138 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonpoem at this point might appear to be ambivalent, but the comparison
suggests that the Bower of Pleasure only provides a restoration destined
to be undone, while the Temple of Chastity memorializes the triumph
over the “tyrant passion”; only in this sense is the tomb “glorious.”
This is how Robinson chooses to preface the introduction of the poet-
character Sappho—by presenting her with an explicit choice and then,
given the outcome, making an implicit judgment of that choice.
This is why Sappho has lost her lyric voice. She first speaks in a
series of rhetorical questions that make evident the poet- character’s
choice between chastity and pleasure. When she gazes on Phaon’s
“beauteous eyes,” Sappho asks, “Why does each thought in wild dis-
order stray? / Why does each fainting faculty decay, / And my chill’d
breast in throbbing tumults rise?” (1: 330; 2–4). Robinson echoes
the original “Sappho’s Ode,” as it was called, in which the female
speaker confesses the confusion engendered by sexual desire in simi-
lar language to that with which Robinson introduces her Sappho. As
Longinus’s first- century treatise On the Sublime is the only source
for this, Sappho’s most famous poem, Robinson chooses to pres-
ent Sappho’s expression through a complex network of masculine
agents—Longinus, Philips, Ovid, Pope—that culminates Robinson’s
own mediation of that voice in the Petrarchan sonnet sequence.
Robinson thereby ensures that Sappho cannot speak directly or sing
in her own lyric voice: “Mute, on the ground my Lyre neglected
lies, / The Muse forgot, and lost the melting lay” (5–6). Sappho and
Phaon is clearly dialogic, but it is also a dialogue of sorts between the
poet- narrator and the poet- character. In Sonnet V, the poet- narrator
responds to Sappho’s predicament with her own choice between
chastity and pleasure, which, as she makes clear, is a choice between
reason and love: “O! How can LOVE exulting Reason quell!” (1:
330; 1). This is not a question but an exclamatory comment on the
preceding sonnet, for Sonnet IV, in Sappho’s voice, clearly shows
how Love exults in its triumph over Reason. Love, the poet- narrator
asserts, is degenerative: “How fades each nobler passion from his
gaze!” (2). Sappho, in succumbing to erotic love, has thwarted her
potential, for one of these “nobler passions” is “Fame, that cherishes
the Poet’s lays, / That fame, ill- fated Sappho lov’d so well” (3–4).
So, in neglecting her lyre, Sappho, moreover, has forfeited her claim
to poetic fame and, implicitly, has surrendered it to the poet- narrator
of Sappho and Phaon, who asserts it herself in thirty- nine succeeding
sonnets.
Where the original is rhetorical, Robinson’s adaptation is polemi-
cal. She has, furthermore, a personal investment in rejecting a9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1389780230100251_05_ch03.indd 138 12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM
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