240 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonpoetic romance? We might recall the critic for the English Review
who described the poetry of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda as
building to a figurative “orgasm” that is “sometimes so violent
as to carry the poet far beyond the precincts of common- sense”
(Rev. of Poetry of the World 127). While the reviewer may not have
intended sexual climax, Coleridge’s simile “As if this Earth in fast
thick Pants were breathing” that precedes the forcing of his “mighty
fountain” begins to seem a lot less Freudian and more deliberately
ludic, more consciously erotic as well as more carefully crafted, as
Robinson’s reading of the poem suggests that it was.^12 Perhaps this
is why Coleridge did not share “Kubla Khan” with anyone other
than Robinson for several years: although we tend to see the poem
as Coleridge intended us to do—as dropping from the heavens—to
Coleridge the poem may have seemed too much a relict. When he
had put enough distance between the poem and its Della Cruscan
associations he finally published it. It was then that he set about
mythologizing the circumstances of the poem’s composition. But
he did not need to mythologize the poem for Robinson because
she knew as well as he did the pleasure of—and the price poets pay
for—feeding on honeydew and drinking the milk of Paradise. And
while her letters show Robinson promising to quit the muse, she
keeps writing poems, or “scribbling” as she, like Merry, calls it,
until her death. At the end of her life, her praise for Coleridge is the
reiteration of her promise to Della Crusca nearly a decade earlier: as
she re- reads his verse, she will imitate him and claim for herself her
share of fame.O, then I’ll think on THEE,
And iterate thy strain,
And chaunt thy matchless numbers o’er and o’er,
And I will court the sullen ear of night,
To bear the rapt’rous sound,
On her dark shad’wy wing,
To where encircled by the sacred NINE,
Thy LYRE awakes the never- dying song! (1: 103; 51–8)Always competitive even as she makes obeisance, Robinson asserts this
while performing the meter of Della Crusca’s “Ode to Tranquility.”
Writing to Coleridge as Stuart’s laureate, as the English Sappho,
Robinson makes a similar gesture by proving again that she can match
the “matchless numbers” of those poets she admires and awaken her
lyre with a “never- dying song” of her own.9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2409780230100251_07_ch05.indd 240 12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
omso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-13