The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

220 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

noted that the “eerily haunting effects created by a combination of

rhyme, meter, and repetition” present in Robinson’s text surpass “the

capacity of Coleridge’s ballad meter, however brilliantly employed, to

assume complementary meaning” (“Lyrical Tales” 27–8). In other

words, according to Curran, Robinson’s “meter” matches its “mat-

ter” better than Coleridge’s does.

For “The Haunted Beach,” Robinson has devised a nine- line lyri-

cal stanza as difficult to rhyme as the Spenserian stanza, but with

shorter, and more incantatory, alternating lines of four and three

stresses, with an augmented rhyme in the second and fourth lines:

x 4 a_ 3 [bb] 4 a_ 3 c 4 d 3 c 4 c 4 d 3. The augmented rhyme is particularly signifi-

cant because Coleridge found it to be an essential feature of the stanza.

Just as he praises Robinson’s ear, he also complains that William Taylor,

who translated Bürger’s “Lenore,” has written to him asserting “that

Double Rhymes in our Langauge have always a ludicrous association –

Mercy on the Man! Where are his Ears & Feelings?” (Letters 1: 576).

The association Coleridge makes between Robinson’s ear and Taylor’s

is revealing; Robinson’s stanza, for Coleridge, clearly demonstrates the

effectiveness of augmented, or “double,” rhymes for creating a creepy

rather than comic atmosphere. The metrics of each line is indispens-

able in creating the shape of the stanza. Again, following the “Alonzo”

meter, these lines feature a heavily accentual stress to emphasize the

qualities of the haunted consciousness. In the refrain, or burden, which

appears with some variation at the end of each stanza but the final one,

“Where the green billows play’d,” for example, we hear three heavily

accented syllables; and although the six total syllables might suggest

foot verse, we would have to scan Robinson as implausibly substituting

a pyrrhic foot and a spondee for the first two feet (and an anapestic,

or trisyllabic, substitution would not balance out with the rest of the

feet because there is not metrical unit of one syllable). Robinson, like

Coleridge or Lewis, is simply counting stressed beats instead of syl-

lables. What Coleridge would have appreciated most about the meter

is the intricacy of its rhyme in each stanza, especially internally in the

third line, and the alternating shortness of the meter, which keeps the

corresponding sounds closer together for musical effect. The rhyme

is unique in a stanza of this length because there are only four end-

rhymes, and especially because the first line does not rhyme with the

rest of the stanza. Curran best describes the effect of the stanza when

he writes, “The stanzaic form is, to put it simply, haunted – forced,

like the tide that dominates the poem and ‘Re- echo[s] on the chalky

shore’ (8)[,] to turn back on itself, unable to break free of a predeter-

mined mechanism of control” (“New Lyric” 18). This is the effect that

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

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