when the motion of the mind bounces off of objects in the world that a subject is produced. This subject, unstable and momentary, dissolves back into the flow of world and mind. If we can read poetry of the fancy as a map of “identity,” this identity is unstable, always under creation and revision, unable to be pinned down.

Because the “map” of consciousness that we can interpret out of a poetry of fancy is so dispersed and various, we will not gain much by analyzing “Beachy Head” in terms of “subjectivity” in order to find out “who” the author is behind the work. Such reading-as-decoding works against this kind of poetry. Rather, it is more fruitful to view such a poem in terms of the collection and dissolution of subjectivity across and through patterns of language. It is not the case that there is no subject to be found here; rather, the kind of subjectivity embodied in poetry of the fancy is in and of the language of the work.26

Post-face: Of Form

This essay, an “attempt” via the fancy, has left more loose ends than it has tied up. But what else might be the result of an attempt at the fancy? If one engages in an action that resists unity, one will not, alas, end up with a unified product of writing. One might say that in the end there is not a product at all, only tracings of some disparate thoughts. As a mode of criticism, this method of tracing and dispersion may be considered questionable because it doesn’t fulfill the duties of unification and synthesis prized by the tradition of literary criticism. However, an investigation of something like the fancy loses something when it is treated directly in a traditional, academic manner. How can a systematic mode get at something that is not made of the same elements, something that is made of air?

This question of mode and relationship of subject to object remains complexed as art and criticism continue beyond the limits set forth by postmodernism and contemporary writers explore this question of mode in critical work crossing many fields. Bernstein’s A Poetics, Hejinian’s “Happily,” and works such as Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson address this issue of “mode” in the field of poetics. The language and form of Deleuze and Guatari’s works Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus address this issue in the field of philosophy. Works such as Clayton Crockett’s A Theology of the Sublime, and Mark C. Taylor’s Erring, though less formally exciting than the above works, address and re-vise the traditional readings of philosophy and theology, accentuating the elements of the Western tradition that have been excluded by previous modes of criticism.

Although typically classed as “postmodern” these works seem to go beyond “postmodernism” in that they not only expose the errors of looking at the world in a fixed way, but, like the fancy, offer new ways to read old visions of the world. They propose ways that force the “reader” to work through the world anew, seeing it as freshly as possible, for themselves.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei. Four Year Old Girl. Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 1998.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Portable Coleridge. Ed. I.A. Richards. New York: Penguin

Books, 1978.

Crockett, Clayton. A Theology of the Sublime. London: Routledge, 2001.

Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence. Trans. Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books, 2001.

Engell, James. The Creative Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Keats, John. John Keats: The Major Works. Ed. Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2001.

Pascoe, Judith. “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith” in Re-Visioning

Romanticism. Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

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

Press, 1993.

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[1] By “objects” here and elsewhere I do not only mean objects of perception, but an array of things from ideas, feelings, and sensation to moments in history, texts, and words.

[2] I offer this quote from Lyn Hejinian’s preface to “Happily” as an explanation for beginning this investigation of “Beachy Head” and the fancy with philosophy: “It would be equally grandiose of me to claim status as a philosopher. And yet, in the end, it is as philosophy—as the making and seeing of connections (to repeat Wittgenstein’s formulation)—that poetry participates in knowing what we can and can’t know about the world and how to live in it” (384). Likewise, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a study in what we can know (our apperception of the world) and what we can’t know (the world itself). Furthermore, the poetics of the imagination and of the fancy propose radically different positions on what we can and can’t know about the world (and, more importantly and more radically still, how to live in it).

[3] I directly address the difference between the different “ways of using language and mode of being” implied by the imagination and the fancy in the sections “Relationship with the World II: Language” and “Relationship with the World III: Subjectivity.”

