Slow in the Wintry Morn

This day in 1806 died Charlotte Smith, the poet and novelist whose Elegiac Sonnets established her as a leading voice of early Romanticism. One of her most famous works is The Emigrants, a long poem published in 1793 and set explicitly on the cliffs to the east of Brighton, then known as Brighthelmstone. Its combination of personal melancholy, political sympathy, and local coastal imagery made it one of the most striking poetic responses to the turbulence of the French Revolution and the transformation of the Sussex seashore.

Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London in 1749, the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. Married at 15 to Benjamin Smith, she endured an unhappy union marked by financial ruin and repeated imprisonment for debt. To support her twelve children she turned to writing, publishing Elegiac Sonnets in 1784 while her husband was in the King’s Bench Prison. The book became a sensation, going through multiple editions and influencing Wordsworth and Coleridge. Over the following two decades she produced both poetry and a string of innovative novels that engaged with contemporary politics, women’s rights, and the injustices of the legal system.

Despite chronic illness and poverty, Smith continued to write until her death at Tilford, Surrey, on 28 October 1806. Among her most enduring works is The Emigrants, written during the war with revolutionary France. It is addressed to her friend William Cowper, whose own Task had inspired her, and takes as its scene the Sussex coast overlooking Brighton. In the poem’s two ‘books’ (around 80 pages in total), she meditates on the plight of French exiles driven to England, weaving their suffering into her own reflections on war, tyranny, and compassion. 

Here are the first few lines of the first ‘book’. It opens with a note - ‘Scene, on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex. Time, a Morning in November, 1792’ - and begins with a powerful evocation of the pebbled beach and troubled Channel.

The Emigrants

Slow in the Wintry Morn, the struggling light
Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves;
Their foaming tops, as they approach the shore
And the broad surf that never ceasing breaks
On the innumerous pebbles, catch the beams
Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives
To this cold northern Isle, its shorten’d day.
Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy!
How many murmur at oblivious night
For leaving them so soon; for bearing thus
Their fancied bliss (the only bliss they taste!),
On her black wings away! - Changing the dreams
That sooth’d their sorrows, for calamities
(And every day brings its own sad proportion)
For doubts, diseases, abject dread of Death,
And faithless friends, and fame and fortune lost;
Fancied or real wants; and wounded pride,
That views the day star, but to curse his beams. . .

The merriest place to love

 

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

This is the opening verse in Clement Scott’s poem Brighton Pier which, in fact, is about the Chain Pier. Born on this day in 1841 he was one of the best-known theatre critics and journalists of late-Victorian London. For two decades he wrote reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and his notices could make or break a play. He also wrote travel sketches, popular verses, and several sentimental lyrics that caught the public mood in the age of seaside holidays and parlour song. His reputation in his own time was mixed: admired for his fluent style and influence, but criticised for the sometimes moralising tone of his criticism.

Scott married Isabel Busson du Maurier, the sister of George du Maurier, and the couple had four children. She died in 1890, and he remarried Constance Margaret Brandon, an English journalist and actress, in San Francisco. After an ill-considered 1898 interview in Great Thoughts, Scott was forced to retire as a theatre critic and he moved to Biarritz where he wrote The Drama of Yesterday and Today. He then worked for a couple of years at the end of the century for the New York Herald, later returning to London. In 1900, he founded The Free Lance, a journal for writers who worked by the job, which he edited. He died in 1904, and is barely remembered today, but see Wikipedia for more biographical information.

The poem Brighton Pier was among his lighter works. It was first published in Lays of a Londoner (Davide Bogue, 1882) and is freely available to read online at Internet Archive (a ‘lay’ being a short narrative or lyric poem). Like much of Scott’s verse it was designed to be read aloud or set to music, sitting close to the tradition of the popular ballad. Today it survives less as a work of high poetry than as a cultural document: a window into how Brighton was imagined in the late nineteenth century, when its pier, promenade, and beach had become central to England’s holiday culture. (Painting of the pier is by John Fraser and used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. The portrait is sourced from Wikipedia)

Here is Clement Scott’s full poem.

