ABSTRACT

This chapter offers the recluse figures in order to suggest the significance and persistence of the tensions evident in the enigmatic conclusion of Beachy Head and to mark out a tradition to which the poem belongs. Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head moves quite spectacularly from a sweeping and panoramic cosmological, geographical and historical vision, to a series of village vignettes, before concluding with the single and isolated figure of 'the lone Hermit' in the final lines of the poem. The opening lines of Beachy Head, indeed, offer the reader a prospect view in miniature composed precisely according to the aesthetic principles that John Barrell has suggested were widely adopted in eighteenth-century Britain from the seventeenth-century Roman landscape painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Addressing the question of Beachy Head's fragmentary nature, John Anderson suggests that 'the fragmentary form of this poem is not entirely an accident–that Smith was attracted to the idea of constructing a ruin, of using fragments expressively'.