The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 143

Sappho seeks to remind Phaon of their erotic past. The Ovidian

Sappho, however, uses the memory to seduce Phaon through sen-

sual language, describing their sexual chemistry (see lines 49–62).

Robinson’s Sappho is more elegiac in recalling their sexual history

and her address is more an apostrophic lament in the absence of her

lover than an attempt at correspondence:

WHY art thou chang’d? O Phaon! tell me why?

Love f lies reproach, when passion feels decay;

Or, I would paint the raptures of that day,

When, in sweet converse, mingling sigh with sigh,

I mark’d the graceful languor of thine eye

As on a shady bank entranc’d we lay.... (XVIII; 1: 335; 1–6)

While Pope’s translation shows Sappho promising repeated plea-

sure, Robinson’s sonnet has her missing the afterglow, the erotic

intimacy that transcends the “decay” of sexual desire. Despite the

sexually charged imagery of the sequence, Robinson understands

that the masculine Petrarchan tradition is absorbed with the thrill

of unconsummated desire, of possessing an unattainable object of

desire; from a woman’s perspective, her sonnet sequence asserts, the

challenge is maintaining possession of the loved one. Here, for exam-

ple, Sappho’s Lesbian girls are not playthings but heteroerotic- poetic

proxies, “tuneful maids” sent to tempt Phaon with her poems, which

she reduces to agents of seduction rather than vehicles for fame. “No

more the Lyre its magic can impart,” she claims, “Though wak’d to

sound, with more than mortal grace!” Her desire is expressed in her

poetry, even as it diminishes her claim to poetic fame. Robinson’s

Sappho thus devalues her erotic poetry as having no purpose beyond

the procurement of physical pleasure:

Go, tuneful maids, go bid my Phaon prove

That passion mocks the empty boast of fame;

Tell him no joys are sweet, but joys of love,

Melting the soul, and thrilling all the frame!

Oh! may th’ ecstatic thought his bosom move,

And sighs of rapture fan the blush of shame! (Sonnet VIII; 1: 331; 9–14)

She is thus willing to compromise her poetic fame in order to sexu-

ally arouse her lover. But she also acknowledges the risk in indulging

physical pleasure because such pursuits inevitably will lead Phaon to

forsake her for new objects. “Then how can she his vagrant heart

detain, / Whose Lyre throbs only to the touch of Love!” (Sonnet

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1439780230100251_05_ch03.indd 143 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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