The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

28 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

Fair TRUTH shall snatch a Wreath, TO DECK HIS PARENT MUSE!

(1: 210–1; 8–14)

Perhaps out of a sense of delicacy and respect, Robinson avoids f lat-

tering Smith but instead acknowledges her son’s service and sacri-

fice, and suggests that Smith will receive the gratification not of a

poet but of a parent, earning not a poetic laurel but a maternal one.

This poem is complicated by the possibility of a rivalry between the

two poets, whose literary careers run parallel in many respects and

by the reality of Robinson’s infamous nonliterary career as Perdita.

Because of Robinson’s reputation, Smith wanted to avoid any asso-

ciation between her work and Robinson’s, and Robinson may have

sensed that Smith may not have accepted as a compliment a tributary

poem signed by her.^5 So, the paternal Oberon avatar serves as a partial

effacement of the unsavory aspects of Robinson’s past. Robinson’s

poem, for example, prompted a response: “Sonnet to Oberon,

Occasioned by a Sonnet to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, in the Oracle of

the 17th September” by “Themira” appeared in the Oracle for 20

September 1793, reminding readers the previous Oberon poems—

particularly “Invocation”—are poems that “could sooth a weeping

Mother’s woe.” But, by this time, Robinson already had claimed the

Oberon avatar in all of its complexity and with all of the associations

it entailed.

Robinson does not use the Oberon avatar again until it appears

nearly seven years later in the Oracle, now owned by Peter Stuart, who

purchased it from Bell and called it the Oracle and Daily Advertiser.

On 4 April 1799, Robinson gave the signature to her “Stanzas on

the Duchess of Devonshire,” which again recalls Cibber’s comedy for

a similar play on the pseudonym and the lovesick hero of The Oracle.

Here, the avatar pays court to Robinson’s own patroness, Georgiana,

but the guise of a male admirer allows Robinson to add a touch of

erotic infatuation (2: 1). Almost a year later, Robinson revives the

avatar for her work at the Morning Post during the final year of her

life, at which point it loses its punning association. As Pascoe points

out, Oberon becomes an identity for “lavish[ing] praises on women”

(Romantic 174). In particular, she does so on female celebrities whose

experience of publicity, good and bad, may accord in some respects

with Robinson’s. Oberon praises them in several poems published

in the Morning Post during the final year of Robinson’s life, includ-

ing an ode to the actress Dora Bland whose stage name was “Mrs.

Jordan” (2: 55–66), a lyric celebrating the beauty of Georgiana

and her aristocratic cohort (“Stanzas Written in Hyde- Park on

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 289780230100251_03_ch01.indd 28 12/31/2010 4:20:10 PM12/31/2010 4:20:10 PM

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

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