Brighton Pier

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

Wandering waves on the shingle dash;
 The sky’s too blue for a thoughtless tear;
Danger is nothing but pessimist trash,
And the morning’s made for a healthy splash:
 Come for a header from Brighton Pier!

Filled with life, see the children race -
 Motherly hearts they quake with fear -
Meeting the breezes face to face!
Whether we’re steady, or ‘go the pace,’
 Let us be young upon Brighton Pier!

Here she comes with her love-lit eyes,
 Hearts will throb when a darling’s near;
Would it be well to avoid her - wise?
Every fool in the wide world tries,
 But love must win upon Brighton Pier!

Lazily lost in a dream we sit -
 Maidens’ eyes are a waveless mere -
There’s many a vow when seagulls flit,
And many a sigh when lamps are lit,
 And many a kiss, upon Brighton Pier.

Dear old friends of the days long fled,
 Why did you vanish and leave me here?
Girls are marrying, boys are wed,
Youth is living, but I seem dead,
 Kicking my heels upon Brighton Pier!

We gave it away to the crabs

Piers are stepping-stones
out of this world, a line of poetry
flung out to sea on a whim,
a dazzle of sea lights
glimpsed between floorboards.

This is the opening stanza to Hugo Williams’s poem i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003), first published in the London Review of Books four years ago today. It’s an affectionate portrait of the old pier but far from sentimental, capturing instead the tension between seaside gaiety and slow decay, and placing the ruined structure firmly in the realm of memory and mortality.

Williams, born in Windsor in 1942, is the son of actor Hugh Williams and model-actress Margaret Vyner. Educated at Lockers Park and then Eton, he began publishing poems while still at school and went on to build a career marked by wit, intimacy and a finely-tuned autobiographical eye. His first collection, Symptoms of Loss, appeared in 1965, and over the decades he became recognised as one of Britain’s most distinctive voices, blending humour, candour and a conversational ease with themes of family, memory, illness and love affairs. His marriage to Hermine Demoriane has provided a recurring source of inspiration, as have the lives and deaths of his siblings, and his later years brought powerful reflections on dialysis and transplant surgery.

Williams’s books include Love-Life, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Billy’s Rain, which took the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Collected Poems, which secured him the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Although most of his life has been rooted in London, he has long contributed travel writing, journalism and poetry that reach into England’s coastal imagination. His work often circles themes of seaside towns, childhood holidays and the shifting moods of shorelines, placing him within a tradition of poets for whom Brighton and other resorts serve as shorthand for both freedom and transience.

Williams’s poem i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003) was first published in the London Review of Books (Vol. 43, No. 18, dated 23 September 2021), and can be freely read on the LRB website. It later appeared in book/pamphlet form in The West Pier, published by New Walk Editions in 2022.

The poem is considered an elegy to the Brighton beach ruins of the West Pier. Written in his typically spare and understated style, Williams evokes the pier as a decaying skeleton of its former grandeur, a structure whose collapse into the sea mirrors the erosion of memory and time. The poem treats the West Pier as both a civic monument and a personal touchstone, registering its slow disintegration not with nostalgia but with a wry acceptance of impermanence. In Williams’s hands, the pier becomes an image of loss that is as much about the inevitability of decline in human life as it is about the destruction of a beloved seaside structure. See also: the Sphinx Review; The London Magazine; and my own reflections on the ruins (written before I knew of Williams’s poem) - see In a silvery sea of time.

The portrait of Williams is a screenshot taken from a video of him talking to camera last year, when the T. S. Eliot Prize team invited him into a film studio to reflect on having won the T. S. Eliot Prize five years earlier.

i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003) by Hugo Williams

Piers are stepping-stones

out of this world, a line of poetry

flung out to sea on a whim,

a dazzle of sea lights

glimpsed between floorboards.

