The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates I 165

and oppression. She goes on to affirm that Nature herself recoils at

the British enterprise, a wickedness unknown, she presumes, to those

whom the white Europeans deem inferior:

“Could the proud Rulers of the Land

The SABLE Race behold;

Some, bow’d by torture’s giant hand!

And others, bought with gold!

Then wou’d they pity SLAVES, and cry with shame,

Whate’er our Tints may be, our SOULS are still the same.

“Why seek to mock the ETHIOP’S face?

Why goad the hapless kind?

Can Features alienate the race?

Is there no Kindred MIND?

Does not the cheek that vaunts the roseate hue,

Oft blush for crimes that ETHIOP never knew!

“Behold the angry waves conspire

To check the barb’rous toil!

While wounded NATURE’S vengeful ire,

Roars round our trembling Isle!

Methinks her voice re- echoes in the wind,

MAN was not form’d by HEAV’N to trample on his kind.” (25 – 42)

Robinson’s character borrows the familiar social and even evangeli-

cal rhetoric of the abolition cause and its liberal proponents to make

a number of critical points. But she gives the poem a unique voice in

the construction of her own original, or nonce, form: the stanzas of

“The Storm” are homostrophic, each consisting of a six- line unit that

begins as conventional hymnal measure but that adds a couplet con-

sisting of a pentameter and hexameter: a 4 b 3 a 4 b 3 c 5 c 6. After Nancy’s

reproachful monologue, which continues in the same stanza estab-

lished by the narrative frame, Robinson resumes the plot of the poem

to show Nancy “madd’ning at the view” of her lover’s drowning and

finally to depict her plunging herself “in A WAT R Y GRAVE!” (50, 60).

The narrative lends additional pathos to the circumstance and adds

some emotional heft to the polemic by directing the sympathy toward

the two identified English victims, Nancy and William.

Dissatisfied with this aspect of the text’s affective agenda, Robinson

revised the poem extensively for her final volume of verse, Lyrical Tales,

the title of which ref lects the inf luence of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s

Lyrical Ballads. A lthough Robinson’s “The Storm” appeared t wo years

before Lyrical Ballads, the poem and its revision later as “The Negro

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1659780230100251_06_ch04.indd 165 12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM

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

Cop

yright material fr

om www

.palgra

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

sitetsbib

lioteket i

Tr

omso - P

algra

veConnect - 2011-04-13