The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

74 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

colon at the end of the stanza above signals poignantly the logical

consequence of beauty:

Transplanted from its lonely bed,

No more, it scatters sweets around,

No more, it rears its fragrant head,

No more its sparkling tears begem the ground;

For ah, the beauteous f low’r, too soon

Scorch’d by the burning glare of day,—

Faints, at the sultry glow of noon,

Droops its enamel’d head—AND BLUSHING DIES AWAY. (17–24)

Beauty, Laura Maria suggests, is consumed by the admirer; uprooted

from its native fecundity, the f lower cannot sustain the scorching

attention of the sun. It is a parable that pertains directly to Robinson’s

personal experience as a celebrated beauty and as a woman more gen-

erally. Only here in the final stanza does the f lower achieve agency

of its own, whereas in the previous stanza it was acted upon, albeit

benevolently. Here, “transplanted,” the f lower becomes an active sub-

ject but only in the qualification of what it does “no more,” and this

agency is only temporary. Again acted upon by the sun, displaced as it

is from its birthplace, the f lower dies, finally achieving agency only in

its mortality—drooping, blushing, and dying. The final effect of the

poem is the surprising imagery of the f lower’s “enamel’d head” and

its “blushing” death. The consummation of the f lower’s existence

comes in a striking image of its ultimate adornment as a paradoxically

artificial and organic object of pleasure. Coupled with and as part of

the deployment of this trope, she means to demonstrate her ability

to refine and to modulate her lyrical performance, bringing forth her

own poetic, even formal, agency.

Robinson’s early poems in the Oracle are all devoted to imagin-

ing the literary pseudonym as elegant avatar. In other words, Laura

Maria reasserts herself as a sophisticated presence in the Oracle. But

more than this, Laura Maria is herself a metaphor, a paradox even:

the fictional ideal combined with the autobiographical self. She is per-

haps Robinson’s most important avatar in the way the persona tropes

Robinson’s obsession with the impossible contradiction between art

and nature and the mystery of their imaginative, poetic reconciliation.

Laura is art; Maria is nature. And Bell continued to support that mys-

tical presentation in promoting forthcoming poems: noting the receipt

of a new poem by Laura Maria, Bell writes to the public, “It shall be

our pride to pay the most respectful attention to her truly elegant

Poetical Effusions. To the preference given us, we are by no means

insensible; and we anxiously hope for the future communications of

9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 749780230100251_04_ch02.indd 74 12/28/2010 11:08:27 AM12/28/2010 11:08:27 AM

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

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