The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

30 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

The most remarkable of Robinson’s Oberon poems is “The

Camp,” which Paula Feldman describes as “a poetic tour de force”

(British 594). Like her earlier poem “January 1795,” published with

Robinson’s Portia avatar (see chapter four), “The Camp” is in tro-

chaic tetrameter, which is best known as the meter Shakespeare uses

for the witches in Macbeth, to which Robinson alludes by echoing

the phrase “hurly burly” in line 32 (2: 111–2). Robinson’s metri-

cal choice, moreover, greatly the enhances the satirical montage of

sights and sounds of an assembly of soldiers and an attendant entou-

rage where the fashionable and the military, the opulent and the vul-

gar, and, most of all, the sexual, the belligerent, and the commercial

become jarringly confused. As Pascoe notes, Robinson probably wit-

nessed much of this firsthand at Windsor Camp, where, as the Post

reported on 5 August 1800, a large party took place the week before

(Romantic 156). Robinson’s Oberon poem, however, appeared in the

Morning Post more immediately on 1 August 1800. The poem’s form

extends its meaning through accretion, but here is how it opens:

TENTS, marquees, and baggage waggons;

Suttling houses; beer in f laggons;

Drums and trumpets, singing, firing;

Girls seducing, beaux admiring;

Country lasses gay and smiling

City lads their hearts beguiling;

Dusty roads, and horses frisky;

Many an Eton boy in whisky;

Tax’d carts full of farmers’ daughters;

Brutes condemn’d, and man—who slaughters!—

Public- houses, booths, and castles;

Belles of fashion, serving vassals;

Lordly Gen’rals fiercely staring,

Weary soldiers, sighing, swearing! (2: 111; 1–14)

Robinson uses the binary symmetry of the couplets and the syncopa-

tion of varying caesurae to sonic and semantic effect. The power of

the poem is that the irony, one suspects, is ironic in itself because

its satirical method shifts imperceptibly from objective description to

sarcastic juxtaposition and back again. Moreover, the poem’s inevi-

table rhythmic echo of “Double, double, toil and trouble” gives it

pleasingly disorienting oscillation between playfulness and dread. As

it builds to its conclusion—where Oberon finally observes, “All con-

fusion, din, and riot— / NOTHING CLEAN—AND NOTHING QUIET.”—

the fairy signature attached at the end merges strangely but effectively

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

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