The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

202 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

echo of the sense,” except for Coleridge’s emphasis on the poet’s

ability to “artificially” manufacture, through versification, metrical

excitement and energy—a quality he saw Robinson’s poetry possess-

ing in abundance. The passage above emphasizes craftsmanship and

deliberateness as well as the mandatory possession of a particular

skill, “an ear,” for the achievement of poetic effects. As Coleridge

writes, sounding conspicuously (and unintentionally) in agreement

w it h Wordswor t h, meter cont rols “t he work ings of passion” in a “ba l-

ance of antagonists” that is deliberately formulated “for the foreseen

purpose of pleasure” (2: 64). As Stephen Parrish reminds us, pleasure

is central to the metrical principles of both poets; their difference is

not so much the effect of meter but whether or not it has value dis-

tinct from the language in which the poet expresses it (“Wordsworth

and Coleridge on Meter”). For Coleridge especially, this pleasure is

ineffable: notoriously difficult to analyze, to explain, or to teach. In

explaining the “effects of metre,” Coleridge adds,

As far as metre acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity

and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention.

This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprize, and by

the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re- excited,

which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct

consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate inf luence. As

a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation; they

act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. (Biographia 2: 66)

The effect Coleridge describes is not unlike Wordsworth’s explana-

tion of meter’s power “to divest language in a certain degree of its

reality, and thus to throw a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial

existence over the whole composition” (755n). Or to put it another

way, meter is a manifestation of the art of poetry, its un- reality, a

touch of verbal and formal surrealism. In his remarkable simile, he

compares meter to “yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giv-

ing vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally

combined” (Biographia 2: 67). While the pleasure of meter is sub-

liminal, Coleridge asserts that it is contingent upon the relationship

between style and substance: The pleasure, he says, is “conditional,

and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and expres-

sions, to which the metrical form is superadded” (Biographia 2: 69).

Coleridge characteristically is interested in the subconscious work-

ings of metrical practice as it acts upon the conscious reception of the

poetic work. Coleridge finds that her ear works in tandem with her

“full and overf lowing” mind as expressed in the poetry.

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