The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

104 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

proud disdain” and to take strength from “the glorious tide that fills

each Ve in” (61, 63). But the woman’s maternal instincts assert their

primacy in the portrayal: at the thought of their ultimate separation,

Marie Antoinette exclaims, “Oh! all the MOTHER rushes to my heart!”

(66). Only at the end does this Marie Antoinette succumb to the

terror of her situation as she recalls the horrific murder of her hus-

band at the hands of the revolutionaries with imagery reminiscent of

Priam’s slaughter at Troy: “See! See! they pierce, with many a recre-

ant Sword, / The mangled bosom of my bleeding LOR D!” (71–2). The

penetrative violation of the male body is particularly shocking; what

was obscene in the “Fragment” is fully realized here. The poem can-

not continue beyond this “dreadful thought” and “agony supreme”

(73), and even though its project appears to be the eliciting of sympa-

thy for the “widow Capet,” as she was known in France, Laura Maria

ends the poem essentially with a plea for a compassionate end to her

suffering “in sweet Oblivion’s dream”—a consummation devoutly to

be wished that can only mean the death that Laura Maria imagines

the Queen herself supplicating (75–8).^18 Despite its manifest inten-

tion, the poem concludes with Marie Antoinette thinking only of

herself, asking “the CHERUB PITY” to “save ONE VICTIM from the

LAST DESPAIR!” (77–8).

Although this conclusion points to a compelling ambivalence,

Laura Maria’s performance of the Queen’s predicament served well

enough as pro- government propaganda in the pages of the Oracle.

Like many liberals, Robinson was distressed by the violence in France

and the outbreak of a war in which her country had no clear objective

once the French monarchs were dead. This trio of poems, moreover,

appeared just as Pitt began implementing measures to defend the

country against invasion from without and insurrection from within.

These poems, despite what might be some proto- feminist sympathy

for the Queen, are a long way from Robinson’s later radicalism. The

Whigs, at this time, were divided over reform and the Revolution.

Appearing in the Oracle, Laura Maria’s poems, which everyone now

knew were Robinson’s, amounted to support for Pitt’s war because

they delineate the terrifying menace represented by France. The

humanization of Marie Antoinette put Robinson at odds with those

who argued that the war was unnecessary because France was no real

threat to Great Britain. This was Fox’s position. Fox detested Paine

and his politics as much as the Tories did, but was concerned that Pitt

and the King were conspiring to undermine the English constitution

by plunging the country into a war that, if successful, would only

reaffirm monarchical absolutism and despotism not only in France,

9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 1049780230100251_04_ch02.indd 104 12/28/2010 11:08:31 AM12/28/2010 11:08:31 AM

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

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