The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 131

Eloisa exclaims, in the famous line, “How happy is the blameless

vestal’s lot!” (207). In this context, Eloisa’s description of virginal

innocence—“Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”—is ironic: sex-

ual ignorance, in other words, is bliss, while renouncing known plea-

sure is psychic torture. The allusiveness of Robinson’s poem to Pope’s

and Ovid’s poems creates this subtext of known sexual pleasures that

reverberates throughout her Petrarch’s epistle.

In “Petrarch to Laura” Robinson thus places the pre- eminent male

poet in the traditionally feminized subject position of the Ovidian

heroic epistle. As Gillian Beer has noted, “Heroic epistle takes as its

pre- condition the enforced passivity of women: formally and in nar-

rative the poems rely upon sequestration” (140). Robinson under-

stood this, so her “Petrarch to Laura” takes place during Petrarch’s

retirement but before Laura’s death. Her Petrarch essentially is Pope’s

Eloisa. Even his coveted laurel pales in comparison to his devotion to

Laura’s erotic allure, which is the source of his poetry:

When nations thron’d THY POET’s Fame to share,

And shouts of rapture fill’d the perfum’d air!

No f lush’d delight from adulation caught,

No selfish joy with false ambition fraught

Could draw my prostrate soul from LOVE and THEE:

Still at THY shrine I bent the trembling knee! (1: 155; 231–6)

In effect, Robinson figuratively neutralizes (or neuters) her predeces-

sor’s genius, making his ambition subservient to his passion, his intel-

lect submissive to his emotions, and his “wreath of fame” contingent

upon the inspiration afforded him by a female figure whom Robinson

herself has overwritten with her poetic avatars—Laura and Laura

Maria. It is a figure of herself that animates this Petrarch, that, as she

has him write, “bade my verse with deathless glories shine” (242).

Laura is thus always the embodiment of poetic fame. Robinson’s fig-

uring is fundamentally ludic and self- ref lexive because, of course, this

is literally true: Robinson’s Petrarch is her own creation, endowed

by her version of Laura. In this poem Petrarch becomes another ava-

tar. Demonstrating an incisive understanding of the heroic epistle,

Robinson performs a cross- gendering that mimics her significant pre-

cursors, Ovid and Pope. Like many male poets before her, Robinson

understood that the Ovidian tradition required a kind of formal

transvestitism, so she writes as the male erotic subject when she

chooses the heroic epistle, instead of writing as Laura; or, conversely,

she chooses the heroic epistle to write as Petrarch, instead of choosing

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1319780230100251_05_ch03.indd 131 12/28/2010 11:08:41 AM12/28/2010 11:08:41 AM

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