The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

164 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

novel Angelina, the blank verse tragedy The Sicilian Lover, the son-

net sequence Sappho and Phaon, the novel Hubert de Sevrac, and her

lengthy four- volume novel Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, all of

which appeared under her own name. During this time, from January

of 1795 until December of 1797, Robinson published only a couple of

original poems in periodicals, although poetic extracts from each of

the works listed in the preceding appeared in newspapers and maga-

zines. The one major exception is Robinson’s remarkable poem “The

Storm,” which appeared in the Morning Post under her own name,

“Mrs. Robinson,” on 3 February 1796. This poem is significant for

a number of reasons: first of all, it is a forthright condemnation of

her country’s participation in the slave trade. As Shelley A. J. Jones

has shown, Robinson’s antislavery poem “The Storm” appeared in the

Morning Post in the midst of its reports of Britain’s ill- fated invasion

of French colonies in the Caribbean for the purpose of expanding its

slaving interests, and of a storm that destroyed a number of ships in

a f leet en route to the West Indies (42–5). Robinson’s poem is dated

1 February 1796, the day the paper reported that the surviving ships

had been recovered. Robinson’s poem, however, does not celebrate

the safe return of those ships and the sailors and soldiers. Instead,

she imagines the foundering of one of those ships just off the coast

from the perspective of a young woman, the “love- lorn NANCY” who

watches the catastrophe from the shore, horrified by the imminent

death of her lover, William, in the wreck (1: 318; 6). As she laments

William’s death, Nancy also condemns the system that, as Jones points

out, has made her lover, presumably a sailor or soldier, both “oppres-

sor and oppressed” (45). She watches the terrified shipmates leap from

the deck only to perish in the tumult, and the character Nancy speaks

in a voice that echoes the rhetoric of Robinson’s indignant Portia:

“Oh! Cruel Pow’r! Oh! ruthless fate!

Does HEAV’N’S high will decree,

That some should sleep on beds of State—

Some in the roaring sea?

Some, nurs’d in lux’ry, deal Oppression’s Blow,

While humble MERIT pines in Poverty and Woe!” (19–24)

Although Nancy decries the dispensations of Providence, Robinson,

in the manner of the Portia poems, directs her critique at artificial

social structures reified by custom and prejudice. Implicit in this, of

course, is the fact that the sailors and soldiers who here perish are also

the victims of class inequities as well as the instruments of bigotry

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1649780230100251_06_ch04.indd 164 12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM

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

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