The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates I 159

it would devastate the local economy—as he had done in 1791 and

1792 (Oracle 8 March 1794). Moreover, Tarleton was suspected of

having help from Robinson herself in the writing of his speeches,

despite her own contrary views (Davenport 169).

The series of Portia poems are the most potentially controversial

political poems Robinson had published up to this point. This avatar

with all of its associations stands in stark contrast to Laura Maria at

the Oracle, which had been previously her most prominent avatar.

“St. James’s Street, on the Eighteenth of January, 1795” demon-

strates further Robinson’s cultivation of an urban and urbane ava-

tar for political commentary in a newspaper—her first attempt to do

so following the end of the Della Cruscan network: this particular

poem appeared in the Morning Post on the 21st of January—Queen

Charlotte’s birthday—just a few days after the date on the poem. It is

an explicit attack on the apathy of the privileged upper classes toward

the poor. Playing on the persona of Portia, each of these poems has a

direct political purpose and shows impressive rhetorical savvy. More

so than her previous avatars, Robinson’s Portia demonstrates her

understanding of the medium and its context, and of how a newspa-

per poem with an explicit political or social message ought to eschew

literary complexity, or what her critics occasionally called obscurity,

in favor of easy wit seasoned with sentiment and indignation; such

poetry ought to be consumable. In “St. James’s Street,” later titled

“The Birth- Day” in her 1806 Poetical Works, Robinson, characteristi-

cally clever, uses the specific urban setting—a fashionable thorough-

fare from Piccadilly to Pall Mall and St. James’ Palace—to contrast

the situations of the rich and the poor by creating the rhetorical illu-

sion of a dual space:

HERE bounds the gaudy gilded chair,

Deck’d out with fringe and tassels gay;

The melancholy mourner, THERE,

Pursues her sad and painful way!

HERE, guarded by a pompous train,

The pamper’d Countess glares along;

THERE, wrung by poverty and pain,

Pale Mis’ry mingles with the throng! (1: 314; 1–8)

And so the poem continues with the poet’s upbraiding of “HIGH

NAMES, adorning little Souls” who “Contemn the pang they never

know!” Robinson here anticipates by some sixty years the metaphor

central to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, in which the two cities are

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1599780230100251_06_ch04.indd 159 12/28/2010 11:08:49 AM12/28/2010 11:08:49 AM

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