Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night on the ocean settles dark and mute,
Here, the speaker describes reality filtered through the lens of her own mood. She feels pensive and brooding, and projects those emotions onto the seaside vapors. Her quiet skepticism is reflected in the "dark and mute" night. A Romantic poet, Charlotte Smith portrays a dramatic vision of the natural world deeply tied to human subjectivity. Meanwhile, the speaker's ability to reframe her surroundings through the lens of her own mood and emotions supports her later assertion that reason is untrustworthy. After all, how can empirical reasoning be trusted when sensory perception is so easily altered by the observer's emotional state?
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding, "Strike the bell!"
As she lists the various noises audible through the night's seemingly total quiet, the speaker challenges her own certainties. She concedes, with each auditory image, that her initial perception of quiet was subjective and flawed. At the same time, the voices she hears in the distance are themselves representations of flawed subjectivity. They represent the ways in which social structures reinforce ideas about reality. The seamen, taking turns during the night watch, must agree to behave as if reality is certain and shared, putting aside any doubts for the sake of group functionality.
Misled the pilgrim—such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends in life's long darkling way.
These final two lines, following the poem's volta, are a formal departure from what has come before. They rhyme with one another, breaking the alternating ABAB pattern that preceded them, as is typical in the final lines of an English sonnet. But the final line also includes two additional syllables—that is to say, it is written in iambic hexameter rather than iambic pentameter. This lengthening mimics and emphasizes the concept of "life's long darkling way," making readers feel that we, too, are fumbling through a long and uncertain period. The pattern already established by the poem has, in a sense, misled us just like the "fairy fires" the speaker describes, leaving us unprepared for the final couplet.
