Stuart’s Laureates II 227Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep. A poem entitled “Mrs.
Robinson to the Poet Coleridge” appeared f irst in the fourth volume
of her Memoirs among several dozen “tributary lines” addressed to
her by several friends, including John Taylor, Samuel Jackson Pratt,
James Boaden, and Peter Pindar (John Wolcot). “Mrs. Robinson to
the Poet Coleridge” follows in this sequence Coleridge’s “A Stranger
Minstrel,” ostensibly a reply to her “Ode, Inscribed to the Infant Son
of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.” Robinson’s ode on the occasion of Derwent
Coleridge’s birth appeared in the Morning Post for 17 October 1800;
the other ode to Coleridge, “Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge,”
is dated in the Memoirs also October 1800 and signed “Sappho,”
indicating Robinson’s intention to publish it in the Morning Post. We
do not know if Coleridge received a copy of Robinson’s tribute before
it appeared but, in a letter to Thomas Poole from February 1801,
Coleridge does refer to “a most affecting, heart- rending Letter” he
received from her “a few weeks before she died, to express what she
called her death bed affection & esteem for me” (Letters 2: 669).
It is possible that this letter included her poetic response to “Kubla
Khan.” Given Coleridge’s reluctance to acknowledge the existence of
the poem, his silence on receiving Robinson’s poem, while quoting
for Poole a passage from her letter, would be characteristic of him. We
do know that, once Coleridge moved from London to Keswick, he
and Robinson kept up a correspondence that included the exchange
of poems. In December of 1802, Coleridge wrote to Maria Elizabeth
Robinson expressing his irritation that she or, as he politely sug-
gests, the publisher Richard Phillips printed “A Stranger Minstrel”
in the Memoirs. Calling this poem “excessively silly,” Coleridge
reveals that the poem was intended to be part of a “private Letter” to
Maria Elizabeth’s mother and was not meant for publication (Letters
2: 904). Coleridge’s poem appears to be a response to the revised
version of her ode on Derwent’s birth, first published in the 1806
Poetical Works, for it is in the later, greatly altered text that “min-
strelsy” replaces “harmony” in the refrain, and where Robinson refers
to herself as “an untaught Minstrel” (2: 479–80).^9 Obviously, it was
Maria Elizabeth who found Coleridge’s poem among her mother’s
papers and provided it to Phillips. She evidently also possessed in
manuscript Robinson’s unpublished poem to Coleridge on “Kubla
Khan” and gave that to Phillips as well. Coleridge, in his letter to
Maria Elizabeth, claims not to have seen the volumes, so we do not
k now if he had read Robinson’s poem on “Kubla K han” at t he t ime of
writing to her; again, he does not mention it. Coleridge likely would
not have been pleased to see Robinson’s direct references to and9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2279780230100251_07_ch05.indd 227 12/28/2010 11:09:05 AM12/28/2010 11:09:05 AM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
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