‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ is a sonnet by one of the great proto-Romantic poets of the second half of the eighteenth century, Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Smith’s sonnets anticipate Romanticism partly because nature in her poetry is so often feared with an awesome power that verges on the terrifying: ‘life’s long darkling way’ is brooding and full of menace here.
Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening
Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night on the ocean settles dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding ‘Strike the bell!’
All is black shadow but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Misled the pilgrim – such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends in life’s long darkling way.
‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ is a sonnet whose title explains the location (we are near a sea-port or harbour) and the time of day (evening). The poem contains a number of features which would come to be associated with Romanticism, but we will come back to those in a moment.
Let’s analyse the poem section by section, summarising its content.
Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night on the ocean settles dark and mute,
The word ‘clifted’ means ‘split’ or ‘fissured’: it’s related to the word ‘cleft’, i.e. cleaved or split in two. The shore or boundary between land and sea is uneven and rugged. There are no neat lines or perfect angles here, such as the earlier Augustan or neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope, earlier in the eighteenth century, would have praised. Romantics are drawn to the natural roughness and imperfection found among nature and the elements.
Talking of elements, those ‘vapours’ – the mists from the sea – are ‘Huge’, as if they are on the verge of encompassing everything, making the poet’s view even more messy and unclear. There is an absence of both sight and sound: the night, as it settles down upon the surface of the sea, is both ‘dark and mute’.
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding ‘Strike the bell!’
However, all is not completely silent: those ‘billows’ – the spume or foam from the sea – crash upon the rocks with such energy that they create a ‘repercussive roar’ as they strike the stones. (Smith’s alliteration, which returns in ‘rugged’ and ‘rocks remote’, suggests the roaring sound of the water on the rocks.)
And there are human sounds, too: sailors in a ‘bark’ or boat shout to each other where their boat is anchored to the shore, as one seaman takes over from another on watch duty. Smith also hears one voice announcing that the next hour has arrived (watches at sea traditionally change over every few hours, on the new hour), striking a bell to signal the hour.
All is black shadow but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Misled the pilgrim – such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends in life’s long darkling way.
Everything is plunged in the ‘black shadow’ of late evening and coming night, with these shadows suggesting the liminality that is present throughout ‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’. It is a poem that is liminal in terms of its location (between land and sea), its time (evening being between day and night), and its imagery and detail (shadow, plus one sailor giving way to another on watch).
There is, however, a clearly visible or ‘lucid’ line (‘lucid’, in contrast to the earlier misty ‘vapours’, suggests clarity as well as light: ‘lucid’ is 
derived from the Latin lux, ‘light’) where the ‘surf’ or waves hit the sand (more liminality). The lights from the ships also break up the shadowy darkness, putting Smith in mind of ‘fairy fires’, supernatural conflagrations like the fabled will-o’-the-wisp, marsh-lights which weary travellers thought they could see at night.
Charlotte Smith concludes the sonnet by broadening out this specific image to make a more philosophical point about life in general: just as these lights are bewitching, like the fairy fires that mislead pilgrims, so ‘reason’ and rational thought – ‘wavering’ like a candle flame that flickers – are unstable and unreliable guides as we make our way through the darkness of life. This is another Romantic touch: the Romantics privileged emotion over reason, and subjective experience over objective ‘truth’. Rationalism is all well and good, but what does it actually feel like to experience the world?
‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ is an example of an English or Shakespearean sonnet: that is, it’s rhymed abab cdcd efef gg, with three quatrains followed by a concluding rhyming couplet. (We have discussed the different kinds of sonnet in more detail here.) This allows Smith to advance her description of the port scene across three quatrains before we get the volta or ‘turn’ midway through that penultimate line, as so often in Shakespearean sonnets, as she considers what this scene represents.
If you enjoyed ‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’, you might also like Smith’s sonnet on being cautioned against walking on a headland.
Wonderful piece of poetry. Rolls right off the tongue. Thanks for sharing.
Glorious, isn’t it? And so right: it needs to be read aloud for the full effect.
Quite so.