In September 1792, French revolutionaries killed more than a thousand political prisoners to prevent them from being freed and joining enemy forces. After the September massacres, many, including the English poet Charlotte Turner Smith, had to question their support for the French Revolution and its founding principles. In 1793, Smith published “The Emigrants,” a two-part poem about French refugees who settled in Brighthelmstone, a town in southern England. The first part of the poem is set a month after the September massacres, while the second part takes place the following spring. Smith uses the setting of his poem, a place where civilization and nature meet, to show how the atrocities committed by French radicals bring humanity out of harmony with nature. In condemning French atrocities, Smith does not show the ways in which revolutionaries literally destroy natural beauty; instead, it shows how her knowledge of suffering in France prevents her from connecting with nature, even in England, which was not physically affected by the conflict. While writers of Sensibility literature view such emotional responses as admirable, Smith portrays them as destructive forces that sever her connection to the natural beauty around her. Smith, therefore, uses “The Emigrants” not only to condemn the atrocities of the French Revolution, but to criticize the effectiveness and validity of the literature of Sensibility, distancing himself philosophically from Enlightenment thought and anticipating later writers of the Romantic movement. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Smith begins Book I of "The Emigrants" with the description of the natural areas around the city to begin to hint at the causes of the conflict in France disharmony between man and nature. Rather than describing the coast in terms of beauty in the poem's opening lines, he portrays it in a disturbed state: “SLOW in the winter morning, the struggling light / Casts a faint glow on the troubled waves” (1). With these elaborate descriptions of “distressed” light and “disturbed” waves, Smith suggests that nature has difficulty functioning as usual, or that, at least, he is unable to perceive nature without imagining it in conflict. Although this part of the poem is set in November, the weather is "winter", further suggesting that nature does not follow its usual pattern or that it fails to perceive it as usual; this unseasonable description suggests that the weather is worse than expected, which may parallel how the French Revolution, descending into violence, is also not going as Smith expected. Smith does not yet explicitly allude to the Revolution, but hints at its effects: “Alas! how few people wake up joyful in the morning!” he writes referring to those in France who are directly affected by the conflict (1). He writes of those who see “the day star, but curse its rays” (2). The victims are not simply lamenting the start of another day spent struggling to survive; the sun itself has become a representation of their hardships, so they “curse” the sunlight, thus rejecting a part of the natural world in which they should be able to find “joy,” but cannot. Smith continues to develop this connection between joy and nature through his descriptions of the landscape's creator. It conjures up the image of a benevolent and natural god "whose Spirit is called / This wondrous world of waters" (2). This is not a distant and impersonal god, but linked to “This” specific landscape. Here he finally begins to describenature as something beautiful and serene. He continues, writing that this god's breathing “Low murmur, above the gently rising tides, / When the beautiful Moon, in the clear summer night, / Radiates [the ocean] with long trembling lines of light” (2). This calm world of natural beauty she describes inhabits the same physical space as the beginning of the poem, but not at the same time. He specifically places this image in a “clear summer/night,” placing it in the past, before nature was thrown into the chaos he described, further highlighting the lack of such calm beauty in the poem's current setting. This god offers humanity “Nothing but good: Yet Man, the misguided Man, / Mars has done the good work he was asked to enjoy, / And makes of himself the evil he deplores” (3). Nature, therefore, should be a source of joy or enjoyment, but the “evil” of the revolutionaries cuts humanity off from this joy. While Smith herself is not directly threatened by the violence of the French Revolution, she too finds herself cut off from nature due to the conflict occurring on the other side of this once “wonderful” and now “troubled” ocean. The victims of the Revolution are supposedly cut off from nature due to their concern with the threat of violence and the actual destruction of their natural environment, but for Smith, safe in the untouched south of England, this alienation from nature must have a different source. Faced with his problems along with news of the Revolution, he expresses a desire to leave society and live amid the natural beauty surrounding his city, in "some lonely cottage, deep / In the green woods" (3-4) . Only here could she appreciate "The beautiful works of God, untainted by man / And [be] less affected then, by human misfortunes / [she] had not witnessed" (4). Here he begins to connect his relationship with nature with the ideas of