Where the wild woods and pathless forests frown,
The darkling Pilgrim seeks his unknown way,
Till on the grass he throws him weary down,
To wait in broken sleep the dawn of day:
Thro' boughs just waving in the silent air,
With pale capricious light the Summer Moon
Chequers his humid couch; while Fancy there,
That loves to wanton in the Night's deep noon,
Calls from the mossy roots and fountain edge
Fair visionary Nymphs that haunt the shade,
Or Naiads rising from the whispering sedge;
And, 'mid the beauteous group, his dear loved maid
Seems beckoning him with smiles to join the train:
Then, starting from his dream, he feels his woes again!
– Charlotte Smith
This sonnet, written shortly before the 18th turned into the 19th century, combines the threatening aspects of the wilderness with the enchanting. We are first shown the scene: wild woods, pathless forests, frowning, in a personified way. It's a foreboding sight. Only in the second line are we introduced to the human element in this scene: an intruder, a darkling Pilgrim on his unknown way. If he's a pilgrim, how can his way be unknown, unless his ultimate goal is not some specific religious shrine but some as-yet undefined sense of peace? He is propelled by the inchoate yearning the fuels the Romantic wanderer. Darkling is always a striking adjective. Given the frowning forests, it's no wonder he is in the dark, but the word also carries with it something more than merely "without light"; it suggests something mysterious, disquieting, a darkness spiritual as well as literal. (Most readers of poetry will hear an echo in this opening of Dante wandering lost in the forest at the opening the Divine Comedy, with the grand & sacred aura that memory carries with it).
Weary from his unsated searching, the Pilgrim throws himself on the grass to sleep – a broken sleep, of course. Sleep leads to that other ambiguous realm of freedom & fright, the echt-Romantic world of dreaming. Smith really creates the whole scene with such swift strokes – the Pilgrim, a word with a long tradition of spiritual seeking & growth, here applied to a restless soul clearly in turmoil: he strays through the darkness & the wild, as if any direction is the same; he throws himself on the grass, his sleep will not be deep or restful.
The physical situation is as deftly presented as the psychological, & the two are intermingled, with human emotions & moods applied to Nature, & the natural world reflecting the inner state of the Pilgrim: the silent air, the boughs barely swaying, the moonlight, pale & capricious: pale, suggesting a ghostly rather than robust presence; capricious, which in this context suggests something like dappled, or the varying light you get when clouds or swaying tree-limbs temporarily block the light. But capricious is usually applied to humans, & it's usually a gendered term, applied mostly to women who are seen as emotionally volatile or subject to sudden changes of mood (if applied to a man, there would be an implication of effeminacy, suggesting he is lacking in manly steadiness of purpose). Here it is applied to the moon, usually personified as a goddess, in particular Artemis/Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt, & of course the moon, with its regular cycles of waxing & waning, is a symbol of constant changing. A suggestion of a woman, a virgin uninterested in love, an element changeable & capricious, light that comes & goes: we may be getting a hint of the causes of the Pilgrim's underlying discontent.
The moonlight chequers (the British spelling of checkers; the poet is reinforcing the sense of spotty & irregular light) the humid couch: basically, the damp bank on which he's thrown himself. This is the sort of fancy diction that could be vaguely comic, but here it suggests to me that for the pilgrim the lines between civilization (a couch or proper bed) & the wilderness (a bank of soft grass, just as good!) are blurring. Is this the effect of exhaustion, dreaming, or despair?
Fancy appears; here, as in Shakespeare, the term means Imagination, particularly untrammeled imagination, a quality that emerges strongly in the night's deep noon, which is an inversion referring to midnight – again, a blurring of lines, this time between day & night. Fancy is personified as one who loves – a word that reinforces our sense of an erotic dilemma as what's lying at the heart of the poem – to wanton – a word that connects with capricious earlier &, again, reinforces a sense of erotic titillation & uncertainty underlying this Pilgrim's progress. Wanton meant something like to play or frolic, but already there was also an underlying sense of the meaning to be sexually unrestrained – again, this was a gendered term, applied in the sexual sense mostly to women.
Our pilgrim's sleep is broken: is he dreaming, or in a state of half-slumber in which his imagination (Fancy) is conjuring up an erotic vision? He seems to have some classical learning, to picture these women (naked, or nearly so, we can assume) as nymphs & naiads (nymphs are forest spirits, mostly associated with trees, while naiads are water spirits). It's a pretty picture, to him & to us; what sort of distancing is underway that compels him to see them not just as naked pretty women but as classical spirits? (It's like those academic paintings that displayed nudity freely as long as they could dress up the naked with a classical title.)
The scene is lovely but unreal, a bit otherworldly: the visionary nymphs . . . haunt the shade; visionary suggests religious ecstasy, but also something trance-like & unreal; haunt here means, basically, where they hang out, but it of course also carries ghostly overtones, & shade is a term that can refer to ghosts as well as the shadows cast by the forest. The whole scene is enticing, but illusory & possibly dangerous: there are dark powers at loose in the forest.
Right before we come to the final couplet, the implied but as-yet unseen other half of the hinted-at story appears: his dear loved maid. (Maid here means a young, virgin woman.) He loves her, but does she love him? In the concluding couplet, she seems to gesture to him to join them in their frolics, but just at that sweet moment his dream-world dissolves, & he remembers his unhappiness – presumably that he is not loved in return. We can see no ending, certainly not a happy one, to this pilgrimage, & part of the Pilgrim's grief is that he also sees no end in sight, at least in the actual world. Lovely dreams show up to entice, delude, & then torment him in the trackless forest.
I took this from The Poems of Charlotte Smith, edited by Stuart Curran.
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