I only just justified Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’ as a long enough poem to track my reading of such. It is a poem that explores the relationship between man and nature (a traditional work of romanticism) but from the perspective of the cliffs of Beachy Head. Here Smith follows human history looking at the fossilised past and the Norman conquest to the mundane of fishing and the nighttime acts of smuggling. 

The poem is written with no rhyme scheme but also lacks a stanza structure, the lengths constantly varying for no major perceived reason. As far as a work of romanticism goes, it was extremely typical and not much special at all. Given my love for many Romantic works and the themes surrounding such, this one just didn’t really hit the mark for me.