The Macbeth Chain of being

Charlotte Smith is an underappreciated writer of the Early Romantic period. Despite the fact that both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (two of the more famous Romantics/OWG’s) both credited Smith with influencing their works, she has never reached the same level of acclaim that both men enjoy and has only in recent years began to be properly recognized as an important part of the English canon. I am sad to say I had neither heard of Smith nor her works before this class, but I am glad I have been exposed to her writing and hope to make her more well-known when I teach my own future literature classes.

Her life was absolutely tragic: a mother of 12 (3 died, leaving 9 hungry mouths to feed), she was pawned off on a husband at age 15, a betrayal by her father that she always saw as her being “sold off.” She spent a majority of her youth pregnant and raising children while trying to write whenever she wasn’t otherwise occupied with keeping the financial wolves at bay. The sheer misery of her existence bleeds through every poem. The selections we read for class literally came from a book called, “Elegiac Sonnets,” so I suppose we ought to have seen that coming. Alas, we simpleminded college students once again show how much we have yet to learn…

I loved all her poems but found “To Sleep” the most relatable of the three we read. There is something so quintessentially familiar to the college student about begging the universe for the solace of a sleep that won’t come. We can feel the pained urgency in the speaker’s (presumably Smith’s) pleading first line, “Come balmy Sleep,” for what student (or what human being in general, for that matter) hasn’t ever felt the same? I have spent many a night staring at the ceiling in the dark, waiting for sweet oblivion to overtake me and worrying that it won’t happen, then giving up and turning Netflix on to keep the anxiety at bay. Many of us students have also resorted to alternative means to sedate ourselves when sleep proves elusive, whether that be NyQuil, Benadryl, cannabis, or anything else, and with her references to “poppies” and “opiate aid” one is led to think that.

Smith herself at one time may have resorted to using laudanum to sleep and, given the poem, it may have stopped working. The next few lines made me stop and realize that Charlotte Smith had to have received a good education even though she was a girl, rarer a circumstance than many realize even for that time period and only accessible to the well-to-do. The giveaway was the use of certain references she made in the poem. In line 3 she shows her knowledge of mythology by invoking Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams. Around line 7 she appears to be paraphrasing Shakespeare. Her line “the poor sea boy, in the rudest hour, Enjoys thee more than he who wears a crown” sounds just like Henry IV, Part II, Act III.

Scene 1, when the Bard himself says “Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, And in the calmest and most stillest night…Then happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” She even reuses the same word as Shakespeare, “partial,” to personify sleep and ask for its help. I can’t help but see that as either a deliberate homage or plagiarism, and given that she is a respected writer, I doubt the latter. She discusses all the people who sleep better than her— the peasant, the sea boy, and the village girl, who have all exhausted themselves with honest work.

One could mistake this one first reading as an exploitation or an idealization of poverty and class for the sake of art, but I think it had more to do with the fact that even though they physically work harder than she does, their cares are simpler. A bit classist? Perhaps, although I don’t think she meant it that way. No, I think it is because in a naïve way she sees them as only having to concern themselves with the present moment, with “labor, liberty and love,” while she must worry about her children, her family’s social reputation, her husband’s numerous debts, her writings, and many other issues specific to her upper class origin. The poem ends saying that sleep denies her the aid that would “calm the anxious breast; to close the streaming eye.”

Essentially it is her anxieties and the fact that she’s crying her eyes out that is keeping her awake. The sudden realization at the end that this is more than mere insomnia is craftily done, for it makes the poem so terribly sad and makes it stick with you. It reminds me of yet another Shakespeare work, Macbeth, in which both the titular character and his wife lose their ability to sleep normally as a result of the guilt they feel after murdering their own king in pursuit of power and glory (a gross oversimplification that I hope you will forgive). The biggest difference, though, being that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth get what they deserve, while Smith’s sleeplessness feels so undeserved. In her case, the reader is stricken with a deep sense of pity for this weeping poetess. You just want to hug her and tell her that everything is going to be okay, even if it won’t in the end.

Did you like this example?

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