The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 225

Sappho had been there before him, and that her Body could be no

where found, he very generously lamented her fall.” Given Robinson’s

illness and Coleridge’s knowledge of it, the poem in light of this story

about Alcæus’s love for the doomed Sappho assumes the quality of an

elegy or lament.

The other poems in their exchange present the two poets on a

more equal literary footing. Her “Ode, Inscribed to the Infant Son

of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.” celebrates the birth in Keswick of Derwent

Coleridge on 14 September 1800. Presumably Robinson received the

news either through Stuart or through correspondence with Coleridge

himself. And she likely knew of the death of the Coleridges’ second

son, Berkeley, the previous year. The “Ode” confirms Robinson’s

familiarity with Coleridge’s 1798 poems “Frost at Midnight,” “The

Nightingale,” and “The Rime of Ancyent Marinere.” But it also con-

firms her familiarity with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” for, like her trib-

ute to that poem, “Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge,” it mimics

the formal irregularity of “Kubla Khan,” recalling stylistically the

baroque meters of her Laura Maria odes. The “Ode” paints the Lake

District, to which Coleridge has removed, as a fantastic imaginative

space like that demarcated by Kubla Khan:

Ye^ CATAR ACTS! on whose headlong tide

The midnight whirlwinds howling ride;—

Ye silent LAKES! that trembling hail

The cold breath of the morning gale;

And on your lucid mirrors wide display,

In colours bright, in dewy lustre gay,

Fantastic woodlands, while the dappled dawn

Scatters its pearl- drops on the sunny lawn;

And thou, meek Orb, that lift’st thy silver bow

O’er frozen vallies, and o’er hills of snow;—

Ye all shall lend your wonders—all combine

To greet the Babe, with energies divine!

While his rapt soul, SPIR IT OF LIGHT! to THEE

Shall raise the magic song of wood- wild harmony! (2: 136; 25–38)

As a tribute to Coleridge as a poet and as a father, Robinson thus cel-

ebrates the generative faculties manifest in “Kubla Khan.” The poem

develops the poetic conceit of Derwent as the son of poetic genius,

addressed throughout as the “Spirit of Light,” while literally calling

on the sun rising and so also alluding to Apollo, the god of poetry.

Even here Robinson attends to formal considerations as the invoca-

tion calls upon the fixing and fitting of metrical variations: “To thee

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2259780230100251_07_ch05.indd 225 12/28/2010 11:09:05 AM12/28/2010 11:09:05 AM

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