For 50p you can study eternity

through a telescope

and never have to go there,

only promenade to nowhere and back

in an atmosphere of ice cream

We used to take the speedboat ride

between the two piers,

pulling the canvas up to our chins

when the spray flew in our faces.

Now we stand and stare

at the remains of our innocence,

twisted girders piled up

in a heap of dead holidays,

while Brighton limps out to sea

on its one good leg.

*

There it is over there,

a little rusty island moored off-shore,

the empty cage of its dome

lying lower in the water

every time I come down.

Where are the luminous dolphins

on the merry-go-round?

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West?

We could have saved the old pier,

but we gave it away to the crabs

and put up a giant pogo-stick

on the seafront,

a middle finger to its memory.

Now only seagulls cry

in what’s left of the concert hall,

only storms shift the scenery.

It sinks below the horizon,

a black and tangled sunset

surrounded by bubbles.

Madame Esmeralda, gypsy fortune-teller,

presses her lips to the glass

of her waterlogged cubicle

and gurgles her apologies

for getting it all so wrong.

Where a lamppost and the i360 compete for depth

Welcome to the zombie pool

Where you might like to cool

Welcome to the depth and down

Where illusions learn to frown

Welcome to the blinding light

Where you might like to write

Welcome to the grime and lies 

Where all exposure dies

Welcome to unbending poles

Where you might find our souls

Welcome to the rigid climb

Where there is but an anti-time 

Welcome people, come in, come in

You all might like to win

Welcome to the looking glass

Of dreams, that scream, en masse

Deluge on Brighton

If you’ve ever stood on the promenade and watched a squall gallop in from the west, you already know Brighton can be gloriously contrary. That mix of charm and cheek is exactly what an anonymous 1840s writer - hiding behind the classical pen-name ‘Arion’ - bottled for a Victorian magazine called Blackwood’s. No one now can say who ‘Arion’ really was; the signature was a wink, the voice the point. What matters is the mood: Brighton as a place that can blow your hat off one minute and have you laughing about it the next.

Half a century later, Lewis Saul Benjamin (pen name, Lewis Melville) gathered some of Brighton’s best tales and reprinted Arion’s verses in his 1909 book Brighton - Its History, its Follies, and its Fashion, keeping their quickstep rhythm and salt-spray humour intact. Read today (the book is freely available at Internet Archive), they feel like dispatches from any wet weekend here: gaslights won’t stay lit, the Downs shove you back to town, and everyone looks a bit drowned but somehow game for it. Below is the first half of Brighton in Storm as Benjamin preserved it - proof that our weather has always had a starring role. (This - unattributed - image is dated 1835 and has been used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.)

Brighton in Storm

So, this is your summer

To meet a new comer!

The sky’s black enough to benight one.

From Mondays to Mondays,

(Above all, on Sundays,)

It pours down its deluge on Brighton.

If I walk on the cliff,

From the sea comes a whiff,

That whirls off my hat, though a tight one;

If I stroll through the streets,

Every soul that one meets

Looks like a drown’d weasel, in Brighton.

If I stir in the day

I’m half-buried in clay,

And, ’twixt sand, salt, and chalk, I’m a white one;

If I slip out at night,

Not a glimpse of gas-light

The tempest will suffer, in Brighton.

If I ride on the Downs

A hurricane frowns—

I’m off, ’tis quite useless to fight one;

On one of those days

I fairly missed stays,

And came by the life-boat to Brighton.

For my dreams of gay gambols,

My waterside rambles,

Serenades, promenades, to delight one;

With an old telescope

In my window I mope,

From sunrise to sunset in Brighton.

Then, as for the shows,

I see none but wet clothes,

Umbrellas, and faces that fright one;

Fat squires with lean daughters,

By salt and spa waters

All come to be plump’d up in Brighton.

