The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

52 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

And e’en the gentle have believ’d,

That ANNA, AND THAT I, WERE ONE.—

Would it were so!—we then might prove

The sacred, settled unity of Love.

Unbeknownst to Merry, however, Cowley had left England for France,

as the World reported on 5 September 1788, where she would remain

until the next summer. With no response from Anna Matilda, Della

Crusca was not heard from again in the papers, although Bell pub-

lished his long poem Diversity before the end of the year.

Having received no response from Della Crusca, Robinson’s Laura

made another, more blatant attempt to catch his attention. Her poem

“The Muse” appeared 13 November 1788, with a taunting edito-

rial headnote: “Of Poetical Trifles, where is there, even from DELLA

CRUSCA, any Writing with more shew of Facility, and more beauti-

fully Finished than much of the following?”

While perhaps a challenge to Della Crusca, this note says a lot

about the ludic characteristics of this kind of writing—it is supposed

to give a sprezzatura- esque impression of improvisation but with some

refined polish as well. These are, after all, “poetical trif les.” Laura

invokes the muse by invoking Della Crusca with a playful allusion to

Anna Matilda’s first poem to him, “The Pen,” with its invitation to

“thrill” her “bosom” with his “golden quill”; however, Laura, in a

move characteristic of Robinson, takes command of Della Crusca’s

instrument herself:

O! LET me seize thy Pen Sublime,

Which paints in glowing dulcet Rhyme

The melting Pow’r, the magic Art,

Th’ extatic raptures of the Heart.... (1: 53; 1–4)

Laura’s claim to Della Crusca’s pen is perhaps a bit more earnest,

and less playfully erotic, than Anna Matilda’s poem, but her poem

shows Robinson seriously establishing herself through her avatar as

having a certain kind of popular culture cachet. The poem includes

a reference to Joseph Warton’s poem The Enthusiast; or, The Lover of

Nature (1744), which celebrates nature as a source of poetic inspira-

tion and which portrays Shakespeare as an ingenious child of nature.

It identifies the source of Anna Matilda’s phrase “golden quill” as

coming from Shakespeare (sonnet 85), and praises Italian opera com-

poser Antonio Sacchini, who lived in London from 1773 to 1781,

during which time several of his operas premiered to great acclaim.

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 529780230100251_03_ch01.indd 52 12/31/2010 4:20:15 PM12/31/2010 4:20:15 PM

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

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