Beachy Head was somewhat difficult to read because of the meandering nature of the poem and the constant digressions. I didn't find the rest of Smith's poems that were assigned as difficult, but they were all shorter so I think length might have had something to do with it. There were a lot of individual sections of the poem that I really enjoyed, but it was hard to picture the poem as one unit. I kept mentally dividing it into sections. I especially enjoyed the section about the hermit, particularly these lines:
"Just beneath the rock
Where Beachy overpeers the channel wave,
Within a cave mined by wintry tides
Dwelt one, who long disgusted with the world
And all its ways, appear’d to suffer life
Rather than live"
"Near the lone Hermit's flint-surrounded home,
Claim'd unavailing pity; for his heart
Was feelingly alive to all that breath'd;
And outraged as he was, in sanguine youth,
By human crimes, he still acutely felt
For human misery."
I agree. It was hard to follow the poem with a singular theme, as it seemed to jump all over the place.
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