The new sensitivity that characterizes Romantic literature often leads to the recurrence of melancholy as a powerful and recurring motif, particularly in poetry. Romantic poets use their poems to express their personal feelings and anxieties and to capture them, they use their imagination. As Addison and Shaftesbury say, “the imagination should 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 worldview that characterized Romantic poetry and of the strong influence of nature as a powerful force and magic capable of connecting different worlds. Say no. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Smith's Sonnet 32 ​​revolves around melancholy, and early on the poet states that these lines address "melancholy." , an element personified and to which the power of a character itself is attributed. In this way, the poet's mood will be one of the central themes of the poem and each element that appears in it will act as a communion that perfectly matches Smith's feeling. There are many theories about the voice in Smith's poems and whether it is the poet herself who speaks in all of her verses. 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 she does For Melancholy."[ …](Sonnet LXXXV), which ''establishes its speaker as a theater spectator.''(p-332). This essay treats the voice of the poem as if it were Smith's voice, considering that the very setting of the poem is a place very familiar to him - the River Arun, in Sussex - in addition to the fact that Smith wrote repeatedly in her letters that she suffered from melancholy and unhappiness. In Sonnet 32, she is in an isolated place, looking at her surroundings, which becomes a source of inspiration but not because of nature itself. This return to nature occurs in an egocentric way. The poet's imaginative power, in this case the use of pathetic errors, subdues the real world and modifies nature until it becomes a docile element which transforms to accompany him in his melancholy. Smith uses a sensory description of the landscape and its strength: “I love to listen to the hollow sighs/Through the half-leafless wood that breathes the wind (l. 3-4). The use of the senses is a way of offering the reader the possibility of entering his world and experiencing the same feelings as his and even taking us to the same setting of his poem; As Kristin M. Girten says in Tactile Poetics of Charlotte Smith, “[t]he visual imagery of Charlotte Smith's poetry is striking in its microscopic attention to detail and its transporting effects (p. 215). In this case, nature is represented in its most decadent and destructive form; its elements have the capacity to be alive and to move the world around it. The first eight lines are focused on the description of his environment and this sublime and decadent nature which abandons him. It seems that nature envelops and absorbs him, giving him the feeling that something supernatural is arising and taking him to another world. Additionally, Smith is believed to be the founder of the basis of the Gothic novel, easily noticed at this point in the poem. where she uses gothic elements to represent her mood. It evokes ghosts and frightening elements thatseem carried by the wind; once again, his use of sensory description - particularly through the sense of hearing - produces a strange effect on the reader, as if we were haunted along with the poet. This effect is particularly remarkable in verses 7 and 8: "Strange sounds are heard, and mournful sounds are heard. melodies, / Like wanderers of the night, who mourn their misfortunes, where the use of alliteration of the sounds s, m and w recalls spectral and ghostly lamentations. Furthermore, from the beginning, we find the strong metaphor of autumn to symbolize how everything is darkening in his world; Smith evokes darkness and obscurity and finds inspiration there. “[When] the last autumn spreads its evening veil, the light disappears little by little” and the gray mists of these dark waves arise, creating a deadly atmosphere of terror. We can notice the evocation of the sublime in nature as Burke says in A Philisophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauty: "The passion provoked by the great and the sublime in nature, when these causes operate with the most power, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its movements are suspended, with a certain horror. […] No passion deprives the mind so effectively of all its powers of action and reasoning as fear. […] To make something very terrible, darkness generally seems necessary. The second part of the poem changes, however, and offers a structural turn. Here the volta appears and we find a sestet which introduces us to the meeting of Smith and the ghost of Otway on the banks of the River Arun. All of the elements in the poem seem to come from the River Arun, and in one way or another they have the power to serve as a connection between Otway and herself. Smith was known to be an admirer of Otway, considered to have a special talent for depicting pure human feelings and that is exactly what Smith is trying to do. The river Arun and its waters are considered by the poet as a link between the past and the present and are capable of making her meet Otway. In fact, it is in this setting that she imagines him coming back to life as if coming straight out of the water, like the rest of the ghosts who seem to come out to haunt her through the mist of the river. We can also find this magical effect of nature and its elements as a link between the present and the past in poems like "Lines written a few kilometers above Tintern Abbey: We revisit the banks of the Wye during from a tour, July 13, 1798 by Wordsworth, where he turns to the water of the 'Sylvan Wye, and with the sole company of nature which '[for] him was all in all, he is able to evoke the past and find release from anxiety in the purity of nature. In this way, he is “almost suspended” (l. 47) and he is able “…to see the life of things (l. 51). Note that Charlotte Smith does not reflect on the beauty of an ideal and perfect nature. , as Wordswoth does, nor does he even add any other person in this poem. She focuses on herself and returns to the elements that best correspond to her melancholy, even personifying nature or returning to ghosts. It is curious to see how it escapes established literary preconceptions; she does not evoke classical figures to serve as a guide but she implies a kind of patriotic feeling by returning to the figure of Otway, born near the very river in which she writes. It is at this moment and in the inspiration produced by the meeting with Otway and the way he is able to emphasize with her when Smith finds the cure for his melancholic feelings and realizes that there is no what to be afraid of but.