The new sensitivity that characterizes Romantic literature often leads to the recurrence of melancholy as a powerful and recurring motif, especially in poetry. Romantic poets use their poems to express personal feelings and anxieties and use imagination to capture them. As Addison and Shaftesbury state, "the imagination must not be subordinated to the intellect and focuses on the beauty of the wilderness as a source of melancholy." This article will analyze Charlotte Smith's sonnet 32, "To Melancholy" as a representation of the new mood and conception of the world that characterizes Romantic poetry and the strong influence of nature as a powerful and magical force capable of connecting different worlds. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Smith's Sonnet 32 ​​revolves around melancholy and, from the beginning, the poet states that these lines are addressed to "[t]o melancholy", an element that is personified and to which the power of a character himself. In this way, the poet's state of mind will be one of the central themes of the poem and every element that appears in it acts as a friendship that fits Smith's feeling perfectly. There are many theories about the voice in Smith's poems and whether or not the poet herself speaks in all of her verse. As Paula R. Backscheider argues in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, "Kathryn Pratt demonstrates that the speaker is both spectator and spectacle and uses individual sonnets as examples, as To Melancholy does.[...](Sonnet LXXXV), which ''sets up its speaker as a theatrical spectator.'' (p-332) This essay treats the voice of the poem as if it were Smith's own voice, considering that the setting of the poem itself is a place very familiar to her. - the River Arun, in Sussex - as well as the fact that Smith writes recurrently in his letters that he suffered from melancholy and misfortune In Sonnet 32, he is in an isolated place, staring at his surroundings, which becomes a source of inspiration but not because of the. nature itself. This turning to nature occurs in an egocentric way. The imaginative force of the poet, in this case the use of pathetic errors, subjugates the real world and modifies nature to the point of making it a docile element that transforms itself to accompany it in its meloncholy. Smith uses a sensorial description of the landscape and its strength: "I love to listen to the empty sighs / Through the half-bare forest that breathes the storm (l. 3-4). The appeal to the senses is a way of offering the reader the opportunity to enter her world and experience the same sensations as her and even take us into the same setting as her poetry; as Kristin M. Girten states in Charlotte Smith's Tactile Poetics, “[t]he visual imagery of Charlotte Smith's poetry is striking in its microscopic attention to details and its transporting effects (p.215). Nature in this case is represented in its most decadent and destructive way; its elements have the ability to be alive and to move the world around it concentrate in the description of her environment and of this sublime and decadent nature that abandons her. It seems in some way that nature envelops and absorbs her, transmitting the sensation that something supernatural is arising and taking her into another world. Furthermore, Smith is believed to be the founder of the basis of the Gothic novel, easily noticeable at this point in the poem. where he uses gothic elements to represent his state of mind. Summons ghosts and frightening elements that seem to be carried by the wind; once again, his use of sensory description – especially through the sense of hearing – produces a strange effect on the reader, as if we werepersecuted together with the poet. This effect is particularly notable in lines 7 and 8: "Strange and mournful sounds are heard."tunes,/ As of nocturnal wanderers, mourning their misfortunes, where the use of alliteration of the sounds s, mew are reminiscent of ghostly laments and ghostly. Furthermore, from the beginning, we find the strong metaphor of autumn to symbolize how everything becomes darker in his world; Smith evokes darkness and darkness and finds inspiration in them. "[W]hen the last autumn spreads its evening veil, the light disappears little by little" and gray mists rise from these dim waves, creating a deadly atmosphere of terror. We can note the evocation of the sublime in nature, as Burke states in A Philisophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauty: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate with greater power, is Stupor; and stupor is that state of the soul in which all its movements are suspended, with a certain measure of horror. […] No passion so effectively deprives the mind of all its ability to act and reason as fear . […] To make something truly terrible, darkness seems necessary in general. The second part of the poem, however, changes and offers a structural turning point. Here the vault appears and we find a sextet that introduces us to the meeting of Smith and of Otway's ghost on the bank of the River Arun. All the elements of the poem seem to originate in the River Arun and, in some way, it has the power to act as a link between Otway and herself. Smith was known to be an admirer of Otway, considered to have a special talent in depicting pure human feelings and this is exactly what Smith is trying to do. The river Arun and its waters are considered by the poetess to be a connection between past and present and are capable of making her meet Otway. Indeed, it is in this environment that she imagines him returning to life as if emerging directly from the water, like the rest of the ghosts who seem to come out to haunt her through the river mist. We can find this magical effect of nature and its elements as a connection between present and past also in poems such as "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey: On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13,1798 by Wordsworth, where he turns to the water of the `sylvan Wye, and with the only company of nature that `[t]he [he] was all in all, he is able to evoke the past and find an outlet for his anxiety in the purity of nature In this way he is "almost suspended" (l. 47) and is able to "...see into the life of things" (l. 51). We note that Charlotte Smith does not reflect on the beauty of an ideal and perfect nature, as Wordswoth does, nor does she add any other person in this poem. She focuses on herself and resorts to the elements that best suit her melancholy, even personifying nature or resorting to ghosts. It is curious how she shies away from established literary preconceptions ; she does not evoke classical figures to guide her but implies patriotic feelings by resorting to the figure of Otway, who was born near the same river where she is writing. It is in this moment and in the inspiration that comes from meeting Otway and the way he is able to emphasize with her when Smith finds the cure to his melancholy feelings and realizes that they are not something to be afraid of but are something to which he can delight in. The poet here addresses melancholy directly - a literary figure called an apostrophe - and recognizes in it a power and a magical effect in her and in her poetry. The use of the sonnet form, following the structure of ABBA, evokes the Petrarchan sonnet, whose theme is usually love, it can be used as an ambiguous allusion to melancholy not as something negative or sad but as a subject of".