The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 211

beats shows that Robinson, like Coleridge, is primarily interested in

count ing stresses rather than cumulat ive syllables in each line. In “The

Savage of Aveyron,” a traveler encounters a feral boy whose mother

had been murdered by thieves while he was only a baby.^5 Its intricate

stanza patterns match its setting, the “mazy woods of Averyon,” each

stanza winding to its terminal five- beat line, thus rendering its own

dream- like quality of being lost in the woods alone. The speaker won-

ders at the end if the “wretch” may have been “fancy- fraught” in the

“Dark wilds of dreary solitude” (2: 195; 168–73). According to the

Memoirs, this poem is “the last offspring of Mrs. Robinson’s Muse,”

and it demonstrates the perfection of her metrical art (2: 191). The

strange hypnotic meter and repeated rhymes capture perfectly the hor-

ror of the boy’s solitude and how it has stunted his development. The

speaker’s refrain expresses his alternating fear of and desire for solitude

when confronted by the young boy. The ostensible subject of the poem

is the boy, but the poem shows a far deeper interest in the speaker’s

reception of the idea of the boy’s existence. Each stanza includes the

word Aveyron at the end of a line, usually the ninth, and ends with

the word alone or one that rhymes with it. But more interestingly,

the poem’s meter emphasizes the speaker’s psychological response to

seeing the boy and his contemplation of the implications of the boy’s

savagery. Ultimately the speaker projects these fears upon himself.

In the Memoirs, Robinson’s anonymous friend (Maria Elizabeth or

Pratt) comments somewhat incongruously that “the correctness of the

metre, and the plaintive harmony which pervades every stanza, clearly

evinces the mild philosophy with which a strong mind can smooth

its journey to the grave” (2: 191). This suggests to me that the friend

recognized the poem’s outstanding formal features but could not

account for them and perhaps intended to obfuscate the poem’s darker

undercurrents; the technical proficiency her mother exhibits in the

poem, therefore, becomes a testament to the poet’s ultimate rejec-

tion of what seemed to many to be the hysterical Sensibility of the

1780s and 1790s in favor of a firmer, more masculine Stoicism or,

more likely, a pious resignation to the will of Providence. The poem

itself contradicts this reading—particularly as the speaker suddenly

finds him or herself alone at the end of the poem haunted by the boy,

“Whose melancholy tale would pierce AN HEART OF STONE” (2: 195;

174). The speaker’s encounter with the unknowable other leaves him

(or her) psychologically ravaged.^6 Even though this conclusion sounds

like a typical humanitarian poem of Sensibility, the cumulative effect

of the poem’s weird, incantatory stanzas creates a darker atmosphere

of alterity that resists sentimentality. The speaker and the boy achieve

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2119780230100251_07_ch05.indd 211 12/28/2010 11:09:03 AM12/28/2010 11:09:03 AM

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