The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

162 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

published in the Oracle. The negative play given this earlier poem in

the Oracle may account for Robinson’s decision to print the later Portia

poems pseudonymously, but it also suggests the burgeoning conf lict

between Robinson’s political views and those held by the proprietors

of the Treasury newspapers that printed her poetry.^3

Worth noting is that the Portia poems also formally diverge from

the pattern set by Laura Maria’s publications in the Oracle; the later

poems in the Morning Post are all fixed forms, rather than the elabo-

rate, baroque irregular odes that had distinguished the work of the

earlier avatar. In addition to the two sonnets, for “St. James’s Street”

Robinson uses a simple quatrain called long hymnal measure, consist-

ing of iambic tetrameters rhyming abab. The fourth and final Portia

poem, appearing on 29 January 1795 (and reprinted the following

month in The Sporting Magazine), showcases an entirely new voice in

Robinson’s poetry: “January, 1795” employs quatrains consisting of

trochaic tetrameter couplets (which Shakespeare uses for the chanting

of the witches in Macbeth and which Robinson uses again for “The

Camp,” as we have seen in chapter one). But Anne Janowitz identi-

fies a source for “January 1795” in John Bancks’ “A Description of

London” from 1738 (87). The catalog of sights in Bancks’s poem is a

burlesque eclogue that uncovers the seedier elements of the city and

is itself an imitation of a similar poem about Paris by the French poet

Scarron. Robinson adopts Bancks’s trochaic tetrameter couplets for

a similarly comic effect to capture an image of the city during what

Craciun describes as “the worst winter in living memory” (British 66).

Unlike Bancks’s poem, however, Robinson’s is interested in antithesis

for more directly satirical purposes: the bouncy meter, consistently

end- stopped lines, and frequent medial caesuras lend themselves to

the construction of binaries:

PAVEMENT slipp’ry; People sneezing;

Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;

Nobles, scarce the Wretched heeding;

Gallant soldiers—fighting!—bleeding! (1: 316; 1–4)

The binary poetics, evident in her choice of couplets (iambic or

trochaic), for Robinson’s most socially and politically aware poetry

ref lects an eighteenth- century formal lineage As J. Paul Hunter

reminds us, the prevalence of eighteenth- century binaries epitomized

by the use of couplets ref lects not merely a overly simplified dualistic

worldview but a desire to set oppositions against one another; as he

writes of Pope’s Essay in Criticism, binaries and couplets serve “to

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1629780230100251_06_ch04.indd 162 12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM

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

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