[4] The notion of “doing something” to the world when we process it through our consciousnesses is directly related to Hejinian’s concern about “how to live” in the world; different modes of processing produce different modes of living. This renders the question of what we “do to the world” when we process it quite ethical. Do we appropriate it and make it in our image? Do we, in some way, access it without transforming it into something for human ends, rather than its own ends? In the groundless climate of the twenty-first century, this question of production takes on luminous proportions, for, as recipients of an almost radical playing out of Kantian ideas, we are all always already constructing the world and our mode of living. Given the tenuous relationship of words to world, the notion of what we “do to the world” when we process it through language is, ethically speaking, quite bleak, for it seems highly unlikely that we can even access “the world” let alone achieve a pure, unmediated access through language. This difficulty, however, makes contemporary poetry of the fancy important in terms of an ethical mode of being in the world. We can see this in the work Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge does in Four Year Old Girl. Four Year Old Girl centers around processing and perceiving the world, and Berssenbrugge gives us an example of the way that poetic language can think through the relationships between self and world without appropriating the world to the self’s own ends. For example, the first section of the poem “Gold”:

A yellow apple could be a small hollow in stone that flows over and over,

a yellow not in a thing, since it vanishes in the dark, while a thing remains

unchanged.

The person the feeling is about may remain unchanged, as the person becomes

visible to you.

When you see leaves in a jar against a pink wall, your door opens onto a pink wall,

chlorophyll effervescing in a leaf, a feeling of light. If I have that person already,

that makes me partly unaware of the person, as if I meant some far-off stars and I

were identical

with my deep thought that already knows them. I’m trying to find how I already

mean stars,

by making this harmonizing light in this room next to a pink room, my remote

thought. (17)

Within the course of this poem, the poet exposes several moments where a person might “naturally” appropriate the world in her perception of it, and shows that by re-thinking these “natural” appropriations of the world, we can propel our minds into the realm of thought, rather than the realm of second-natured appropriation. We all “naturally” think that colors inhere in objects, that an “apple is yellow”—this is one of the major ways that we have learned to construct reality. However, Berssenbrugge reminds us, “yellow...vanishes in the dark, while a thing remains unchanged.” With this simple recognition of the errant assumptions in the reality we have constructed and named “the world,” Berssenbrugge encourages us to question the rote paths of thought that map our general realities. And although other paths we might make are also bound to be “constructions,” approaching the world (and what we come to believe) with thought and investigation becomes an ethical alternative to approaching the world through our linguistic and mental habits.

[5] I have had the opportunity to view a copy of the first edition printing of “Beachy Head” (Beachy Head with Other Poems London: Joseph Johnson, 1807). Although the first edition was published posthumously, it was prepared for press by her and it is important to note that the notes in the first edition are formatted as footnotes rather than endnotes, the same way as the notes are formatted in the edition I work with in this essay.

[6] Yes, “conglomeration” and not “unit” or “piece” of language. “Beachy Head,” a poem of the fancy does not read or look like the unified text of the imagination. Instead, the different fonts and patterns of lines encourage us to read this as a text made of multiple texts.

7 We might quite profitably see Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” for fruitful instruction on “transparent” or “absorptive” language and “impermeable” or “anti-absorptive” language: “There are relative degrees/ or valences of impermeability that can be angled/ against one another to create/ interlinear or interphrasal ‘gaps’ that act/ like intervals in musical composition. Pushing/ further, impermeable elements may fuse together/ dysraphicaly to create a hyperabsorptive textual/ gravity in which the different origninary elements/ are no longer isolable. In this sense./ the absorbed & unabsorbed cleave,/ since cleave means both to divide/ & to hold together” (22-23). In his discussion of the absorptive and impermeable, Bernstein is careful to note that no piece of writing is either absorptive or impermeable; works of language are always both and work most interestingly when they achieve this cleaving. With her lovely, clear imagery and strong sense of place, Smith achieves both absorption and impermeability, but differs from her fellow Romantics by embracing the self-conscious and critical aspects such cleaving brings to light.

8 Whether or not there is a pronounced “linear line of flight” through the poem is, itself, a question for debate. One might trace the “perspective” of the poem from its beginning amidst the heights of the “stupendous summit” to the poem’s ending at the ocean’s depth. Or, one could trace Smith’s moral treatment of “characters” from the selfish boatmen merchants through the frolicking shepherds to the self-less hermit. Or, one might take a look at the line(s) drawn through history from “The period, when from Neustria’s hostile shore/ The Norman launch’d his galleys” (121-22) to the “now” of the day that “is past” (29), although one can easily see from the line numbers that this “line” is not truly “linear.” There is no reason to choose one path through the poem rather than another, for these are only three of several lines that might be taken and there is no singular line of flight to be followed.

