The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 213

powerful incantatory rhythms and rhyme of what we might call the

“Black Tower” stanza, Robinson is able to give the impression that

that consciousness or reality has been altered by the remnants of

the dream. Its tale bears some relation to Coleridge’s dream ballad

“Love,” which Wordsworth added to the first volume of the 1800

Lyrical Ballads in place of the delinquent “Christabel.” “Love” is

in a fairly standard ballad meter, except that Coleridge extends the

second line from the traditional three beats to four (x 4 a 4 x 4 a 3 ), and in

its stanzaic uniformity it is more like “The Lady of the Black Tower”

than his own “Christabel.” For “The Lady of the Black Tower,”

Robinson devises her own four- beat sestet (ababcc 4 ), the lines of

which generally suggest iambic tetrameters but resist foot- verse scan-

sion. If the lines were strictly composed in iambic feet, many of the

them would be catalectic or hypercatalectic—or, even more unlikely,

some lines would feature oddly placed amphibrachic substitutions. It

is more probable, therefore, that Robinson again is simply counting

beats per line.

Thus, what both Robinson and Coleridge are listening for in the

composition of their dream narratives, based on the romance/gothic

ballad, is the heavy footstep of the English line. Given her admiration

for Lyrical Ballads and its inf luence on her, Robinson certainly knew

“The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” which influenced such poems

as “The Lady of the Black Tower,” “Jasper,” and “The Haunted

Beach.” The fantastic meters Coleridge and Robinson composed

share a foundation in English practice and in the human psyche, and

thus their lines sound enough like the ancient folk ballads—a cultural

collective unconscious, perhaps—to encourage “willing suspension

of disbelief.”^7

The Bewitching Effect of that

Absolutely Original Stanza

Wordsworth once called Coleridge “an epicure in sound” (Wordsworth,

Christopher 306). This impulse is clearly at work in Coleridge’s sin-

gling out of “The Poor Singing Dame,” “Jasper,” and “The Haunted

Beach.” “The Poor Singing Dame” in both its “metre and matter”

is similar to Wordsworth’s “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” from the

1798 Lyrical Ballads, a book that inspired Robinson’s 1800 Lyrical

Tales. Each poem tells a story of a poor old woman’s persecution by a

wealthy man; but, unlike the long- suffering Goody Blake, however,

Robinson’s “old Dame,” named Mary, is forever cheerful, singing at

her wheel and dancing at the threshold of her hovel. Wordsworth’s

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

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