The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 231

into question the overdeterminacy of meter and rhyme, what Wesling

calls “the scandal of form,” about which Wordsworth and Coleridge

are both so defensive (63). In a sense, there is a metrical story being

told in “Kubla Khan” that can be read without any regard to seman-

tics. And Robinson’s poem suggests that she comprehends not only

the verbal texture of the poem but its metrical story as well. She reads

the poem completely by reading what McFarland refers to as a poem’s

“substantia,” a term that includes all of the considerations of for-

malist theory: words and their meanings but also stanza, meter, and

rhyme (273).

“Kubla Khan” opens with a five- line variation on hymnal measure.

Coleridge follows with two regular iambic tetrameter lines to signal

a gradual shift from hymnal measure in lines 1–5 to the more aca-

demic heroic quatrain, lines 8–11, which closes the first recognizable

unit of the poem. For the next nineteen lines, Coleridge faithfully

adheres to an iambic pentameter matrix; still, he continues to mingle

the measure, as the rhyme scheme signals. By line 12, the opening of

the second section, Coleridge is self- consciously working in iambic

pentameter, so he nods at his predecessor in seven lines that resemble

the Chaucerian stanza. These seven lines are followed by a quatrain

consisting of two heroic couplets (19–22). But Coleridge’s most

impressive feat of metrical gymnastics comes in lines 23–36, fourteen

lines that form a highly irregular English sonnet. Though he corrupts

the rhyme, Coleridge still manages the requisite seven rhymes. And

he signals the turn between the octave and the sestet with not only

an end- stopped line—“Ancestral Voices prophesying War”—but with

a change in meter as well: the first four lines of the sestet recall long

hymnal measure. Of course, Coleridge closes the “sonnet” with the

traditional iambic pentameter couplet, thus providing the punchline

to his metrical joke and punctuating the second stanza. The third

stanza, describing the vision and the poet’s incantation, is a return

to the folk meters that open the poem, though with even more mis-

chievous technical variations to complete the meter. So, by the end

of “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge has essentially told the story of English

poetic practice from the native ballad forms to Chaucerian foot verse

to Renaissance sonneteering to eighteenth- century couplets and end-

ing finally in a return to the ballad form in the Romantic period. As

we shall see, Coleridge’s review of English poetry is a peculiar feature

of the kind of poem that “Kubla Khan” is, particularly as it partakes

in an eighteenth- century tradition of lyrical irregularity.

Robinson was keenly aware of this metrical play and was thus able

to read “Kubla Khan” on two levels: as a poem about the imagination,

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2319780230100251_07_ch05.indd 231 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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