The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

166 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

Girl” show Robinson experimenting with the relation of narrative within

fixed and often peculiar poetic forms, a subject for further exploration

in the next and final chapter of this study. In “The Negro Girl,” the

white Nancy becomes the black Zelma, who watches from an African

shore as her lover Draco perishes on board a sinking English slave ship.

Robinson develops Zelma’s character and history, and heightens the

polemical rhetoric, so that the revised version in its deliberately affec-

tive narrative attempts to present a more trenchant abolitionist argu-

ment.^4 On the one hand, the revised version, literally re- presented in

Lyrical Tales, may also refashion the original poem’s essentially liberal

politics into an even more radical one. On the other hand, however, the

Lyrical Tales version, removed from the immediate context in the news-

paper, becomes a more sentimentalized humanitarian narrative similar

to those written by Wordsworth and Southey. Robinson’s interest in

the subjectivity of Zelma, “The Negro Girl,” resembles the way many

of Wordsworth’s poems in Lyrical Ballads consider an epistemology,

even an aesthetic, of alterity, such as, for example, “The Thorn,” “The

Mad Mother,” or “The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman.” In

that sense, Lyrical Ballads appears to have inf luenced Robinson’s revi-

sion. In 1796, however, “The Storm” is nonetheless still an innovative

poem—particularly for Robinson. She had experimented previously

with narrative in conventional ballads such as “Sir Raymond of the

Castle” and “Lewin and Gynneth” from her 1791 Poems, and, in Della

Cruscan tetrameter couplets, works such as in “Anselmo, the Hermit of

the Alps” from her 1794 Poems. Here, just as she is starting to compose

Sappho and Phaon, Robinson begins experimenting with innovating

her own fixed, homostrophic nonce forms for narrative poetry. The

trajectory that emerges here shows Robinson’s practice moving from

the baroque irregular forms associated with Laura Maria, to the fixed

and polemical forms of the Portia poems, to a new interest in using

original forms of her own construction to combine narrative with the

subjectivity and formal variety usually associated with lyric poetry. She

may not have coined the phrase “lyrical ballad,” but she elaborated the

concept of formal paradoxy that governs the juxtaposition of the lyric

and the ballad as opposites—the former being the subjective expression

of feelings and insights, and the latter being the objective representa-

tion of characters and events.

Even though she had dropped the Portia avatar, Robinson’s “The

Storm” shows that she continued to see the Morning Post under

Stuart’s direction as the most viable forum for her most politically

inf lected poetry. After the ambivalence, opportunism, and political

maneuvering evident in the Laura Maria poems for the Oracle, the

rectitude of Robinson’s response to the extremities of “Pitt’s terror”

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1669780230100251_06_ch04.indd 166 12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM12/28/2010 11:08:50 AM

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