9 This break of rhythm can be read as a breaking away from a notion of a unified poetics and a unified self. Meter is often read as a structuring force, something that proposes an underlying order to the world even if the words of the poem are proposing chaos. By constantly (but not consistently) breaking the rhythm of the poem, Smith proposes that there is not an underlying unity; rather, there are moments of consistency and pattern. Furthermore, the iamb is sometimes rather “romantically” likened to a heartbeat, the heartbeat of the speaker. This precious metaphor further engrains the notion that the poem is a representation of the speaker’s subjectivity (as discussed in the section “Relationship with the World III: Subjectivity ). By upsetting the heartbeat of the poem with the erratic rhythm of prose (which is made even more erratic by Smith’s inclusion of scientific names of flowers), Smith suggests an erratic, non-uniform speaker.

10 …as the “fancy” is a volatile force of mind.

11 This footnote serves as a specific example of the severe “erratic rhythms of prose” mentioned in the preceding footnote.

12 The length of these notes brings us to an interesting aesthetic and metaphysical question: what element dictates the importance of a unit of language? Does an author, such as Charlotte Smith, who is looking at the language and putting it to use as part of her poem, dictate the importance of each idea, allotting it a specific amount of space according to its importance to her text? Or does the information in and of itself (as far as we, remembering Kant, can know it) have its own weight of importance that demands to be recognized despite the ways in which it does or doesn’t fit into the work as a whole? Smith’s work in “Beachy Head” seems to argue the latter and allows the content of the note—not its ultimate use for her ends—dictate the amount of space, and importance, that it is allotted.

13 We might consider this sort of linking as a precursor to the links utilized in hypertext. Jena Osman’s “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist,” an example of poetic use of hypertext found on-line at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/osman/periodic/, engages the reader in the motion-act of fancy. The reader jumps from one element of the periodic table to another, unfolding poems as she clicks, linking poem to poem, poetic element to poetic element. Since the reader gets to decide the links and avenues to pursue, she is involved in creating the text much more than if she had the text before her in a static, print form. Although the text is limited by the number of links Osman has embedded in it, the fact that we must look at it on-line invites us to expand the array of possibilities by cutting and pasting the poem’s terms into the Google search window (always waiting at the top of the page/screen). In doing so we expand the text into the World Wide Web itself.

14 This is, of course, a figurative walking, predicated upon an “as if” but engaged with via a “suspension of disbelief” that allows the reader to float through the gates of the “as if” as if they weren’t there. It is the writer of the imagination’s duty to render those gates as wide and invisible as possible, lest they wake their reader from the dream of the text.

15 We see such a gathering of elements in the last part of the previous section (“Footnotes toward Language”) wherein I look at Smith’s gathering of such disparate modes of language as poeticisms (“beamy adamant”), the definition of diamonds, and bibliographic notes telling us how to find out more information about Indians diving for pearls. Smith sets these ideas and moments of language beside one another for the reader’s mind to flit over and incorporate however he or she wills.

16 This element of the fancy is particularly interesting in terms of Kant’s gap between our apprehension of the world and the world as it is in and of itself. Perhaps the fancy can offer us different “views” of apprehensions, thus creating a knowledge of the world that is based on more than one subject’s particular apprehension. This knowledge might be based on many views taken by a single person as well as the many views taken by other persons.

17 Note the assumption of a “self” that underlies this idea of transforming nature into poetic fodder; it is the same notion I discuss in “Relationship III.”

18 This, in itself, shows us a fundamental element of Smith’s relationship with the world around her. As the emphasis of these lines falls on the objects that they describe, Smith’s writings about the world, in general, are much more about “the world” (and about writing) than about “herself.” These lines do not depend on a narrative of subjectivity to hold them together. Rather, they depend on the descriptive powers of language.

19 Although I call Smith’s treatment “poetical,” I agree with Pascoe’s observation that Smith remains true to the observed characteristics of the flowers (203); Smith’s treatment of the world attempts at “truth” rather than something like “artistic license.” The veracity of Smith’s descriptions of the world is particularly interesting (and amusing) in light of her note on the pronunciation of “anémone,” included in the extended quotation in the body of this section. Smith worries about deviating from the “true” pronunciation of “anémone,” but deviates anyways because it sounds better in her poem. Her anxiety about this deviation, which engenders the note, shows the extent to which she is concerned with adhering to a description that gets at something “true” about the world rather than something merely imaginatively created.

