The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

160 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

not merely London and Paris, but the separate worlds of the rich

and the poor coexisting in the same space. As Stephen C. Behrendt

asserts, this poem demonstrates Robinson’s “deliberate attempts to

destabilize the system by dramatizing for her readers the suffering of

the excluded under an established system of callous privilege” (British

55). The poem closes with the familiar trope of death as the great

equalizer, again from Gray’s Elegy:

“Take Physic Pomp!” let REASON say,

“What can avail thy trappings rare?

The tomb shall close thy glitt’ring day!

The BEGGAR prove thy EQUA L, THERE!!” (1: 315; 41–4)

Robinson’s Portia here echoes Shakespeare’s Lear, who finds himself

homeless and destitute on the heath. Just before he enters the hovel

of Poor Tom (Edgar in disguise), Lear has an epiphany, addressing

those who still enjoy the luxury he no longer does:

Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superf lux to them,

And show the heavens more just. (3.4.33–6)

Although the poem alludes to Lear’s plea for humanitarian relief for

the poor, we should not forget, however, how politically charged such

a sentiment was for the 1790s, particularly as Britain waged war with

revolutionary France: the poem’s ostensibly Christian conclusion con-

notes as well the obliteration of class distinctions—what conservatives

called “levelling,” a bogey used to combat Thomas Paine’s Rights of

Man and to frighten moderates with the fear that liberals and radicals

meant to subvert the English constitution and undo the fabric of civi-

lized society. One pamphlet, A Caution against the Levellers (1793),

insisted that those seeking reform would “overturn the government,

and put all property under confiscation, as they have done in France”

(qtd. in Claeys 88). In this way, Robinson’s Portia poems recall

William Hazlitt’s comment that Wordsworth’s “Muse... is a levelling

one. It proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all

things to the same standard” (Lectures 253). But Portia’s charge is

more confrontational than Lear’s, coming from a political voice in an

opposition newspaper rather than from a desperate, dethroned, and

elderly monarch mourning the loss of his own power and inf luence.

Robinson understood that her readers, like media consumers today

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

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