The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

216 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

functions similarly and also illustrates the metrical features described

previously. The two third stanzas make for useful comparison:

Now, the Lord of the Castle, a proud, surly ruler—

Oft heard the low dwelling with sweet music ring:

For the old DAME, that liv’d in the lonely hut, cheerly,

Wou’d sit at her wheel, and would merrily sing!

When with revels the Castle’s great Hall was resounding,

The old Dame was sleeping, not dreaming of fear;

And when over the mountains the huntsmen were bounding

She wou’d open her wicket, their clamours to hear. (2: 33; 17–24)

Both stanzas emphasize the advantageous position of the antagonist

in relation to the protagonist, who, in Robinson’s text, is a consid-

erably less pathetic figure. And given the emphasis in Robinson’s

poem on the old woman’s cheerfulness and her joyful singing, we

can see her attempting to achieve a more lush musicality in her meter

than the choppy, gossipy tone of Wordsworth’s; the nestling of beats

within an abundance of unstressed syllables—again with a generally

anapestic feel—establishes a melody that persists after the death of

the woman in the sixth stanza and concludes upon the repetition of

the title phrase in the final line. This last note has a resonance that

serves the poem well and makes for a very different conclusion than

Wordsworth’s poem, which encourages the recollection and repeti-

tion of the sounds of the poem along with its moral: “Now think, ye

farmers all, I pray / Of Goody Blake and Harry Gill.” Both poems

might be considered in the context of the impulse toward overall nar-

rative experimentation at the time.

Robinson’s poem, though she did reprint it in her Lyrical Tales,

appeared in an opposition newspaper and, in that particular context,

did what it needed to do—fill space while amusing the sensibilities

of a particular readership, liberal- leaning Londoners suspicious of

Prime Minister Pitt but afraid of radical insurgents. Robinson does

not need to get these readers to “think” in the way that Wordsworth

is attempting to provoke his readers into doing. But she does need

to please them with her “metre and matter.” This is the major dif-

ference between Robinson’s Lyrical Tales and Wordsworth’s Lyrical

Ballads. Because most of the poems in Lyrical Tales appeared first

in the Morning Post, Robinson composed her poems with a very

specific readership in mind. As Wordsworth’s advertisement and

his expanded and expanding preface indicate, he represented, if he

did not conceive, the collection as aiming for a wider, more specifi-

cally literary audience. Poems such as “Simon Lee,” “The Thorn,”

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2169780230100251_07_ch05.indd 216 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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