The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 45

having “grown a breathless statue at the sound” of a “female voice,”

Anna Matilda retorts,

Thy statue torn from Cupid’s hallow’d nitch,

But in return thou shalt be dull, and rich;

The Muses hence disown thy rebel lay—

But thou in Aldermanic gown, their scorn repay;

Crimson’d, and furr’d, the highest honours dare,

And on thy laurels tread—a PLUMP LOR D MAYOR!

She teases him with an unf lattering vision of himself as a compla-

cent burgher rather than the poetic playboy to whom she initially

responded (and whom she may have known Merry actually to be).

This is actually a comic invitation to drop the earnest pose and to

play. In this context, then, I find it difficult to take seriously the

Della Crusca poem that appears three days later, “Ode to Death,”

in which “Young Ammon” (Alexander the Great) succumbs in the

following manner to personified Death, the subject of the address:

“The World I’ve won!”—THOU gav’st the withering nod, / Thy FIAT

smote his heart,—he sunk,—a senseless clod!” (25 December 1787).

This poem also ends with what has to be a parody of the most com-

mon trope of Sensibility, particularly after the Werter sensation of

the 1780s; one that appears frequently in Smith’s popular Elegiac

Sonnets: “Then tho’ I scorn thy stroke—I call thee FRIEND, / For in

thy calm embrace, my weary woes shall end.” Merry’s Della Crusca

avatar was a way to employ the popular Werter- like trope, even as it

started to become moribund, with a fresh touch of irony that made it

all the more fun.

The speculation on the identity of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda

fueled interest in The Poetry of the World during the summer of 1788.

Topham teased his readers with it: “Who will say a Lady cannot keep

a Secret?” he writes, while reminding them that “Anna Matilda’s

Laurel” “has trembled over the heads of Mrs. Piozzi, Mrs. Cowley,

Mrs. Barbauld, and Miss Seward—each of whom has disclaimed any

pretensions to it” (World 29 July 1788). Reviewing The Poetry of the

World, a critic for the English Review suggested that Della Crusca and

Anna Matilda are the same person, based on stylistic likenesses in the

poems and a similar lack of “judgment and good taste,” adding that

“the orgasm is sometimes so violent as to carry the poet far beyond

the precincts of common- sense” (127). Exactly. Such excitement

was appropriate perhaps in the pages of a disposable newspaper, but

the printing of the two volumes in such an elegant manner as Bell’s

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 459780230100251_03_ch01.indd 45 12/31/2010 4:20:14 PM12/31/2010 4:20:14 PM

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

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