A combination of unwellness and technical difficulties meant I didn’t post this yesterday, but following on from previous posts on the idea of separation in Beachy Head (which in turn followed from our discussions on the separation of human and nature in the Sublime), I thought I would focus particularly on the hermit towards the end of the poem.

By definition, a hermit is someone who has separated himself from the rest of humanity and the fact that he lives in a cave separates him even from the broader environment of Beachy Head, sound is “Hardly heard” (634) where he is and he is away from the “wild music” (637).

His separation means “nothing mark'd to him the season's change,” (680), he misses the beauty but he is protected from the dangers of nature, he cannot become better or worse. However, “he still acutely felt / For human misery.” (691/2) because it is impossible to truly escape humanity and he still watches the clouds and listens to the wind to learn when storms are coming: he is an observer of nature but it is impossible to observe without feeling. When he removes whatever separation he had built between him and nature, it is when he attempts to rescue people from the waters and is drowned himself, suggesting that nature is too powerful for man to fully interact with and some separation is needed.

The reputation of Beachy Head as dangerous and lethal is not exclusive to this poem, even before I read it, I was familiar with Beachy Head’s reputation as a suicide spot, so it hardly surprised me that there was darkness and death in this poem. Indeed, last Friday, the author Frederick Forsyth wrote an article in the British newspaper The Daily Express which included the memorable opening “Nick Clegg would make a great EU commissioner, says his deputy Chris Huhne, who wants his job but would prefer to push him off Beachy Head.” The pervading idea of Beachy’s Head’s danger, combined with its beauty, makes it a perfect subject for a poem such as this, which looks at the beauty and destructiveness in nature.