The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

242 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

performing fame through form and actually earning it. Similarly,

when she praises Coleridge as Sappho, she confers upon herself the

authority to deck Coleridge with a laurel of her own construction:

addressing him, she promises to “weave a crown for THEE, / GENIUS

OF HEAV’N- TAUGHT POESY!” (2: 196; 51–2). The crown is of course

her poem, substantiated in its formal complexity, as it always is for

Robinson.

The tragedy and the irony of Robinson’s poetic career is that, replete

as her poetry is with assertions of her worth and the supreme value

of poetic fame, she seems to have hoped that repeating these charms

often enough in print would make them true. Although it comes

from her 1797 novel Walsingham, the inscription on the monument

above her grave stands as Robinson’s final word on the subject:

Yet, o’er this low and silent spot

Full many a bud of spring shall wave,

While she, by all, save one, forgot,

Shall snatch a wreath beyond the grave. (5: 20)^13

In writing her own epitaph, Robinson finally fixed in form—in verse

and in stone—what the speaker of Gray’s Elegy could only imagine.

She certainly intended the allusion.

9780230100251_07_ch05.indd 2429780230100251_07_ch05.indd 242 12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM12/28/2010 11:09:07 AM

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

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