The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

144 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

IX; 332; 13–4). Sappho’s sexual obsession thus threatens not only

to drive Phaon away, but also to impair fatally her reputation as a

woman poet. Even as she asserts her own poetic legitimacy with the

sequence, Robinson also proclaims the ineffectuality and ephemer-

ality of Sappho’s lyric expressions—her actual compositions—which

Robinson figures as existing outside of her sequence. Accordingly, she

alludes to the fact that Sappho’s writing failed to be as carefully pre-

served as that of other ancients because lyric poetry was not as highly

valued as, say, epic or dramatic works. As Robinson writes, and as her

Sappho acknowledges, “Folly’s torch consumes the wreath of fame”

(XI; 332; 7). The “wreath of fame” is wasted upon Sappho because

she lacks the fortitude to reject passion, sensibility, and feeling. She

lacks, moreover, a benignant Laura- figure to foster transcendence.

Robinson means to avoid the original Sappho’s fate—in more ways

than one. In the Ovidian source, Sappho’s lyric prowess derives from

her homoerotic passion; in Sappho and Phaon, it is erotic passion itself

that has enervated, debilitated her lyric creativity. Her Sappho rejects

reason in favor of sexual fantasy and thus succumbs to the tyranny of

love (Sonnet XVII; 1: 334–5). The poet- character also expects severe

judgment from other women: “nymphs beware,” she warns, “how ye

profane my name, / Nor blame my weakness, till like me ye love!”

(335; 13–4). Although Phaon’s rejection is her personal misfor-

tune, Sappho expects women ultimately to precipitate the ruin of her

reputation. Playing upon the stereotypes of the emotional woman,

Robinson’s Sappho becomes the “frantic minstrel,” who is contrasted

against the rational voice of the poet- narrator, who suggests that love

in the hands of a woman poet is destined to ruin not only the woman

who falls prey to it, but the woman poet who is inspired by it:

On the bleak rock your frantic minstrel stands,

Each task forgot, save that, to sigh and weep;

In vain the strings her burning fingers sweep,

No more her touch, the Grecian Lyre commands! (XIX; 335; 5–8)

Sappho succumbs to feeling, but Robinson suggests that such a sur-

render to dependent love is devastating to women and to women poets.

Her love conquers her reason and thus endangers her poetic status.

Previously, before he rejects her love, Phaon, not the Lesbian women,

inspired her poetry, which the poet- character wrongly presumes is a

synecdoche for her totality in Phaon’s eyes:

CAN’ST thou forget, O! Idol of my Soul!

Thy Sappho’s voice, her form, her dulcet Lyre!

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1449780230100251_05_ch03.indd 144 12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM

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