The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

210 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

“hear” the suggested rhythm in a line rather than placing emphasis

where it ought to go, resulting in demoted stress on nouns and verbs

and promoted stress on articles and conjunctions just to achieve the

melody. It appears that Coleridge’s enthusiasm for Robinson’s ear

springs from the way Robinson’s innovative stanzas, combined with

the heavy rhythms of accentual meter, suit the effect of fantasy or, as

Stuart puts it, “the pathos of Romance.”

This is a major point of connection between the two poets, however:

both Robinson and Coleridge employ versification as a conscious fixing

of the unconscious in and as form. Coleridge wrote in his notebooks

that “Poetry is a rationalized dream” that puts “to manifold Forms

our own Feelings” (2: 2087). Coleridge’s most innovative poems at

this time, “Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” and

“Christabel,” clearly demonstrate his interest in the gothic insofar as

its nightmarish qualities may be adapted for explorations of the uncon-

scious. A lt houg h it is her forma l ha nd l i ng of t h is mater ia l t hat he specif-

ically praises, Robinson’s adaptation of the gothic for similar purposes

surely appealed to him; she validated an aesthetic interest in the super-

natural that neither Wordsworth nor Southey shared with Coleridge

around the time he was working on his dream poems. Early chivalric

ballads such as “Sir Raymond of the Castle,” “Lewin and Gynneth. A

Tale,” both from Robinson’s 1791 Poems, and “Donald and Mary,”

from her 1794 Poems, are clearly inf luenced by Percy’s Reliques. These

poems are conventional in form and regular in syllabic count, generally

falling into foot- verse. The inf luence of the gothic ballad is even more

apparent in poems Robinson composed after Lewis’s The Monk and

the “Alonzo” stanza; these include not only “The Doublet of Grey”

and many of the poems in her 1800 volume Lyrical Tales, but also

innovative poems such as “The Savage of Aveyron” and “The Lady of

the Black Tower,” both of which appeared posthumously, the former in

the 1801 Memoirs and the latter in Maria Elizabeth Robinson’s 1804

tributary collection The Wild Wreath. These poems are supernatural

tales of violence, horror, and nightmare.

The first, “The Savage of Aveyron,” can be scanned as having

an iambic foot matrix with a few substitutions. It is framed by two

intricate fifteen- line stanzas with slightly different rhyme schemes

(a 4 b 4 b 4 a 3 c 4 c 4 c 4 a 3 b 4 /a 4 d 4 d 4 b 3 /a 3 e 4 e 4 b 5 /a 5 ) with twelve similarly

rhymed twelve- line stanzas within (a 4 b 4 b 4 a 3 c 4 c 4 c 4 a 3 c 4 /d 4 e 4 e 4 d 5 /c 5 ).

Note that Robinson’s principle permits some variation in the rhyme

scheme, indicating that the more important constant is the number

of stresses per line. Despite the iambic tendency of the lines, which

is endemic to the English language, the regularity in line length by

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2109780230100251_07_ch05.indd 210 12/28/2010 11:09:03 AM12/28/2010 11:09:03 AM

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

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