SOURCE: Miskolcze, Robin L. “Snapshots of Contradiction in Mary Robinson's Poetical Works.” Papers on Language and Literature 31, no. 2 (spring 1995): 206-19.

[In the following essay, Miskolcze reexamines women writers' place in the early Romantic movement by considering Mary Robinson's poetry, wherein her use of exiles and fugitives can be read as embodiments of the contradictions within the movement itself.]

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars engaged with British Romanticism generally have been eager to contain the period within the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and, in the process, maintain the revered status accorded the traditional “Big Six”—Blake; William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats. With the rediscovery of works by many women of the age, however, delimiting the period has become more difficult as Romanticism's long-accepted definitions are not only now being called into question, but the inclusion of women writers whose works are still in the process of being collected and made known again also generates challenges to conventional, male-author-based conceptualizations of the period. In consequence, students and scholars of the Romantic movement are being forced to reexamine what they know and, more importantly, how they came to know it. To know Romanticism now seems a blurry process because it is becoming more and more difficult to reassess the definition—or definitions—as writers who had “vanished” are rediscovered, collected, and assessed. Additionally, given the current practice of deemphasizing aesthetic value judgments and focusing on the cultural, sociological, economic, and psychological factors that influence a writer's work, new paradigms are being proposed which call into question twentieth-century perceptions of the Romantic movement.

I propose here to examine the work of one woman writer of the late eighteenth century, Mary Robinson, who has received more attention from twentieth-century scholars and critics than most of her female contemporaries. Mary Robinson (nee Darby) was in her lifetime well-known in Britain both for her acting abilities and later for her talent as a writer of both poetry and prose. Although Mary Robinson's personal life has almost from the start received considerable scholarly attention, her poetry has remained relatively unexamined. As a result, contemporary readers and critics lack a view of Robinson's enigmatic representation of the complexities of alienation as it is embodied by many of her subjects and personas. I here propose to show that Robinson's exiles and fugitives embody many of the contradictions present in Robinson's late eighteenth-century world and provide historically and artistically valuable representations of the earlier Romantic movement itself.

The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson was published in 1824, twenty-four years after the author's death on December 26, 1800. Although the poems are not dated, this edition is the most complete to date of all of Robinson's published and unpublished poetry.¹ The simple fact that a collected volume of her poetry was published over twenty years after her death is a credit to her continued popularity as a poet. The Poetical Works is Robinson's third collection of poetry. An earlier collection, Lyrical Tales, was published in 1800 by the prestigious firm of Longman; within the same month Longman and Rees published the second edition of Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. As Stuart Curran has noted, the great faith Longman and Rees placed in Robinson's abilities and popularity is evidenced by their payment to her of sixty-three pounds for a press run of 1250 copies, “which in both categories signifies very respectable numbers” (19). Longman had good reason for their faith; the first edition of her essay “Vancenza” sold out in one day and her first one-volume collection of poetry, published in 1791, had nearly 600 subscribers (Robinson 211-12).

Robinson's contemporaries had an intense if not obsessive fascination with her as a public figure. Before she was made an invalid by a variously-described illness in 1783 she was a renowned actress, highly esteemed by such theater luminaries as Sheridan and Brereton, and was constantly in the public eye, perhaps willingly since she maintained a coach—a 200 pound a year investment on an average income of 600 pounds a year. She attended and hosted parties peopled by the rich and famous like Lord Lyttleton and lived a life of apparently considerable adventure. According to her Memoirs (which was finished by her daughter Maria E. Robinson after her mother's death), Robinson was nearly kidnapped at gunpoint by an admirer, and, most notoriously, conducted an affair of two years with the Prince of Wales, who had seen her play the part of Perdita in The Winter's Tale. Her public notoriety extended even to the medium of the popular print, where she was caricatured by James Gillray's “The Thunderer” as sexual bait for the Prince of Wales and Colonel Banastre Tarleton (Fergus and Thaddeus 194). She was part of a literary community which included artists who are presently more well-known than in their own day, such as Wordsworth, who at the very least knew of her, and Coleridge, who worked at the Morning Post during the same years that Robinson did and who is known to have corresponded with her both publicly, in literary magazines, and privately.

