Summary
There's nothing but shadows and blackness, reports the speaker—except for a single line visible where the ocean meets the sand. Farther out, the speaker observes the lights of ships, comparing them to fires made by fairies. Those fairy fires mislead travelers, causing them to walk in unsafe directions. These are similar to the tempting but untrustworthy guidance of reason, which people often use to help guide them through the bewildering darkness of life.
Analysis
This stanza repeats the pattern established in the previous one, but focuses now on visual rather than auditory images. Just as she did in the poem's first stanza, our speaker declares that there's absolutely nothing to see. But she then contradicts herself, gradually filling in the scene with examples of what she sees. This orients us by letting us see the scene, but it also disorients us: as soon as we've come to terms with darkness, we're told that it's not nearly as dark as we believed. In other words, we realize that our speaker isn't altogether reliable. They're confused and fumbling, and we're confused and fumbling with them.
The speaker can't, in other words, entirely trust her senses. Those senses can provide insufficient information (for instance, telling us that it's dark or silent when that's not entirely true). Through a complicated series of comparisons, Smith extends this idea of untrustworthy evidence into a broader context. The speaker compares lights in the distance to fairy fires, which, according to folklore, mislead lost wanderers and send them into danger. Smith then compares these fairy lights to the very idea of reason, saying that reason, like fairy fires, can feel trustworthy but can in fact be dangerous and misleading. In other words, the evidence of our senses, the folkloric fairy lights, and reason itself all have one thing in common—they offer easy promises of safety or certainty, but they're not always what they seem.
Smith was a member of the Romantic movement, a group of writers and artists who pushed back against the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Perhaps the most prominent of those Enlightenment ideas was the importance of reason. According to many Enlightenment thinkers, sense-data and rational thought are in fact the only possible trustworthy sources of information. In this poem, Smith pushes back against this devotion to reason. She doesn't assure us that she's found a better way. In fact, the poem ends with the phrase "life's long darkling way," suggesting that life will always be a long, dark path. But, she proposes, it's better to fumble along that path, knowing we're disoriented and confused, than it is to delude ourselves into thinking we can trust the "fairy fires" of our senses.
As we reach the end of the poem, we can see that it falls into four broad sections. As previously discussed, the first two sections describe the scene's silence and the sounds of voices, using an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme. In lines 9-14, we encounter the next two chunks. Lines 9-12 are still written in iambic pentameter, but once again, our rhyme scheme shifts. Now, as the speaker enumerates visual images, our ending words are "line," "sand," "shine," and "land"—in other words, as the poem's content shifts, so does its rhyme scheme, shifting from CDCD sounds to EFEF ones. However, the poem's final two lines break the pattern established over the first twelve. Just as the poem's content takes an extremely sharp turn, launching into a critique of Enlightenment values (and, perhaps, making us rethink everything the speaker has said so far through the lens of this critique), it pivots to a GG rhyme scheme. This marks out the final couplet as a total departure, emphasizing its pithiness as well as its importance.
This poem, with its 14 iambic pentameter lines and its ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme, is a typical English or Shakespearian sonnet. Possibly the most distinct and important aspect of this form is not its length, its meter, or its rhyme scheme, but rather the way it suddenly changes, taking an unexpected direction in its final two lines. That shift is marked by formal elements (like that GG rhyme scheme), but those formal elements exist to highlight a change in content. The change is called a "volta," an Italian word meaning "turn." In this poem, while a series of smaller changes help us move between different types of imagery, the volta moves us into totally new territory, helping us make the shift from observation of the disorienting scene at the port into an abstract philosophical meditation—all within just two lines.
