Charlotte Smith’s “To The
Fire-Fly of Jamaica”
When I first read To The
Fire-Fly of Jamaica my first thought was of the thick canopy of the forests
in the Caribbean. The imagery was beautiful and brought to mind my own
adventures in similar forests. These thoughts changed instantly when I came to
the beginning of stanza three when the poem says, “the recent captive, who in
vain, Attempts to break his heavy chain,” (lines 17-18). I counted four of
these plot changing moments within the poem.
The first section is
filled with imagery of the forest of Jamaica. The second is found within the
third stanza when the readers are introduced to the captured fly. The third one
is the fourth stanza which introduces the slave. And the last one begins at the
fifth stanza, where Ms. Smith brings up the Romantic Naturalist writers. It
takes Ms. Smith about five stanzas to bring up the real target audience of the
poem. This is also where we discover the true point to the poem.
The poem was built
as a warning to Naturalist poetry writers during her time. The poem is
comparing the naturalist writers to the captured firefly and the slave, stating,
“Think ye, how fugitive your fame? How soon from her light scroll away, is
wafted your ephemeron name” (lines 60-62). Ms. Smith’s use of particular words
and metaphors gives a disconcerting warning to Naturalist writers that their
fame is only temporary.
Questions:
1 1. Charlotte Smith uses both the slave and the
captured firefly as metaphors to compare them to Naturalist writers. Why did
she use both? Did one bring certain aspects that the other could not?
2. Why such brief statements about the slave and
the captured firefly? Do you believe that these metaphors could have been used
more actively in the critiquing of the Naturalist movement?
The poem makes use of a very strange figure, that of the dead firefly that is “trapped” behind glass in a collector’s cabinet in Britain. We see this in the opening line “How art thou altered!” which is addressed to the firefly “seen in a collection” (1). The description that follows reveals the forest where the firefly used to live, before it was collected by a naturalist or entomologist. This vivid description of plant life sets off the difference between the dead insect and the landscape of Jamaica; it also introduces (through the references cane and coffee, conventional crops of the slave plantations) the references to slavery in the 3rd and 4th stanzas. These stanzas are tricky: the slave who “attempts to break his heavy chain” (18) is no longer terrified by the firefly’s light because the firefly has been captured and removed to a new location—a process very much like the one the slave underwent after being kidnapped in Africa and undergoing the middle passage. Smith’s poem thus creates a bridge between the scientific collector and the plantation owner who enslaves his laborers, and connects both of these figures to the “human meteors” described at the end of the poem. The firefly’s condition behind glass reveals to “human comets” how fleeting fame is (57-64), but by implication, this gestures to the short-sightedness and perhaps fleeting existence of both colonial rule and scientific knowledge.
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