The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

140 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

For example, Sonnet VI, presumably in Sappho’s voice, asks if love

really is nothing more than sexual obsession:

IS it to love, to fix the tender gaze,

To hide the timid blush, and steal away;

To shun the busy world, and waste the day

In some rude mountain’s solitary maze?

Is it to chant one name in ceaseless lays,

To hear no words that other tongues can say,

To watch the pale moon’s melancholy ray,

To chide in fondness, and in folly praise?

Is it to pour th’ involuntary sigh,

To dream of bliss, and wake new pangs to prove;

To talk, in fancy, with the speaking eye,

Then start with jealousy, and wildly rove;

Is it to loathe the light, and wish to die?

For these I feel,—and feel that they are Love. (1: 330–1)

Playfully and knowingly dealing in Petrarchan contraries, this sonnet

possesses an articulation of the lover’s quandary as ironic yet sympa-

thetic any of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sonnets. Robinson’s sonnet

implicitly admits that the experience the poet- character describes is

contrary to any reasonable or ethical definition of love, but concludes

nonetheless that the lover’s feelings subjectively validate it. Lovers do

feel this way, while their observers recognize the dangers of defining

love in such solipsistic terms. The next sonnet, Sonnet VII, responds

immediately with an almost comic reversal in its opening line:

COME, Reason, come! each nerve rebellious bind,

Lull the fierce tempest of my fev’rish soul;

Come, with the magic of thy meek controul,

And check the wayward wand’rings of my mind.... (1: 331; 1–4)

Robinson understands that such vicissitudes are endemic to the

English Petrarchan tradition and that the sonnet- lover scoffs at

such nostrums. The sonnet- reader, of course, is more interested in

the “wayward wand’rings” of the erotic imagination—although the

attempt to restrain passion is certainly also amusing, as the neo-

Petrarchans Sidney, Drayton, and Daniel in particular demonstrate.

As Sidney writes in Sonnet 71 of Astrophil and Stella, “But ‘Ah,’

Desire still cries, ‘Give me some food!’ ”

Robinson’s treatment of Sappho is professedly heteronormative. Even

if she were unable to read the original Latin, which is more explicit,

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

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