The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 219

similarly “too good to perish” after reading it in the Morning Post

for 26 February 1800. Coleridge informs Southey, “I was so struck

with it that I sent to her to desire that [it] might be preserved in the

Anthology.” He adds, “She was extremely f lattered by the Idea of it’s

[sic] being there, as she idolizes you & your Doings. So if it be not too

late, I pray you, let it be in”; although “it falls off sadly to the last,”

Coleridge notes to Southey that “the Images are new & very dis-

tinct” (Letters 1: 576). The seaside setting and supernatural elements

in “The Haunted Beach,” combined with its violent imagery, bear

some similarity to the 1798 “The R ime of the Ancyent Marinere,” as

well as the poem’s themes of crime, guilt, and punishment. The poem

tells of a fisherman haunted by “a band of Spectres,” the drowned

shipmates of a shipwrecked man whom he has murdered.^8 In this

passage, Robinson describes how the sailor saves himself by attaching

himself to the mast of the ship only to meet his end by human hands

when he reaches the shore:

The SPECTR E band, his MESSMATES bold,

Sunk in the yawning ocean,

While to the mast, he lash’d him fast,

And brav’d the storm’s commotion!

The winter MOON upon the sand

A silv’ry carpet made,

And mark’d the SAILOR reach the land—

And mark’d his MURD’RER wash his hand

Where the green billows play’d! (2: 45; 46–54)

Coleridge finds that the poem “wants Tale,” but the poem does not

tell a story so much as it captures the guilty man’s state of mind.

In the stanza above, Coleridge particularly liked the phrase “silv’ry

carpet,” as he tells Southey; this image points to the poem’s chrono-

logical and narrative uncertainty as the effect of the moonlight on

the sand illuminates both the sailor’s salvation and his doom—but

with an emphasis on the fisherman’s guilt as he, like Pilate or Lady

Macbeth, attempts to wash away his crime. It is only in the expanded

version of the poem with an additional expository stanza, from Lyrical

Tales, do we learn that the “Shipwreck’d Mariner” has himself stolen

a “packet rich of Spanish gold” from the ship before it sunk, thus

providing the fisherman’s motive for killing him (2: 463). Robinson

may have added this stanza on Coleridge’s advice, or Stuart may have

dropped the stanza for space concerns. In its first publication, how-

ever, the absence of the additional stanzas gives the original version

the same compelling ambiguity that underlies Coleridge’s “Ancyent

Marinere.” Clearly the two poems are related, although Curran has

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