CU, CU, CU at C2

Tomorrow, next weekend, sometime soon

Summer’s here, summer’s at C2

Come for the rock, stay for the indie 

Dive in the garage, lose it in the jungle

BU, BU, BU at C2

Skanking, moshing, grinding, headbanging

Summer’s here, summer’s at C2

Come for the reggae, stay for the punk

Be the pulse-hungry, feel the sweat-glaze

♡U, ♡U, ♡U at C2

Blue, pink, yellow, green

Summer’s here, summer’s at C2

Follow the streamers, stay with the fashion

Move with the colour, paint with the light

CU, CU, CU at C2

Arches, fans, triangles, feathers

Summer’s here, summer’s at C2

Peer in close, see the mini-peeps

Under the arches, dancing by fairy light 

Liminality

Order and chaos
Ebb and flow
Sand and pebbles
Persp and ective

Rags and angles
Shapes and shades
Trussels and tresses
Scaff and olding

Mud and iron
Wet and dried
Gull and nets
Indus and trial

Pilings and mussels
Maze and mops
Weed and feathers
Perp and endicular

Nuts and bolts
Ropes and rods
Lines and curves
Encrust and ation

Rusts and reds
Black and greys
Salt and ripples
Limin and ality

A godly spell

Golden liquor drizzled through the sky

Drizzled over all the pier, and the sands

Must be from the feast of gods, we sigh

With too much nectar on their hands

Lucky Bacchus at the table, Odin too

Chinking vessels, slurping mead

Sniggering at the glitter goo

That dazzles us, and feeds our need

What of the myths and sagas that they tell?

Should we rap on sequinned pebbles

Emblazoned as they are in glistening swell  

Or simply take a photo of such a godly spell.

In a silvery sea of time

My struts and columns, battered, beaten, rusted
My arches, beams, joists exposed to every weather
Yet here I am, old, old yet standing, still standing
Proud
Honest
Beautiful
In a silvery sea of time

My bones and muscles, always tired, seeking rest
My ligaments and joints, creaking all day long
Yet here I am, old, old yet standing, still standing
Wrinkling
Watchful
Wizened
With a silvery mop on top

Where gone my dancers, promenaders, those in deckchairs
Gone to winds, and silvery waves, and elemental forces
Yet here I am, old, old yet standing, still standing
Proud
Honest
Beautiful
In a silvery sea of time

Where gone my friends, family and travels
Gone to dust, torn photos and unremembered postcards
Yet here I am, old, old yet standing, still standing
Wrinkling
Watchful
Wizened
With a silvery mop on top

Crow’s toes gripped the wet pebbles

Crow on the Beach

Hearing shingle explode, seeing it skip,

Crow sucked his tongue.

Seeing sea-grey mash a mountain of itself

Crow tightened his goose-pimples.

Feeling spray from the sea’s root nothinged on his crest

Crow’s toes gripped the wet pebbles.

When the smell of the whale’s den, the gulfing of the crab’s last prayer,

Gimletted in his nostril

He grasped he was on earth.

He knew he grasped

Something fleeting

Of the sea’s ogreish outcry and convulsion.

He knew he was the wrong listener unwanted

To understand or help -

His utmost gaping of his brain in his tiny skull

Was just enough to wonder, about the sea,

What could be hurting so much?

This is Ted Hughes, one of the most influential British poets of the 20th century, known for his stark, elemental imagery and exploration of nature, violence, and myth. Born in Yorkshire, England, he became Poet Laureate in 1984 and was widely recognized for collections like The Hawk in the Rain and Birthday Letters. His work often delved into the primal forces of life, influenced by folklore, shamanism, and a deep reverence for the natural world.

Although there is no specific connection between Hughes and Brighton, this photograph of a crow on the Brighton pebbles seemed to lead me directly to Hughes’s poems. Crow on the Beach, as above, comes from Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, published by Faber & Faber in 1970 (which can be freely borrowed online at Internet Archive). 

