a far more wildered mental landscape. The self-consciousness of Smith's arther "
nice felicities
"produce the poem's final, disastrous revelation: that the delicate workings of the sonnet execute an awareness of the "giant horrors" one constructs by raising illusory (i.e., rational) defenses against them.
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There is an imagination in Smith's sonnet at war with its cursed artifice and its limited, shrinking consciousness. Warned (reasonably) against a direct encounter with the lunatic, Smith goes to meet him in imagination because her own "moody sadness"her feelingspossess a deeper knowledge than her defensive, civilized understanding. In 1812 Byron would make the drama of "Consciousness awaking to her woes" world-famous in the story of Childe Harold (Canto I, stanza 92). This story, however, began to be told in the late eighteenth century's literature of sensibility, as Smith's sonnet shows. It is the story of the sleep of reason, its illusory dreams, and its "awaking" to that complex Romantic understanding that ''Sorrow is knowledge" (
Manfred
I.1).
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A crucial feature of Smith's sonnet is its style of sinceritya style that would come to characterize so much Romantic poetry. The purpose of the style is to make the immediate experience of "the poet" the dramatic focus of the textas if "the poet" were herself the poem's central subject, as if she were subject to the revelatory power of the poem she herself decides to write. Romantic melancholy is one affective consequence of the deployment of such a style:
mon coeur mis à nu
, and at one's own hand.
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 | | "style of sincerity": Although Romantic art tends to represent itself as spontaneous and unstudied, these qualities are aesthetic effects of rhetorical strategies. Two key devices are (1) a detailed presentation of a concrete immediate context for the poetical text (epitomized in the famous subtitle of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"); (2) the construction of a poetic revery, as if the reader were "overhearing" the poet musingin several sensesaloud.
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Much Romantic poetry will devote itself to a search for ways to defend itself against the dangerous self-divisions fostered by this style of sincerity. The most famous of these defenses was raised by Wordsworth, whose journeys into his
selva oscura
brought, his poetry argued, an "abundant recompense" for psychic wounding and suffered loss.
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| | For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
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