the literature of Sensibility; in this genre, readers have the opportunity to display their virtue through emotional responses to scenes of suffering or difficulty they read about; in other words, responding to the “human sufferings / [that] they witnessed” not with their eyes, but through literature, or in Smith's case, through the news or through his encounters with the emigrants. Although these emotional responses are seen as admirable in Sensibility readers, Smith expresses a desire to escape having to respond emotionally to suffering she does not witness, suggesting that a connection to nature may prevent her from being subjected to scenes that require these responses. . However, now that she is aware of the misfortunes of the French people, not even nature can allow her to escape these feelings. He says that nothing, not "the sequestered cot, where the briar / and wild honeysuckle embrace the mossy thatch", nor the "most substantial farmhouse", nor "the most stately dome / shaded by dark firs", nor "no one of buildings, new and tidy / With windows that swirl towards the restless Sea,” can “shut out for an hour the specter of the Cure” (6). Here, for the first time, he actually begins to describe the city, but he does not do so without commenting on the city's relationship with nature, and only after describing several other homes more closely linked to the natural world. He describes his emotional responses to the Revolution as “the specter of Care” – a ghost, something to be afraid of – and suggests that nothing, neither nature nor civilization, can get rid of this “Care”, this feeling of Sensitivity, once she starts to feel it. Her tendency to describe the natural world as more important than civilization shows that she is still somewhat in line with theEnlightenment thinkers, even if the revolution is making them question this alignment. Smith's lingering connection to the Enlightenment is most evident when he says that the French emigrants, who “dwelt among the artificial scenes / Of the populous City… [forget] all taste / For the genuine beauty of Nature” (25). Echoing Rousseau, he suggests that emigrants were corrupted by the “second nature” of city life and cut themselves off from true original nature. He exemplifies this trend with a French emigrant sitting on the shore with her children. This woman has become “tired of the task / Of having.” here, with swollen and aching eyes / Fixed on the gray horizon, since dawn” (22). Contemplating nature, for her, is a tiring task rather than a source of joy, because "In her daydreams that native land appears to her again"; he sees “Versailles…its painted galleries, / And rooms of regal splendor, rich with gold,” only to open his eyes “On sad reality” (23). Smith continues to emulate Rousseau by criticizing the way the artificial replaces nature for the French woman, but here he also begins to anticipate the emerging movement of Romanticism. Twenty-four years after the publication of “The Emigrants,” the Romantic writer Samuel Coleridge wrote about the concept of “Fancy” in his Biographia Literaria; “Fantasy,” he argues, “is nothing other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space… it is mixed and modified by that empirical phenomenon of will” (478). Coleridge believes that acts of will cut humanity off from the “totality,” a mysterious conception of the world opposed to the rational gaze of Enlightenment thinkers. Predating Coleridge's text by more than two decades, Smith's work applies a similar concept to this French emigrant. This woman sees the beautiful natural environment as sad and finds no joy in it because, by exercising her will and seeing only combinations of images from her memory, she can only observe the old life she has lost; in this way he is unable to participate in the "totality". She does not "[look] smugly at the Ocean's silver breast, / As she sails lightly above the summer clouds / Reflected in the wave" because, due to her willful use of "Fancy", as Coleridge might later say, the The ocean now reflects to her only the lost land on its opposite coast (25). Smith, despite her safety in England, experiences the same alienation from nature as the French woman due to the Revolution. For Smith, looking out over the ocean, he can only hear “the deep groans / Of holy martyrs and royal sufferers” in the wind (19). She is still separated from nature by Sensibility, by her emotional responses to the suffering she imagines in France. However, this is not "Imagination" as Coleridge would say, but "Fancy", as she too must borrow and recombine images from her memory to imagine these scenes. Engaging in sensibility, then, to borrow Coleridge's later term, is an act of “imagination” and will that leads to alienation from nature. Although Smith herself does not use these terms, the language of Romanticism is easy to read in her poetry. Smith leaves Enlightenment thought behind and moves towards the Romantic movement in the second part of his poetry. Book II is set the following April, meant to be a time of beauty and rebirth. However, just as the ocean became a mirror of suffering in Book I, the spring becomes little more than a reminder that the situation has only gotten worse as time passes in Book II. "I would gladly take a break from Care," writes Smith, "courting, once again, the influence of Hope / (for 'Hope' still awaits the.