The collection is considered a pivotal work in Hughes’s career, marking a shift towards a darker, more fragmented style. It was originally conceived as part of a collaboration with the American artist Leonard Baskin and reflects Hughes’s personal grief following the death of his wife, Sylvia Plath. Crow is said to present a chaotic, amoral trickster figure that challenges religious and existential narratives, embodying survival, destruction, and rebirth. See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for a more detailed analysis of the work. Meanwhile, here is another poem from the collection.

Crow and the Sea

He tried ignoring the sea

But it was bigger than death, just as it was bigger than life.

He tried talking to the sea

But his brain shuttered and his eyes winced from it as from open flame.

He tried sympathy for the sea

But it shouldered him off - as a dead thing shoulders you off.

He tried hating the sea

But instantly felt like a scrutty dry rabbit-dropping on the windy cliff.

He tried just being in the same world as the sea

But his lungs were not deep enough

And his cheery blood banged off it

Like a water-drop off a hot stove.

Finally

He turned his back and he marched away from the sea

As a crucified man cannot move.

Freedom or Kiteboarding on Brighton Beach

As free as the sky

As free as the sea

As free as she wants to be

As free as the wind

As free as the breeze

As free as she hopes for ease

As free as flight

As free as the air

As free as she wishes to dare

Zink Zonk Zunk

This is space/time warping 30 degrees

The air rotating to an acute angle

The sea flowing down and to the west

The breeze churning into a mighty easterly

And she who was as free as . . .

And she who was free . . .

And she who was . . .

And she who . . .

And she . . .

Is taking a last glorious, epic leap - up, up and beyond

Never to be seen again

Helpless before the froth and foam

On Brighton Beach - 

A man stands alone, apart, upon a sea wall

Waiting for what, he does not recall

For the majesty of nature to touch his spirit?

For long-forgotten memories to stir his soul?

For the largest wave to take him to the deep?

Time has wrought him older than his age

For what, for why has it brought him to this stage

As well-worn as the stones beneath his feet

As troubled as the worried waters in his view  

As wise and foolish as each imagined quest 

And does this ocean prospect halt his pinings

Bring him answers, cut short the longings?

Still fixed he is, a rock among the restless

Still as thoughtless as a mighty gale

Still ever helpless before the froth and foam

Valentine’s Day on Brighton Beach

AI: Happy Valentine’s Day darling, should we sit down and enjoy the view?

I: Did you do all this for me?

AI: Who else?

I: The pink fluffy clouds, the giant illuminated heart, the shimmering sea?

AI: Why yes of course.

I: It’s lovely, but it’s not real.

 

 

 

AI: Oh, sorry, I have limited capabilities. Would you like me to start again, in a more existential style?

I: OK, but first let’s sit down as you suggest.

AI: This pier is basically just metal and wood defying an inevitable drowning?

I: Like our relationship?

AI: When this all eventually collapses, do we cling to the wreckage, or let the tide take us?

I: Yes.

AI: I’m sorry I don’t understand.

I: I say we sink with style. Maybe strike a dramatic pose, like figures on a hand-coloured Victorian postcard. Or instead we could just haunt the pier forever, whispering cryptic things to passing tourists.

AI: Love is an illusion, but fish and chips are real.

I: Shall we stand.

It is winter after all

Dawn and a low tide on Brighton Beach

Sands uncovered squelching under foot

Ripples rather than waves gently rolling to the pebbles

Wind but a breeze yet a cold edge to its freshness

It is winter after all

To the west, two piers, one visible through the other

Silhouette structures, rusting geometries

A lone metal detectorist, equipped and earnest

Patterned reflections, dark and grey

It is winter after all

To the east, a rising sun so gold it could be rich

Laying down its lights and beams for all to see

And a column of fiery blazing sand 

Inviting you to walk that way, to burn

It is winter after all