comment-Veiled Clarity-3 Veiled Clarity

You’ve done some fine wrestling here with a truly mysterious poem – I think you’re one revision away from a compelling reading. You’re a graceful and flexible writer, and many times I was struck by your phrasing. Mary Robinson’s ambiguities have met their match in your lucid, thoughtful prose.

Attention to details allows you to put across some strong claims about the interplay of chaos and order in The Haunted Beach. You’re very resourceful in structuring your contrasts; meter, syntax, imagery, and types of action are all fair game here. The tracking of surprising assignations of activity and passivity is quite clear. You end up highlighting a disturbing implication of this poem: its treatment of murderous guilt as a foregone conclusion. Humans seem indeed powerless—even in treachery—among such lively natural elements.

The essay hasn’t quite worked out the role of the supernatural, though – or at least not clearly enough for me to understand. Are we in a Coleridgean world in which the supernatural seems a consequence of human action? Or is Mary Robinson’s supernatural essentially different from this – a force that controls the chaos of both (senselessly lively) nature and (helplessly chaotic) men?

You make some intriguing statements about the ordering of information in this poem, namely the reversed conveyance of the murder plot (such as it is). But I wonder if more can be said about the way Mary Robinson handles her reader. If heaven designs dreary prospects for the guilty fisherman, why are we being treated to the same prospects? Or is the poem positioning us differently – like that moon, watching everything from a higher vantage?

These questions come to a boil when considering Mary Robinson’s punishment-crime ordering: I see how this reversal deflects human power, making even a murderer seem passive – but what does it do to the person receiving such an oddly handled story? You’ve emphasized Robinson’s supernatural-like power of containing chaos – but does she demonstrate this power at our expense?

Focusing more directly on manipulations of a reader you aptly characterize as “seeking some illumination” might have firmed up the essay, giving your resourceful analysis an agenda & a final payoff it now seems to lack. Without this focus, you risk falling into repetition and abstraction – as indeed happens every so often in this nonetheless illuminating tour.