Life's Uncertainty
At the poem's end, the speaker uses "fairy fires" as a metaphor for reason. Both, she says, can be misleading, precisely because they promise knowledge and certainty. In doing so, they unfairly tempt people. With this statement, the speaker suggests that life will always, inevitably be full of uncertainty. That uncertainty exists not just in large-scale, abstract conflicts, but in our relationship to sensory reality itself: we can never really believe the evidence of our senses. Things that promise certainty can never actually achieve it, and can only, according to the speaker, put us at a disadvantage by robbing us of the one thing we know for sure—which is that we don't know anything. Instead, we should become comfortable with "life's long darkling way," acknowledging and accepting the inevitability of uncertainty.
Limitations of Human Reason
This poem examines the limits of reason first, subtly, through the speaker's self-contradictory statements. She repeatedly makes broad assertions, claiming, for example, that she can see nothing but darkness, before undermining her previous assertion with an ever-expanding list of exceptions. These exceptions, rather than hinting that the speaker is lying or behaving hypocritically, suggest that no perception of sensory reality can be trusted at face value. By hinting that empirical evidence derived from one's senses is untrustworthy, Charlotte Smith argues against prevailing Enlightenment ideas valorizing reason and empiricism. Following the sonnet's volta, Smith's speaker makes that argument in explicit terms, declaring that reason can mislead and disorient just as easily as it can help.
Loneliness
This poem's speaker is an intensely lonesome figure. While she can hear others, perceiving the existence of sailors or of the man announcing the time, she never interacts with these people. In fact, her loneliness doubles as a kind of radical independence, allowing her to fully embrace uncertainty and question the evidence of her senses. The seamen who communicate in order to change shifts don't have that luxury (or that burden): they depend on a shared sense of reality and a certain level of certainty about basic things like time. The same can be said about the man who announces the hour at the end of the poem's first stanza—his entire role is to help create a shared reality. Loneliness, here, isn't just about solitude. Instead, it becomes a route to objectivity, or at least a route to self-awareness about one's subjectivity.
