To Melancholy Themes

Okay, you should have seen this one coming. The poem is called "To Melancholy," so you better believe that melancholy, or sadness, is going to be an important theme. The weird thing is, though, tha...

Smile, and the world smiles with you. Right? Well, the reverse also seems to be true. The speaker of "To Melancholy" is moping, and it seems that the whole world is moping along with her. There's...

This is a tricky one, so watch out. Charlotte Smith was writing during a time when very few women wrote professionally (the late 1700s), and those that did were often criticized for making a profi...

The speaker of "To Melancholy" imagines that she sees ghosts, "night wanderers," and "phantoms" in the mist over the river. Sounds kinda spooky, doesn't it? She even imagines the ghost of one perso...