The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 55

same difficulty of rhyme (abababab) and the rhetorical structure of

the octave and sestet. Merry has his Leonardo avatar thus confirm his

passion for Laura in a poetic performance more formally controlled

than Della Crusca’s spasmodic poems to Anna Matilda. Robinson’s

Laura responded several weeks later, on 28 February 1789, with an

irregular, thus “illegitimate,” “Sonnet. To Leonardo” that consists

of eighteen lines, in which she again directly quotes Della Crusca:

her poem opens with the phrase “Chill blows the blast,” which is the

opening of his “Elegy Written on the Plain of Fontenoy.” In her son-

net, she rejects apathy as an ineffectual check on “The feast of Reason,

and the flow of Soul,” a quotation from Pope’s “First Satire of the

Second Book of Horace Imitated” (128). At the end, Laura confirms

her feelings for Leonardo/Della Crusca by admitting the pleasure

she takes in the “sweet Converse of THE FRIEND I LOVE” (1: 57; 18).

She here refers back to the “sweet converse” she seeks from the Muse

associated with Della Crusca in “The Muse.” It is a consummation

that Robinson’s Laura cleverly performs, not in a perfectly Petrarchan

form, but in her own deliberate subversion of it and its “Platonic” pre-

sumptions. As we shall see elsewhere in Robinson’s writing, especially

later in her career through the correspondence with Coleridge, the

appropriation of form for her own ends, an exuberant participation in

a formal heteroerotic engagement with her (male) counterparts, is a

hallmark of her work.

Laura’s poetic union with Leonardo/Della Crusca takes place, but

not before the intervention of a jealous Anna Matilda, who explic-

itly unmasks Leonardo as Della Crusca in a poetic harangue that

appeared two days before Laura’s “sonnet,” on 26 February 1789.

Comically incensed by his poems to Laura, Anna Matilda disavows

her love for Della Crusca with scorn for his “factitious pain,” promis-

ing that “Anna shall to thee be dead.” And in jealous fashion she also

directs her hostility toward Laura:

Yes, write to LAUR A! speed thy Sighs,

Tell her, her DELLA CRUSCA dies;

In sweetest measures sing thy woes,

And speak thy hot LOVE’S ardent throes;—

And when it next shall please your Heart

Towards some other Fair to start,

The gentle Maiden’s vers’d in cures,

For every ill, fond Love endures

She drinks Oblivion to its pains—

And vows to stain her pallid cheek

With juices of Red Grapes so sleek,

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 559780230100251_03_ch01.indd 55 12/31/2010 4:20:15 PM12/31/2010 4:20:15 PM

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