The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

142 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

Return, fair youth, return, and bring along

Joy to my soul, and vigour to my song:

Absent from thee, the Poet’s f lame expires;

But ah! how fiercely burn the lover’s fires? (228–41)

The original poem and Pope’s translation have more than a touch of

m i sog y n i st ic sat i re i n t h i s repre sent at ion of S appho’s po et ic prowe s s a s

inextricable from what most readers would have considered her lasciv-

iousness. When Robinson writes in her preface that Ovid’s and Pope’s

“portraits, however beautifully finished, are replete with shades,

tending rather to depreciate than to adorn the Grecian Poetess,” she

refers to the Ovidian source’s emphasis on Sappho’s homoerotic pas-

sion as being more conducive to lyric composition and on the crip-

pling effects of Sappho’s sexual desire for Phaon (1: 324). As the final

couplet in this passage suggests, Sappho cannot be both a success-

ful poet and a heterosexual lover. In the heteronormative context of

Ovid’s Heroides, Sappho’s current predicament is punishment for her

transgressive deviance and her fame is thus compromised.

Robinson’s Sappho, likewise, is only geographically a Lesbian

(like anyone from Lesbos), but Robinson does not deny Sappho’s

unruly and destructive passion. While Robinson’s sequence is more

circumspect, as a “series of legitimate sonnets,” it is just as sexually

and poetically normative. Indeed, there a few literary traditions more

heteronormative than the Petrarchan one. And Robinson performs

many of the stock conventions, but with some surprising variations.

Sonnet X, for example, contains the requisite blazon, following

such examples as Spenser’s Sonnet 15 of the Amoretti or Sidney’s

Sonnet 77 of Astrophil and Stella. After cataloging Phaon’s physical

features, the sonnet concludes with a surprising subversion of the

eternizing conceit, emphasizing mortality and imaging the decay of

Phaon’s physical self (1: 332). In Sonnet XIII, Robinson’s Sappho

“endeavours to fascinate him” and blazons herself by describing the

“Sylvan girls” dressing her for a meeting with Phaon; she chooses

to dress modestly, “elegantly chaste,” to tempt him all the more

through the suggestion of her body; as she says, “Love scorns the

nymph in wanton trappings drest; And charms the most concealed,

are doubly grac’d” (1: 333; 12–4). Recalling the Renaissance pun

on death for orgasm, in Sonnet XV, Robinson uses the image of the

f lowers on which Sappho imagines Phaon sleeping to express her

desire, crying, “O! happy buds! to kiss his burning breast, / And

die, beneath the lustre of his eyes!” (334; 3–4). As in the Ovidian

original, Robinson’s Sappho has realized the dream: in both poems,

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1429780230100251_05_ch03.indd 142 12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM

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

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