The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

128 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

form to place the prevailing figure of poetic masculinity in the female

epistolary position. To clarif y, Robinson’s “Petrarch to Laura” is mod-

eled on Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, which is Pope’s modernization of

Ovid’s heroic epistles, the Heroides; in her poem, Robinson takes a

Petrarchan subject out of its original form, the sonnet, and formally

recasts that subject in light of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard. By contrast,

Sappho and Phaon is adapted from the Ovidian heroic epistle “Sapho

to Phaon,” translated by Pope, which conveys the final history of the

pre- eminent lyric and female poet, Sappho; Robinson formally recasts

this subject in Petrarchan form, the sonnet. So, why voice Petrarch’s

feelings for Laura in a form that is more commonly associated with

Ovid and Pope? Much of Robinson’s poetry explores the ethos of love

and sex; the themes and strategies prevalent in “Petrarch to Laura”

make themselves felt in Sappho and Phaon. In “Petrarch to Laura,”

Robinson wants to obliterate the supposed chastity of Petrarch’s rela-

tionship with Laura through complex formal allusion.

One of the most important features of Ovid’s Heroides is that the

very textuality of the epistolary form has a metonymic relationship to

the physical intimacy the heroine has shared with her lover or hus-

band. Recognizing this, Pope, after having translated in his youth

the Ovidian “Sappho to Phaon,” built his Eloisa to Abelard on the

same model of sexual knowledge. Robinson understood well the bit-

ter irony of Eloisa’s comment on the “eternal sunshine of the spotless

mind”—a kind of bliss- in- ignorance only the “blameless Vestal” can

enjoy, and she refers to that particular line in several of her poems.

Robinson’s “Petrarch to Laura” positions Petrarch as Eloisa, strug-

gling with his carnal passion, because, as a post- Sensibility writer,

Robinson simply cannot believe in the power of a passion that

remains physically unconsummated. She rejects a portrayal of in

morte Petrarchism, where the poet is sustained ultimately by agape

rather than eros. Robinson’s in vita Petrarchism hypersexualizes the

lover, while at the same time feminizing him as an Ovidian heroine.

The vision Robinson’s Petrarch receives of Laura at the end of the

poem only intensifies his erotic desire for her:

I fast, I pray, and yet no comfort find;

Heaven on my lips, but hell within my mind!

I feel THEE ever on my heated brain;

I weep, I sigh, I supplicate in vain! (1: 157; 301–4)

The erotics of the poem emerge from a conf luence of several factors.

First, there is a Protestant subtext that finds the Catholic requirement

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10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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