The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

226 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

I sing! Spirit of Light! to thee / Attune the varying strain of wood-

wild harmony” (2: 135; 5–6). The phrase “wood- wild harmony” is

a refrain throughout and points to the repurposing of Robinson’s

odic practices for the wild expanse of this particular setting, as well

as for the rustic, woodland setting of her own place of composition

Windsor Forest:

SWEET BOY! accept a STR ANGER’S song,

Who joys to sing of thee,

Alone her forest haunts among,

The haunts of wood- wild harmony!

A stranger’s song, by falsehood undefil’d,

Hymns thee, O! INSPIRATION’S darling child! (2: 137; 91–6)

Again, Robinson sees Coleridgean procreation as an allegory for

poetic composition. Her own poem to Derwent is an analogue for

his father’s poetic genius as the child himself is a metonym for all

kinds of creative power. But it is also a lament for her own mortality:

She writes to Derwent, “In thee it [the song] hails the genius of thy

sire, / Her [the stranger’s] sad heart sighing o’er feeble lyre” (97–8).

Even infirm as she was at the time of composition, Robinson’s mod-

esty is a tad disingenuous, for she still has infinite confidence in the

power of her lyre. In this, one of her final odes, what formerly had

been baroque elegance becomes capacious metrical diversity in trib-

ute to a new poetic kindred spirit, Coleridge.

So, going all the way back to her “Ode to Della Crusca,” Robinson’s

poetic tributes tend metrically to accord with the style of the poet she

praises. Predominantly in rhyming couplets, Robinson’s “Ode” also

incorporates balladic quatrains (abab, as in lines 91–4 above), and

enveloping rhyming quatrains (abba; see, for example, lines 51–4,

69–72); moreover, the poem features extreme metrical diversity, with

lines ranging from four to twelve syllables and varying stress pat-

terns. With the exception of his “Ode to the Departing Year,” which

Robinson may have read in Coleridge’s 1797 volume and which fol-

lows the conventions of the eighteenth- century irregular ode, the

only poems by Coleridge that feature such metrical variation and that

Robinson could have known are “Songs of the Pixies,” from his 1796

Poems on Various Subjects, and “Kubla Khan.”

While it is possible that Coleridge shared “Christabel” with

Robinson, he certainly recited “Kubla Khan” for her or gave it to her

in manuscript. Coleridge first published “Kubla Khan: or A Vision in

a Dream” in 1816, when it appeared in a volume called Christabel;

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2269780230100251_07_ch05.indd 226 12/28/2010 11:09:05 AM12/28/2010 11:09:05 AM

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