The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

26 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

poem. On 17 March 1792, the Oracle printed an unsigned response,

“Oberon and Titania,” written by playwright James Boaden, who also

worked on the paper. This response is a playful dialogue in which the

fairy queen jealously interprets Robinson’s poem, signed “Oberon,”

as a seduction poem; a minor quarrel ensues, and the poem con-

cludes with Oberon’s assurance that Titania need not doubt his fidel-

ity and that he was merely soothing “a mother’s fears.”^3 Later, on 27

March, Robinson prints “Oberon to Maria on Seeing Her Gather

Some Pensees,” which might seem to run the risk of rekindling

Titania’s jealousy (1: 171–2). When Robinson republished these two

poems in her 1794 Poems, they are transformed into poems about

her daughter recovering from a distressing illness; the first poem is

re- titled as “Invocation, Written on the Recovery of My Daughter

from Inoculation, and First Published with the Signature of Oberon”

and the second as “Stanzas to My Beloved Daughter, On Seeing Her

Gather Some Pensées.” The former is greatly expanded but not in such

a way as to emphasize the reading established by the new title and dif-

ferent context. The latter poem, which remains largely unchanged,

also presents a fatherly Oberon who admonishes the girl for picking

and thus killing the flowers and teaches the lesson, “Take not what

bounteous NATURE gave / But learn to cherish—and to save” (1: 172;

22–3). This Oberon bears no relation to Shakespeare’s Oberon or to

Robinson’s previous poems; instead, he seems to be a more generally

mythical figure, as the gathering of f lowers, in English folklore, is

associated with fairies.

But why would Robinson write poems for her daughter as Oberon?

In the Memoirs, Robinson’s poetic composition is associated with her

efforts “to cheer and amuse” her daughter, Maria Elizabeth, during

an illness (7: 276). The Oberon avatar for these poems is particularly

curious, especially given the dispute in Shakespeare’s play between

Oberon and Titania over the changeling boy whose mother left under

Titania’s care. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon intends to dis-

rupt Titania’s maternal role by taking the boy from her to be one of his

henchmen. These poems would seem to radically revise the character of

Oberon. Robinson’s Oberon, as it turns out, is just as much inf luenced

by Frances Greville’s “A Prayer for Indifference,” sometimes printed

as “Ode to Indifference,” as by Shakespeare’s character. Greville’s

poem, memorably examined by Jerome McGann in The Poetics of

Sensibility, is indeed a key text in that tradition, inspiring responses by

both Hannah More and Helen Maria Williams.^4 In Greville’s poem,

the speaker invokes Oberon in the hope that he may provide some

opiate, “the sovereign balm” or the “nymph Indifference bring,” as

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 269780230100251_03_ch01.indd 26 12/31/2010 4:20:10 PM12/31/2010 4:20:10 PM

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

Cop

yright material fr

om www

.palgra

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

sitetsbib

lioteket i

Tr

omso - P

algra

veConnect - 2011-04-13