20 As mentioned in my “Relationship” sections, this method of arranging may produce a kind of knowledge that gets at the world in a way that knowledge born of the imagination cannot. It seems as though the botanist, copying the folds, veins, branchings, and seed-pods of a specimen formulates an intimate knowledge of that plant in and of itself. This “knowledge” may not be easily articulated but may be the kind of “connaisance” which grows out of living with a person for 20 years rather than the “knowledge” born of reading about their achievements.

21 Note, here, the difference between “giving” the reader a snippet of reality and “capturing” reality in language. Also, this notion of “giving distinct features of reality” chimes with the notion of fancy’s ability to show us the world “in pieces and at a glance” proposed in “Relationship I.”

22 Although I use the word “relegated” I hope I have shown in “Footnotes towards Language” that Smith does not necessarily adhere to the traditional hierarchy of the textual body over the footnotes. Smith’s footnotes are every bit as important as the body of her work.

23 The close resemblance of these passages broaches an interesting question concerning Smith’s relationship to the concept of “the author” (and the concept of “authority”). Smith’s acts of appropriation seem to show that she did not hold tightly onto the idea that language, once written by an individual, is that individual’s property. Rather, it seems as though she viewed the phrases in the botanical texts that she studied and composed with as units of language independent of any sort of ownership. This speculation, of course, has implications about Smith’s notion of “identity” and its connection to “language.” If she views language as being autonomous from the author, it seems unlikely that she would view language as a “reflection” of an author’s “subjectivity.”

24 And here I cave to the temptation to include the Wittgenstein quote that seems to haunt thousands of essays on literature: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

25 In fact, as Clayton Crockett suggests in his philosophical text, A Theology of the Sublime, if we follow Kant’s workings of consciousness, the writer’s identity itself is also created (97).

26 As one can see from the sections of this paper which directly treat Smith’s work, I have chosen to privilege the “langauged” aspect of the work over the aspect of subjectivity, touching on this element mainly in the footnotes. Yet, the collection and dissolution of subjectivity across the language of “Beachy Head” instructs us with an example of the workings of the sort of subjectivity that arises from the fancy’s interaction with the world.

The first verse paragraph of the poem, itself, gives us much to work with. The first element of note is that the poem does not begin with an overt mention of “the self.” The first line does not proceed “I, on thy stupendous summit…would recline” but rather “On thy stupendous summit” and four lines later “I would recline.” This inversion of the syntax not only makes the “stupendous summit” the focal point of the opening line, but it give us multiple readings of the opening line. The line is first read as a proclamation of subject matter such as the “Ode On a Grecian Urn,” telling us that the poem to follow takes Beachy Head for its subject. It is not until after we have read past the fourth line that the first line gains another meaning: the speaker’s desire to recline on the summit of Beachy Head. This inversion and multiplicity warns us not to read the poem as an extended metaphor for Charlotte Smith’s encounter with sublime nature. Smith, by leaving herself out of the poem until the fourth line where she “reclines,” seems to be telling us that “she” has very little to do with the poem at all.

The second element of note is that the fourth line, “I would recline; while Fancy should go forth” separates out the “I” associated with the subjective ego from “Fancy.” Smith is here telling us that she wishes to leave her “self” behind and go forth with part of herself that is free from the chains of the ego: the fancy. It is interesting to note that “Fancy” in this line seems to be almost altogether independent of the human “I” reclining, yet we know that the “Fancy” is a mode or force of consciousness and, so, cannot be its own entity entirely. Nevertheless, Smith seems to lose her “self” within the course of the verse paragraph; the pronoun “I” is mentioned only one other time in line 12, the rest of the language getting lost in the rhythms and descriptions of summit meeting sea.

In terms of the “kind” of self that is present in “Beachy Head” it is important to note that although the language and world surrounding the consciousness in the first section of the poem supercedes the “I” in terms of grammar, syntax, and content, “Beachy Head” does not feel devoid of a speaker. There is still a strong sense of a singular consciousness and a singular stream of language that is particular to one individual (the language of “inmates of the chalky clefts that scar/ Thy sides” is farthest from generic language).