Headlands

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Charlotte Smith’s “On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic” is a poem of the imagination. The whole octave forms a question as she vividly describes this lunatic whose presence prevents her from walking on the promontory. The imagined lunatic begins as an ‘it’ – “measuring…its distance from the waves that chide below” (2 – 3) and ends as a ‘he’ – “he seems (uncursed with reason) not to know” (13). As the speaker broods at her desk this thing becomes creature becomes person, finally emerging from the mist as someone she envies for his freedom and naiveté.

The word “wild” appears twice in the poem – early in the poem it is paired with “hollow,” suggesting insanity, but later with “wandering,” which associates it with freedom from restraint. In line 13 she writes that he is “uncursed with reason,” another cause for jealousy, because she herself is cursed. This speaks to the romantic sentiment that experience and knowledge can be a burden and innocence an enviable quality.

The most captivating part of the poem, however, at least to me, is the way things blur together. The landscape and the lunatic meandering across it become one, and both are a product of the speaker’s mind. The wind sighs and the man murmurs, responding to the surf. He stands on the brink, both of the land and of some mental promontory… or is it she, the speaker, on this brink? It seems that one cannot imagine qualities in a person that they themselves do not, in some capacity, possess. There is “a solitary wretch” (1) and it is she, the speaker, as much as any imagined madman.

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The entire text of the poem can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/51893