This relationship with Coleridge is often the most remarked-upon episode mentioned in critical discussions of Robinson. With the exception of Curran's “The I Altered” but including his essay “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context,” the few discussions about Robinson have stressed her relationship with Coleridge. For example, Carl Woodring writes: “[Coleridge and Robinson] borrowed from each other to the detriment of both, as in her dilution of ‘the Ancient Mariner’ in ‘The Haunted Beach,’ a ballad that Coleridge promoted excitedly” (126). Stuart Curran, who is doing significant work with women Romantic writers, in “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context” uses context as a mechanism throughout nearly half of his essay to trace the interactions and influences that flowed between Robinson, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. While such analyses of Robinson's interaction with other writers in relation to her own achievements undoubtedly enrich our understanding of Robinson and her work, they tend to be too eager to analyze Robinson's context before examining her work as a poet. To focus upon those around her at the time she was writing instead of first looking at her writing itself, will lead inevitably to a more enriched understanding of those other authors, not Mary Robinson. If there is no substantive achievement to attach to her name, then why be concerned about her ties with anyone?

As recent bibliographical studies, such as that by J. R. de J. Jackson, would suggest, women's writing in the Romantic period is a field of study the boundaries of which are still to be discovered; given the fluid nature of the field, it may be most helpful if Romanticists focus close attention on individual writers and their works before seeking exclusive definitions and messy generalizations.

In some ways, Robinson's work is paradigmatically Romantic. The world Robinson revealed in her writing was one marked by alienation and exile. The orphans and exiles in much of her poetry possess a heightened awareness of mortality, and with it a parallel awareness of the vanity and artificiality of a confusing world. Although she does present religious exiles in some of her poems, the options of communing with God through contemplation or transcendence through nature do not represent her reality, a reality in which her options are contradictory and therefore more true to the actual experience of powerful overflowings of feelings.

Two poems “The Savage of Aveyron” and “All Alone” effectively illustrate Robinson's portrayal of the alienated orphan. In the first poem, the narrator is a traveller in a forest who encounters an orphaned boy who can speak only the word “alone.” The poem is more than simply a sad tale that “would pierce a heart of stone” (line 174); it is an existential poem about the audience of an artist and the alienated. We learn that no one has heard the boy's voice in nine years, and that he learned his one-word vocabulary from his mother, who was murdered. Yet despite his lack of language, images conveying hearing and sound resonate throughout the poem. The traveller hears “tone[s] loud and sad” in the woods (16), the boy's articulation of “alone” is “like the shriek of a dying man” (41), and he is capable of primitive, wordless song:

And now upon the blasted tree
He carved three notches, broad and long,
And all the while he sang a song—
Of nature's melody!
And though of words he nothing knew,
And though his dulcet tones were few …

(64-9)

Although the boy knows only one word, he is still able to create music. He composes his song as he sings it, and during this spontaneous expression of powerful feeling, conveys a written expression of his song on the tree (the “three notches”), a rough approximation of what we might call a musical score, and combines these few “dulcet tones” into a song. For once in his lifetime thus far, everything is set for the boy, clearly a figure of the alienated artist. He is creator and performer and, for the first time, he has an audience, the traveller. Like the boy, the traveller or the “I” of the poem is an artist, a creator and performer of her/his art. The act of poetic creation was inspired by the boy, and the performance is the transcribing of the experience. In the middle of what first appeared to be a wild uninhabited forest, the artist, in essence, heard the tree fall and recorded it for his/her audience to hear also. Moreover, at an authorial level, the poet is herself creating and transcribing another work, one that contains both boy and traveller.

The poem also illustrates, however, how the audience may feel lonely and alienated by means of the self-reflexive tales contained within the text. Although the traveller hears the boy's one word and his song, and although the traveller, who is “weary of the world,” is akin to the boy in their shared aloneness, the traveller craves escape from the boy and the misery he represents, for nearly every stanza ends with the line, “I wish'd to be—a traveller alone.”

There is thus established a tension or contradiction between hearing and involving oneself in a tale of misery and remaining apart and detached from that misery, a contradiction that existed in the physical reality of London among the various classes and in numerous attempts at orchestrating charity for the lower classes. As John Barrell and Harriet Guest point out in their discussion of descriptive poems like Thomson's “The Seasons,” messages within many long poems of the eighteenth century were contradictory (132). Robinson may have done what these critics propose that earlier descriptive poets like Thomson did—planting contradictions within the poem so those who chose to see the contradictions (the miserable and poor) could do so, while those who preferred not to see the contradiction (the privileged classes) would not. In this way, the poet simultaneously addresses many sectors of her culture and illustrates the complexities attendant upon moral issues and the need/desire to act upon them.

