ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head–her long poem published posthumously in 1807–forms part of a larger research project on discursive constructions of identity in British Romanticism. It illustrates Beachy Head, presenting Beachy Head as one of the 'legible rocks' of Romantic poetry. 'In crossing the Channel from the coast of France', Charlotte Smith explains in a note to her poem, 'Beachy-Head is the first land made'. The subject of Beachy Head is not confined by any limitations of time or space. Beachy Head gives not just images of how nature overgrows the ruins of a declining civilisation–it makes the far more radical suggestion that culture and nature are just two seemingly disparate phenomena on one and the same continuum. Beachy Head does show, by precept and example, that sub specie historiae naturae et civilisationis the two are not only commensurable but should be used in conjunction.
