The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates II 101

members of the First Coalition, Great Britain and the Dutch

Republic. Laura Maria responds with a return to form—the

twelve- line stanza form she had used in “Ode to Humanity.” This

time, however, she identifies her poem as a “Fragment, Supposed

To Be Written near the Temple, on the Night before the Murder

of Louis the Sixteenth” (Oracle 27 February 1793). She continues

her experiment with a generally homostrophic poem, although,

aga i n, w it h va r iat ions w it h i n each of t he seven sta nzas. Most of t he

lines are again four beats (seven or eight syllables per line), with

frequent metrical substitutions (trochees for iambs, for example),

but most of the stanzas end with an iambic pentameter and iambic

hexameter rhyming couplet. The metrical variety mimics Laura

Maria’s disturbed imaging of an inconceivable and obscene—lit-

erally ob scena—horror. As the title indicates, Robinson’s view of

the event is unequivocal: The King’s execution is murder. And the

atmosphere in which it is perpetrated is one of appalling anticipa-

tion: “In dumb despair Creation seems to wait, / While Horror

stalks abroad to deal the shafts of Fate!” (1: 191; 11–2). Laura

Maria “supposes” herself outside the medieval fortress where Louis

XVI awaited his fate on the night before he was to be taken from

there to the guillotine. The poem is a “fragment” in the sense that

Robinson wants to portray the horror of the crime as a violation

of the imagination that is inconceivable and thus incomplete; the

poet’s “fancy” cannot envision the consummation of the crime.

Although most critics are more interested in Robinson’s Marie

Antoinette poems, her “Fragment” is compellingly impenetrable,

like the fortress itself. Robinson’s Laura Maria cannot completely

access the scene inside, only its circumstances, until morning

comes. She can geographically place the dauphin, Louis- Charles,

inside the Temple, where he is already “entombed” though still

alive, but can only envision the “Troops of PANDIMONIUM [sic]”

whose “desolating Ire” persecutes “the fairest Child of Earth” (1:

192; 26–30). In contrast to her later poem “Marie Antoinette’s

Lamentation,” Robinson makes no attempt here fully to subjectify

the horror of the night from the King’s perspective until the end

of the poem, but then only brief ly; most of the horror is reserved

for her reader. Instead, she describes the activities of allegorical

figures such as Ambition, Malice, Revenge, Suspicion, Fear—

all representing the French National Convention (38–42). The

Revolutionaries Laura Maria previously had celebrated in Ainsi va

le monde as “the favour’d delegates of Heav’n” have become “The

barb’rous Sons of ANARCHY” who “Drench their unnat’ral hands

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

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