Bell’s Laureates I 27an antidote to her painful sensibility. This portrayal of Oberon likely
influenced the original Il Ferito exchange. Although Greville alludes
to Oberon’s mischief in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she sees him
as a fantastic apothecary of sorts, taking pity on mortals’ wounds; the
“prayer” ends, renouncing the pain of love in favor of “sober ease”
and being content in being “half- pleas’d.” The speaker asks of Oberon
a kind of numb asceticism presumably, through further literary infer-
ence, to avoid the erotic agitation associated with his queen, Mab, in
Mercutio’s speech from Romeo and Juliet. Still, it is difficult to recog-
nize Oberon as a protector without reading Greville’s portrayal as an
additional layer of intertextuality.
On a more personal level, these poems figuratively provide
Robinson’s daughter with a paternal figure that allegorizes the actual
fact of Robinson’s having to raise Maria Elizabeth without the assis-
tance of the girl’s father, Thomas Robinson. In the case of these two
poems, the avatar may serve as a way for Robinson to overwrite her
daughter’s real father with a fantastic poetic version of herself; this
overwriting also revises the antimaternal aspect of Shakespeare’s
character, who, in the play, ends up taking the boy and inexplica-
bly reconciling with his formerly defiant queen, whom Oberon has
humiliated and humbled by having her sleep with Bottom.
The next time Robinson writes as Oberon, she addresses her fellow
poet Charlotte Smith. The last Oberon poem for nearly seven years
appeared in the Oracle on 17 September 1793 as “Sonnet to Mrs.
Charlotte Smith, on Hearing that Her Son Was Wounded at the Siege
of Dunkirk.” Significantly, this is the only poem in which Robinson
pays tribute to a contemporary female poet, but here the emphasis is on
Smith as a mother rather than as a fellow poet. As a woman, mother,
and hardworking professional writer, Robinson suggests a kinship with
Smith, whose son Charles lost his leg in combat while serving under the
Duke of York at the Siege of Dunkirk; Smith’s children, like Robinson’s,
were similarly fatherless, if not literally so. Certainly, Robinson’s choice
of form pays tribute to Smith, who was widely recognized as the poet
responsible for reviving the sonnet with the publication of her Elegiac
Sonnets in 1784. But the poem focuses on the presumed maternal anxi-
ety as Robinson promises comfort for Smith in poetic composition:Yet HOPE for THEE shall bend her soothing wings,
Steal to thy breast, and check the rising tear,
As to thy polish’d mind rapt Fancy brings
The GALLANT BOY, to BRITAIN’S GENIUS dear!
And, while for HIM a LAUREL’D Couch SHE strews,9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 279780230100251_03_ch01.indd 27 12/31/2010 4:20:10 PM12/31/2010 4:20:10 PM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
omso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-13