As Robinson illustrates in “All Alone,” merely being an observer to someone's misery and isolation does not alleviate the problem, but at the same time the act of observation itself does hold some merit. The traveller, the narrator, tells the boy that she/he has often seen the boy alone, and thus knows that he grieves continually for his dead mother. The last line of nearly every stanza spoken by the traveller is based on the fact the boy has never been truly alone since the traveller has heard his groans, and the village is near, along with the “merry reed, and brawling rill” (45). Again, over and over, the boy's audience—the traveller—hears the boy's misery: “the traveller stops to hear thy tale” (8), “And oft I hear thee deeply groan” (23), “I heard thee sigh thy artless woes” (34), “I heard thy sad and plaintive moan” (119), and “I heard thee tell thy mournful tale” (129). Thus Robinson proposes the idea that participation—however passive this participation may be—in another human being's grief may be the only act of consolation possible in the worlds of both the suffering artist and her/his being.

Unlike the case in “The Savage,” the orphaned boy in “All Alone” can speak, and the poet quotes his speech. After the traveller tries to convince the orphan that he is not alone, pointing to himself/herself and the village as potential companions, the boy says:

No brother's tear shall fall for me,
For I no brother ever knew;
No friend shall weep my destiny,
For friends are scarce, and tears are few;
None do I see, save on this stone,
Where I will stay and weep alone.
.....My father never will return,
He rests beneath the sea-green wave;
I have no kindred left to mourn
When I am bid to yonder grave:
Not one to dress with flowers the stone!
Then—surely, I am left alone!

(139-50)

Perhaps he is saying what the muted “savage” could only say in his simple music: mourning for a loss is uniquely one's own and is of necessity a lonely business, and the boy knows that he will be alone in death as well. Merely observing and listening to another's misery does not fill the void of the alienated, whatever intrinsic merit it may hold. As “The Savage” showed, not even art can fill the void.

Orphans are not the only marginal figures who capture Robinson's attention. Her poetry is filled with exiles, in every type of person from the hermit, the cloistered maid, the sage (“Ode to Meditation”), to a displaced and lost Indian (“Lascar: In Two Parts”), to a fugitive and a gamester. Whether one is forcibly exiled or self-exiled, the result is inescapable grief and misery.

“Ode to the Nightingale” is similar to the orphan and outcast poetry in that the narrative persona participates as a listener, hearing “the lingering cadences” (4) of the nightingale's “mournful tale” (19). The persona parallels her misery with that of the “sweet bird of sorrow” (1), and exiles herself to “foreign realms to weep” (33). Unable to gain “the placid hour of careless thought” (40), however, the persona returns to Britain and finds the love of others to whom she had hoped to return to be “a false delusive flame” (60). She has discovered that neither the presumed love of others, nor the comforting effects of nature, were capable of relieving her sorrow:

Yet, ah! nor leafy beds nor bowers
Fringed with soft May's enamell'd flowers,
Nor pearly leaves, nor Cynthia's beams,
Nor smiling Pleasure's shadowy dreams—
Sweet bird, not e'en thy melting strains—
Can calm the heart where tyrant sorrow reigns.

(73-8)

Again, as in the orphan poetry, the miserable self-exile is ultimately alone in his/her misery, and the contradictions between hope and reality remain unresolved.

One can only speculate what type of fugitive Robinson had in mind for the poem “The Fugitive.” We gather he is a “persecuted exile” (39) who is a stranger to the country and whose “kindred” has been “massacred” (44). Since the prime of Robinson's writing career coincided with some of the bloodiest conflicts between France and England, as well as with internal conflicts in France like the Terror, it is possible to assume this fugitive is simply a sort of “generic” exile, from whatever country. But since “massacre” is such a pointed term, it could be possible that she was alluding to the victims of the Terror (the September Massacres in particular) or a fugitive from the Ottoman empire. Either way, it would have been personally dangerous to mention by which country he is persecuted, for this could have prompted charges of suspect loyalty in a politically charged time.

What is most striking about this poem is the way in which the narrator's argument, commonly considered to be a romantic one, contradicts and subverts itself. The poet pleads to the man to “Be cheerful as the lark that o'er yon hill / In Nature's language, wild, yet musical / Hails the Creator!” (55-7). Further on, the poet writes of the mortality of all things, including Nature:

The fever, throbbing in the tyrant's veins
In quick, strong language, tells the daring wretch
That he is mortal …
The sweetest rose will wither …
The bold bird,
Whose strong eye braves the ever-burning orb,
Falls like the summer fly, and has at most
But his allotted sojourn …

(65-7, 69-73)

In addition to another allusion to the fugitive's country, where the tyrant can massacre one's entire family, the idea is introduced here that Nature, which hails God, is just as much at the hands of God as the daring wretch. Both humankind and Nature are mortal, and for that reason, says the poet, “Be cheerful! thou art not a fugitive! / All are thy kindred—all thy brothers, here— … (74-5). But the condolence does not work in life then, for how can one be consoled by the knowledge that she is as mortal as anyone else, either humans or nature? Furthermore there is no suggestion in the poem that mortal life will ever be free of misery, for there is no allusion in this poem to consolations bred of transcending Nature and ascending to eternal peace. What makes us all kindred is that we are mortal—a truly existential, if not morbid, conclusion.

