"The Haunted Beach" is legitimately creepy. Mary Robinson managed to make a beach, normally considered as a relaxing and sunny place, as a eerie spot full of ghosts. She describes this beach as "lonely", there is a cavern with "shad'wy jaws", and "moaning wind". This beach does not sound like the sort of place that I would want to be. But it really only gets worse. In the hut there is the body of a man who was murdered, and the speaker does not really seem to be phased by this. And of course there are the ghosts who inhabit the beach, spending all of eternity doing the work they did in their human life. When I read this the first time, I was unsure of how this could be related to the ideas of the Romantic Poets view of nature. We have read about beautiful places filled with animals and people with morals to teach, but we haven’t read about anything this creepy. Even “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had a moral message at the end. I suppose Mary Robinson took the same care Romantics took in describing woods and fields and applied it to a beach that is sort of grey and uninhabited and maybe there could be ghosts.
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Right. And doesn't the poem suggest a deep connection between human subjectivity and the natural environment, only a darker one than most of the poems we've read?
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