The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

136 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

Pope, and Petrarch—who interpolates commentary as well, Robinson

adheres to a fictional frame whereby the sonnets contained therein

are not supposed to be productions from the pen of Sappho, but the

sonnets that the poet- character Sappho would have written had she

not lost the use of her poetic faculties.

More devastating than unrequited love itself is its effect on the

woman poet who remains creatively debilitated, in contrast to the

male sonneteers of the Petrarchan tradition who draw inspiration,

poetic power, and fame from their courtly amours. Robinson, as a

kind of meta- poet, remains in formal control of the lyric voice. In

this way, Robinson also engages her Ovidian source as translated by

Pope. The epigraph to Sappho and Phaon—“Love taught my tears

in sadder notes to f low, / And tun’d my heart to elegies of woe”—

comes from the opening of Pope’s “Sapho to Phaon,” which, as in the

original Latin text, is about the poet- character’s formal choice. The

epistle opens with Sappho suspecting that Phaon will not recognize

her handwriting and thus her authorship of the document, especially

since it is in heroic couplets, or, in Latin, elegiac couplets (alternating

hexameter and pentameter lines), instead of her characteristic lyric

form, her eponymous Sapphic meter:

SAY, lovely youth, that dost my heart command,

Can Phaon’s eyes forget his Sapho’s hand?

Must then her name the wretched writer prove,

To thy remembrance lost, as to thy love?

Ask not the cause that I new numbers chuse,

The Lute neglected, and the Lyric muse;

Love taught my tears in sadder notes to f low,

And tun’d my heart to elegies of woe. (1–8)

The Ovidian Sappho acknowledges that Phaon is accustomed to receiv-

ing love lyrics not epistolary poetry, the meter of which Ovid himself

innovated for the Amores as an erotic alternative to the heroic meter

(pairs of hexameters) of epic poetry. Writing in English, Pope converts

Ovid’s elegiac couplets to rhyming ones. The point is that Ovid’s Sappho

chooses a new meter, “new numbers,” for her epistle. None of Ovid’s

canonical Heroides acknowledge that they are verse compositions, but

none of them are supposedly the compositions of famous writers; so

the author of this one, Ovid or an imitator, opens with an acknowledg-

ment of the formal choice that the poet- character Sappho presumably

has made. Indeed, the Ovidian source stresses that Sappho chooses

the elegiac measure characteristic of Ovid specifically because her pas-

sion for Phaon has crippled her ability to write lyric poetry: Robinson

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1369780230100251_05_ch03.indd 136 12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM

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

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