The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 129

of priestly celibacy unnatural: Petrarch took minor orders that did

not require celibacy but, like Abelard, he had to remain unmar-

ried in case he were to advance in the church as a priest. Moreover,

Robinson’s pro- Revolutionary politics at this time likely inform the

anti- clerical implications of Petrarch’s supposed impropriety. Finally,

Robinson’s source was, instead of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Susannah

Dobson’s adaptation of the Abbé de Sade’s biography of Petrarch, in

which Dobson disapproves of the vehemence of Petrarch’s passion for

a married woman. For Robinson that is the crux of the story. And

while Sade felt that even virgins could read Petrarch—instead of, say,

Sappho, Catullus, Ovid—without blushing (Zuccato 158), the same

cannot be said of Robinson’s overheated “Petrarch to Laura.”

In this way, “Petrarch to Laura” may be a parody of Petrarchism

revived for the Age of Sensibility as another version of Werterism.

And it expresses the same kind of ludic eroticism that characterizes

the Della Crusca–Anna Matilda exchange in an exaggerated, one

might say melodramatic, and facetious pastiche of Sensibility tropes.

When Robinson’s Petrarch, for instance, complains that the woods of

Vaucluse no longer please him, his language is infused with frustrated

sexual desire:

No more for ME your sunny banks shall pour

In purple tides ripe Autumn’s luscious store;

No more for ME your lust’rous tints shall glow,

Your forests wave, your silv’ry channels f low;

Yet ‘midst your heav’n my wounded breast shall crave

One narrow cell, my SOLACE and my GR AVE. (1: 151; 25–30)

Although ostensibly about nature, these lines are so sensual that

they practically figure a blazon of Laura’s body. This is made all the

more apparent when Petrarch writes to Laura the reason he feels this

way: “Where, LAUR A, shall I turn, what balsam find / To soothe

the throbbings of my fev’rish mind?” (41–2). Robinson reasserts

the erotic Petrarch “wild with passion, madd’ning with remorse”

(49), but she does so by associating him intertextually with the car-

nal heroine of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard. Robinson’s Petrarch is car-

nal, too—profoundly unsatisfied and sexually frustrated as religious

devotion fails to match the imagined and imaginative pleasures of

erotic fantasy. Robinson delights in the double entendre and ambi-

guity of that frustration: she writes, “Fancy bade my frantic mind

explore, / Those scenes of holy joy I taste no more” (59–60). The

heroic epistle, as Ovid’s Heroides and Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard had

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