The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

228 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

quoted phrases from his unpublished poem. In any event, he let the

matter drop, perhaps hoping to be free of Maria Elizabeth’s interfer-

ence with his reputation.

In “Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge,” Robinson thrice refers

to Coleridge’s “sunny dome” and “caves of ice,” which appear in quo-

tation marks, and offers to “trace / Imagination’s boundless space”

with him. “To the Poet Coleridge” demonstrates her technical virtu-

osity; in it, she slyly winks at Coleridge by showing not only that she

understands the matter of his “Kubla Khan” but its meter as well. One

of her last compositions, the poem to Coleridge is remarkable for sev-

eral reasons. Coleridge was circulating “Kubla Khan” in manuscript

many years before its publication in 1816, and Robinson was one of

those who read the poem in an early form. It is difficult to imag-

ine anyone reading the poem in 1801 who would have recognized

Robinson’s cryptic references to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” The first

person after Robinson certainly to know of the existence of “Kubla

Khan” is Southey, but not until 1804 (Mays 671). Robinson’s poem

is the first published response to “Kubla Khan” and the best explica-

tion of it prior to twentieth- century criticism. Remarkably, she dem-

onstrates in it a comprehension of Coleridge’s poem lost on almost

all of its contemporary reviewers. For many readers of Christabel and

Other Poems (1816), “Kubla Khan” was merely “nonsense,” as Charles

Lamb reportedly declared to William Godwin (Reiman 890). And

none of the volume’s contemporary viewers seem to have made any

effort to understand the poem: William Hazlitt, for example, writes

in The Examiner that “Kubla Khan” “only shews that Mr. Coleridge

can write better nonsense verses than any man in England” (Reiman

531); and a reviewer for Scourge and Satirist calls the poem “a hasty

and unintelligible performance” (Reiman 868).

Robinson, however, proves in 1800 that she fully comprehends

Coleridge’s “visionary theme” on poetic imagination (2: 195; 1). She

picks up and responds to all the major images and motifs in “Kubla

Khan”: the river, the fountain, the “sunny dome,” the “Caves of Ice,”

the gardens, even the damsel and her dulcimer. She recognizes, more-

over, the poem’s implicit sexuality and its association with poetic cre-

ativity; she writes that the dulcimer at the end of the poem shall awake

the poet herself “in extatic measures! / Far, far remov’d from mortal

pleasures,” such as those suggested by lines 12–28 in “Kubla Khan”

(2: 197; 61–2). The penultimate act of poetic creation in “Kubla

Khan,” before the completion of the poem itself, is the creation of the

dome of pleasu re. The act ion of Robinson’s poem, inspired by t hat act

of poetic creation, consists of touring the landscape of “Kubla Khan”

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2289780230100251_07_ch05.indd 228 12/28/2010 11:09:06 AM12/28/2010 11:09:06 AM

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

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