The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

134 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

her store, / Love’s radiant scenes are changed to scenes of Care”

(5, 9–10). The poem concludes with the Sappho avatar fixed in the

static hopelessness of despair, even as the poet Robinson completes

her first legitimate sonnet. This is the germ for the more ambitious

Sappho and Phaon. While claiming legitimacy through the sonnet,

she subverts the masculinist erotic tradition of the sonnet by instead

portraying a woman as a passionate sexual being rather than as an

unattainable and passive ideal. The male object of desire becomes just

that—an object, like so many of the women in Renaissance sonnets.

But the intertextuality of the poem and the history it invokes is far

more complicated than simply calling upon the Petrarchan muse.

While her preface praises and defends the historical Sappho, the

sequence bu ilds upon a nd develops a n image of Sappho t hat t he poem

ultimately must renounce. Directly rejecting the “too glowing” and

“genuine effusions” that Robinson attributes to the original Sappho,

her “Sonnet Introductory” proposes a contrary aesthetic of measured

eloquence and chastity that she performs in the legitimate sonnet:

FAVOU R’D by Heav’n are those, ordain’d to taste

The bliss supreme that kindles fancy’s fire;

Whose magic fingers sweep the muses’ lyre,

In varying cadence, eloquently chaste!

Well may the mind, with tuneful numbers grac’d,

To Fame’s immortal attributes aspire,

Above the treach’rous spells of low desire,

That wound the sense, by vulgar joys debas’d. (1: 329; 1–8)

In praising the craft of the poet, Robinson emphasizes the literal

performance of poetic composition, the fixing into form the “bliss

supreme that kindles fancy’s fire”—that is, poetic inspiration—that

requires mastery of the instrument, the lyre, the metonym of lyric

poetry. Although she employs the familiar trope of the poetic muse,

the “magic figures” are manifestly figurative, for Robinson’s diction

stresses the techniques involved in writing poetry the construction

of varied cadences, the “chaste” and artful selection of poetic lan-

guage, and the ability to express words and ideas in metrical form,

or “tuneful numbers.” The thoughts of the mind itself are thus mea-

sured, ordered, and rational as they are articulated in verse by the

skillful poet, a process not unlike Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected

in tranquility” and his poetics of restraint and regulation through

meter. Having achieved this mastery, the poet is justified in seek-

ing the “wreath of fame,” but only if he or she is able to transcend

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1349780230100251_05_ch03.indd 134 12/28/2010 11:08:41 AM12/28/2010 11:08:41 AM

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

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