Bell’s Laureates I 57sensibility and that weeps at sexuality. This is a poetry about frisson
for its own sake, while knowingly and self- ref lexively deploying the
tropes of Sensibility essentially for a cheap thrill. The poetry of the
Della Crusca network is deliberately a burlesque of Sensibility.
Laura’s “To Anna Matilda,” which appeared on 6 March, is dated
26 February to stress the immediacy of her response and her eagerness
to allay—with considerable irony—the other woman’s fears. Robinson
clearly understood the amoebean nature of the previous duet between
Della Crusca and Anna Matilda; but in triangulating it, she height-
ens the competition with her own considerable ambition. While Della
Crusca and Anna Matilda sing to one another and while Topham
puffs them into outrageous immortality, Robinson seems more intent
on actually earning it. “To Anna Matilda” is her first venture into
the metrical experimentation of the irregular ode. As her first two
volumes, in 1791 and 1794, prove, Robinson saw in the irregular ode
great opportunities for demonstrating her metrical versatility. She had
written some elementary odes for her 1775 volume that demonstrate
a basic understanding of the classical strophe- antistrophe- epode; for
these poems, however, she works in fixed stanza forms. Robinson’s
previous poems in the World, with the exception of her eighteen- line
sonnet, were written in octosyllabic couplets. When she comes to do
poetic combat with Anna Matilda, Robinson’s Laura must demon-
strate her facility in working in the irregular ode. In other words, her
success in the duel is contingent upon her constructing elaborate stan-
zaic units with varying rhyme schemes and meters. She must show that
she is agile and f lexible in the managing of her “numbers,” which for
this kind of poetry is basically a syllabic count. To illustrate the agility
of Robinson’s metrical performance, I will chart the metrical and stan-
zaic divisions of this seventy- line poem in the following. I will begin
the rhyme scheme anew with each stanza because the rhymes do not
necessarily continue beyond, although some echoes occur. My pur-
pose here is mostly to show the variation in stanza and line length as
the poem progresses; this is an early instance of Robinson’s exuberant
innovation with form, a quality that comes to characterize her work
throughout her career. The subscript numbers indicate the quantita-
tive measure of syllables. For example, in the first stanza, the first ten
lines are octosyllabic, with a final Alexandrine couplet.1–12: aabbccddee 8 ff 12
13 –18: aa 10 bcb 8 c 6
19–26: aabbccd 8 d 12
27–30: aabb 89780230100251_03_ch01.indd 579780230100251_03_ch01.indd 57 12/31/2010 4:20:16 PM12/31/2010 4:20:16 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