The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 209

number being the stress count. What is difficult to grasp about

“the Alonzo meter” is that its practitioners understood that a gen-

erally anapestic feel was essential, while not prescriptive, so they

aimed for a syllabic disproportion in the number of unstressed syl-

lables to stressed ones. More unstressed syllables emphasize the

beat of the poem. Robinson’s “The Doublet of Grey,” like “Alonzo

the Brave and Fair Imogine,” is a supernatural tale of violence and

star- crossed lovers, and thus metrically and thematically echoes its

original:

XXII.

Now o’er the wild heath when the winter winds blow,

And the moon- silver’d fern branches wave,

Pale Theodore’s spectre is seen gliding slow,

As he calls on the damsel in accents of woe,

Till the bell warns him back to his grave.

XXIII.

And while the deep sound echoes over the wood,

Now the villagers shrink with dismay;

For, as legends declare, where the castle once stood,

Mid the ruins, by moonlight, all cover’d with blood,

Shrieks the maid—in her doublet of grey! (5: 303; 106–15)

The meter reveals the same kind of heavy stress found in Lewis’s origi-

nal. Like “Alonzo the Brave,” most of the lines have a strong anapestic

sound, suggestive of metrical feet, but the syllabic count is often irregu-

lar in the poem and the initial unstressed syllable in many lines is trun-

cated. Considering its gothic subject, it seems more likely that Robinson

is counting stresses, falling invariably into anapests for rhythmic effect,

as a way of capturing the same kind of effect Lewis achieves.

As we can see, by 1816, Coleridge’s “new principle” was not new at

all, although some of the more extreme instances of its practice may

have been, as was the poet’s clear articulation of it in the preface to

“Christabel.” “Christabel” was his attempt to distance himself from

the stanzaic regularity of the ballad, traditional or innovative. In the

Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, the year after the Christabel

volume appeared, Coleridge remarked that “new metres,” specifi-

cally that of “Alonzo and Imogen [sic]” have “in their very mech-

anism a specific overpowering tune, to which the generous reader

humours his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence to the author

than attention to the meaning or quantity of the words” (2: 34). He

means that the stanzaic matrix will cause readers to recognize and

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