The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates II 103

squarely on the shoulders of the French Revolutionaries, her coun-

try’s enemies.

Robinson’s “Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation, in Her Prison of

the Temple” appeared in the Oracle a little over two weeks after the

“Fragment,” on 8 March 1793. This poem concludes the trio of Laura

Maria poems against the French Revolution. As a “lamentation,” it

is particularly formal and, while not an ode, is strictly homostrophic:

Robinson uses a six- line stanza in iambic pentameter like the Ve nu s

and Adonis stanza (ababcc), but she likely did not intend a formal

allusion to Shakespeare’s erotic poem. Yet this fixed stanza does order

the poem more definitively than the previous two poems, and dem-

onstrates Robinson’s move away from highly irregular forms toward

an apparent preference for working in fixed forms, many of which,

as we will see, she devises herself. The formality here is an attempt

to present the French Queen with a sober dignity, to demonstrate a

composure of mind—the rationality that Robinson prizes in so much

of her poetry. Unlike the previous poems, Robinson’s Laura Maria

ventriloquizes Marie Antoinette, with the avatar dispersing some-

what the poet’s personal identification with her based on their actual

encounter years before. The formality highlights the artifice of the

constructed lament, but does not serve to diminish the effect of the

poem; rather, Robinson is particularly invested in the craftsmanship

of the poem. The strict form helps the poet to portray the Queen as

a woman of deep sensibility with an almost Burkean dignity, and to

avoid any hint of hysteria—at least until the end. The first five stanzas

all employ the same rhetorical structure: the first line, “When... ”;

the third line, “Why... ?”; the fifth line, “Alas! because.... ” These

repeated structures have a cumulative effect in the accretion of Marie

Antoinette’s woes and the injustice of her predicament. Robinson

wants to portray the Queen as a respectable and reasonable woman,

and as a devoted and competent mother, not as the degenerate aris-

tocratic monster her persecutors painted her as being. Garnai aptly

describes the poem as a “tableau of domestic solicitude” (89).

Robinson’s poem responds to the pressing concern that the National

Convention intends to separate the Queen from her children: “Why

do maternal Sorrows drench my face?” Laura Maria asks as Marie

Antoinette; “Alas! because inhuman hands unite, / To tear from my

fond Soul its last delight!” (1: 194; 28–30). To do so would be an

act of “fell Barbarity!” (31). The “Lamentation” in the poeticized

voice of Marie Antoinette pleads for the innocence of her children in

the face of imminent execution. And while the poem emphasizes its

subject’s maternity, Laura Maria allows her Marie Antoinette to avow

hereditary privilege, urging her children to face their doom “with

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