The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates II 215

metrical feats such as employing trochaic sounds in the lines that fol-

low the extra unstressed syllables at the end of the augmented lines;

for example, “That evermore his teeth they chatter / Chatter, chat-

ter, chatter still” (3–4), or “R ight glad was he when he beheld her: /

Stick after stick did Goody pull” (81–2). But mostly, what seems to

be “impressive” about the meter is the length of the stanza and the

interplay between the bisyllabic augmented rhymes and the monosyl-

labic standard rhymes. The effect is a chatty, gossipy tone essential

to the narrative irony of the poem. Robinson’s “The Poor Singing

Dame” is a more straightforward ballad- narrative but with an impres-

sive meter of its own. Obviously not being able to reap benefits simi-

lar to those that might accrue to Wordsworth as he points out his

own stanza in his own preface, Robinson nonetheless was a sensitive

enough reader to perceive his metrical experimentation and to match

it. Her stanza, like Wordsworth’s, is eight lines and similarly employs

bisyllabic augmented endings and rhymes mixed with monosyllabic

rhymes. Her stanza counters the recognizable sing- song of the first

quatrain of Wordsworth’s stanza. For example, the “Goody Blake”

stanza depends upon the regular interplay of the augmented rhyme

and the full rhyme, as in:

Young Harry was a lusty drover,

And who so stout of limb as he?

His cheeks were red as ruddy clover,

His voice was like the voice of three.

Auld Goody Blake was old and poor,

Ill fed she was, and thinly clad;

And any man who pass’d her door,

Might see how poor a hut she had. (17–24)

The recurrence of the augmented rhyme—“drover” and “clover”—

followed by the full rhyme is integral to the music of the stanza.

Robinson’s eight- line stanza employs four augmented line endings,

but the first two do not rhyme at all. And, like the “Alonzo meter,”

her lines are longer by syllabic count than Wordsworth’s but still pres-

ent four stresses per line, creating the effect of trisyllabic substitu-

tions throughout or of anapests. Many phrases sound anapestic, but

the poem cannot be scanned as anapestic tetrameter without making

several bizarre substitutions and truncations. Again, the meter makes

more sense as accentual verse. Robinson’s stanza may be represented:

x_ax_ab_cb_c 4. The preceding Wordsworth passage is the third

stanza of the poem, introducing the conf lict and thus beginning the

narrative after two stanzas of exposition; Robinson’s third stanza

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2159780230100251_07_ch05.indd 215 12/28/2010 11:09:04 AM12/28/2010 11:09:04 AM

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

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