The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates II 109

includes a poem that would eventually appear in her novel Angelina,

in 1796; it expresses a more modest ambition than what appears at

the end of her Monody for Marie Antoinette:

Heav’n knows, I never would repine,

Though fortunes fiercest frown were mine,—

If Fate would grant that o’er my tomb

One little Laurel wreath, might bloom,

And Mem’ry, sometimes wander near,

To bid it live,—and drop a tear! (7: 305)

Two days later, on 16 October 1794, Taylor published this poem in

the Tr u e B r iton, prefacing it with a token of his esteem: “The ele-

gance, and still more, the plaintive charm, that pervades the follow-

ing beautiful Lines, will, we doubt not, induce every Reader of taste

to ascribe them to MRS. ROBINSON.”

This poem turns out to be a peculiar axis of Robinson’s politi-

cal ambivalence, for Sampson Perry republished the poem excerpted

from Angelina two years later in his revived radical print, the Argus,

to which Merry also contributed (Perry 300).^21 Craciun takes the

publication of the poem in the Argus to be evidence of Robinson’s

other contributions to that paper in 1796 (British 82–5). In the

poem, Robinson prefers her little laurel to “worldly pow’r” by which

some “tyrannize o’er him whom fate / has destin’d to a lowly state”

and suggests that would the “little great endure / The pangs they sel-

dom stoop to cure” then “the loftiest, proudest, would confess / The

sweetest pow’r—the pow’r to bless” (Tr u e B r iton 16 October 1794).

The poem reads differently in each context: in the Tr u e B r iton, this

is standard humanitarian fare, politically unthreatening and benevo-

lent; two years later, in Perry’s Argus, these sentiments likely had a

singular resonance. Certainly, by then, Robinson was writing more

overtly radical poetry and prose. As early as 1794, her novel The

Widow was suspected of espousing radical sentiments in its satiri-

cal portraits of upper- class women; the Morning Post rushed to her

defense, sarcastically attacking the pomposity of the “fashionable

Widows” who “wonder how a woman without rank, dares takes lib-

erties with great people” while espousing “the cause of the Swinish

multitude” (13 February 1794). But then again, her untitled poem

beginning “Heav’n knows, I never would repine” also appeared in

the Tr u e B r iton as well as later in the Argus. The irony of this dual

publication is that the government ran Perry’s Argus out of business

and rechristened that paper as the Tr u e B r iton on 1 January 1793

9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 1099780230100251_04_ch02.indd 109 12/28/2010 11:08:32 AM12/28/2010 11:08:32 AM

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