Subject to Place, Subjected by Poetry

Abstract

Both Smith and Wordsworth are identified with specific landscapes: the South Downs in Sussex, the Lake District in Cumbria. While Wordsworth has had the advantage of more than a century’s worth of embedding and iconicizing, Smith is on the verge of becoming a more visible feature in her home landscape, and of course her sonnets set in and around her childhood home, as well as “Beachy Head,” perform the function of creating landscapes, inspiring and enabling the speaker’s verse, among other things.¹ Within Romanticism, place often functions as the originary home, the childhood setting, the progenitor of memory which itself informs Romantic poetry; it underpins critical understanding of much of Wordsworth. For both poets, place offers the creation of locality, which in turn leads to a kind of anchoring within the landscape, so that self (or perhaps selves) can be derived from landscape, and hence naturalized: Wordsworth in the Lakes, Smith on the Downs. A kind of place-identity, or place-identification, can be attached to both poets, encouraged by the frequent return to place(s) in their poetry, and their memorializing of rivers, stones, flowers, animals, and diverse locations. This immersion in locale, however, is not without its problems, and both Smith and Wordsworth write into some of their locale poetry a distinct unease, which often corresponds to a speaker’s inability to see past place, or to recognize the relation of this place to that one.

But near one ancient tree, whose wreathed roots

Form’d a rude couch, love-songs and scatter’d rhymes,

Unfinished sentences, or half erased,

And rhapsodies … were sometimes found —

Smith, “Beachy Head,” 1807

— Nay, Traveller! rest.

Wordsworth, “Yew-Tree,” 1798