The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 233

prominent couplets disguise its form, and it ends in long hymnal mea-

sure, mocking the rhyme scheme that traditionally opens an English

sonnet.

Robinson continues the extrapolation of forms in the third stanza

but complicates it with a bewildering rhyme scheme and with seam-

lessly interfused forms. The second stanza ends with the long hymnal

measure, slightly varied, that has become a refrain for the end of each

stanza. The two fourteen- line stanzas that close the poem are again

perverted English sonnets that highlight Robinson’s recognition of

the sonnet Coleridge hides at the center of “Kubla Khan.” The rhyme

scheme of the first closely resembles that of the sonnet in “Kubla

K ha n ,” t houg h R obi n son , never whol ly i m it at ive, va r ie s it ju st enoug h

to make the similarity striking (45–58). Like Coleridge, she contains

the first three rhymes within six lines, thus defying the heroic qua-

train structure usual for an English sonnet, which this most certainly

corrupts as it has seven rhymes. And, like Coleridge, Robinson post-

pones the “b” rhyme until the sixth line; but, where Coleridge com-

pletes the rhyme after three lines, Robinson prolongs completion for

four. Even though her lines are shorter by a foot, Robinson’s exten-

sion of the rhyme creates a more varied aural effect by prohibiting

more than two couplets in the octave, where Coleridge has three. In

the sestet, Coleridge falls into the recognizable quatrain- followed- by-

couplet pattern, though now his lines are also tetrameters. Robinson

inverts this pattern to allow for the long hymnal measure refrain,

which rhymes like a quatrain and here completes the sonnet. The son-

net (59 –72) t hat closes Robinson’s poem begins w it h a st ring of t hree

couplets that end in an iambic pentameter at line 64, where Robinson

substitutes a trochee for the initial foot. Immediately following the

couplets, an envelope stanza dissolves the division between the octave

and the sestet not by enjambing the eighth and ninth lines of the son-

net, as in the Miltonic sonnet, but by making the rhyme of the tenth

line (68) dependent upon the end of the seventh (65). Ending with a

pair of couplets, Robinson prolongs the ending of the poem by two

feet with the slow length of an Alexandrine, a meter that does not

appear at all in “Kubla Khan,” providing closure to both her poem

and Coleridge’s. Robinson’s poem contains at least as much metrical

variety as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” though many of her metrical

choices are notably different from his. Still, she shows that she can

employ similar techniques.

Robinson easily could have imitated “Kubla K han,” but she under-

stood the substance and style of the poem well enough to answer its

imaginative challenge. In effect, Robinson’s poem suggests a metrical

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2339780230100251_07_ch05.indd 233 12/28/2010 11:09:06 AM12/28/2010 11:09:06 AM

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