Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains

Abstract

In Chapter 10 of the first volume of Persuasion, Jane Austen’s favourite heroine, Anne Elliot, no longer in the spring of her life, finds herself musing on whether or not Captain Wentworth has transferred his affections from her to one of the Misses Musgrove. ‘She occupied her mind as much as possible’ by repeating to herself quotations from ‘some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn’.¹ When Wentworth gives a sign of his interest in Louisa Musgrove, Anne’s equanimity is disturbed: she ‘could not immediately fall into quotation again. The sweet scenes of Autumn were for a while put by — unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory’ (p. 83). This generic tender sonnet, which gives an insight into Miss Elliott’s inner world and the sentimental vogue of the wider world, may be an allusion to the extremely popular Elegiac Sonnets of Charlotte Smith.² Smith’s sonnets abound in comparisons between the recurrence of the seasons and the persistence of her loss. For example ‘To melancholy’ begins conventionally enough, ‘When latest Autumn spreads her evening veil… ’ (sonnet XXXII, p. 34). One of her most popular sonnets, ’Written at the close of Spring’ ends: ’Another May new buds and flowers shall bring;/Ah! why has happiness — no second Spring?’ (sonnet II, p. 13) The association between loss and ritual return is fundamental to the move of consolation found in traditional elegies; yet consolation and renewal, as I will argue, are eschewed by Smith in her melancholy sonnets.