The alienated cannot find solace in art, nor in the company of others, nor in nature, nor (as seen in “The Lascar: In Two Parts”) in the church or the wealthy. The Lascar, an Indian slave who escaped to what he believed to be freedom, is now homeless, impoverished, and in need of charity. He turns first to the wealth of others, and attempts to beg at a “proud man's door” (124). The Lascar, however, is turned away by a “surly porter” (127) whose “brow was fair; but in his eye / Sat pamper'd scorn and tyranny” (129-30). As he turns away, he hears the music of the church bells, and decides to seek charity there:

No lofty dome show'd loftier state,
No pamper'd porter watch'd the gate,
No mastiff like a tyrant stood,
Eager to scatter human blood;
Yet the poor Indian wanderer found,
E'en where Religion smiled around,
That tears had little power to speak
When trembling on a sable cheek!

(149-156)

The Indian is doubly cursed; he is both poor and neglected by the rich, and he is a man of color and therefore rejected by a racist religion, filled with what the Lascar calls “christian savage[s]” (36).

In addition to alienated artists, fugitives, and people of color, Robinson writes of the holy exiled man who is devoted to a life of contemplation. The source for this theme may have come from Edmund Spenser, whose poetry the eighteenth century had rediscovered and who was read by Robinson, who includes a long poem in this collection entitled “The Foster-Child: In Imitation of Spenser.” The presence in this poem of allusions to Duessa, the temptress, and a mountain of contemplation where the man finds “solitude sublime” (72), suggests that Robinson was most interested in The Faerie Queene, particularly Book I, which possibility is made stronger by the evidence of several poems, especially “Anselmo: The Hermit of the Alps.” Anselmo has been a hermit of the Alps for three years in order to weep for “the woes of human kind” (24) and to dedicate his life to “holy meditation” (8). Like the Red Cross knight who encountered Despair on his road to unification, Anselmo's despair led him to his mountain of contemplation:

For when the young Anselmo try'd
The paths of luxury and pride,
He found in every gaudy scene
Light vanity, with wanton mien,
And base Self-Interest, grovelling guest,
And Envy, with deep-wounded breast,
And Power that spurn'd the hapless race,
And splendour gilding o'er disgrace;
And bold Oppression's ponderous chain,
To load the groaning sons of pain!

(25-34)

As a result of his “Discontent” with the world, he left the woman he loved, “Despairing, lost, perplex'd to find / No balm to heal his tortured mind” (57-8). During his stay on the mountain, Anselmo ponders the state of humankind:

Shall those, by Heaven's own influence join'd,
By feeling, sympathy, and mind,
The sacred voice of truth deny,
And mock the mandate of the sky?

(119-22)

Instead of encountering on his mountain the Faith, Hope, Charity, and Heavenly Spirit, and the view of a New Jerusalem that Red Cross encounters, however, Anselmo finds no peace and decides to undertake a pilgrimage back to his adored maid. After a night in which he “kiss'd his cross, and sunk to rest” (138), Anselmo sets out “clad in a pilgrim's mean array” to find his Rosa (131). Motivated by the Hope of mortal love, he arrives only to find her dead, and he, “maddening at the sight, fell lifeless to the ground!” (216). In Robinson's typically existential way, Anselmo is denied unification with both the divine and the mortal, and the result is madness and death.

Robinson does not offer many solutions for surviving or coping with misery. In “The Exile,” the poet's weary exile is an echo of a combination of such characters as the artist/orphan in “All Alone,” Lascar, and Anselmo, for the exile is “Disdain'd by Fortune, stung by Art, / And tortured with a feeling heart, / Which Hope had left to break!” (19-21). The rest of the poem is in fact an argument in support of suicide by the narrator:

Then why should he, with haggard eye,
Start from the she-wolf prowling nigh,
Or dread the gulph below?
Why totter o'er the dreadful steep,
And bear the pelting storm, and weep,
When one short step would end the tyranny of wo?
.....Poor exile! why such fears endure,
When Nature's hand presents a cure,
Which only death can give?

(25-33)

All but the last two lines of the poem suggest suicide as the viable solution to misery. The poet leaves these last two lines vague; the reader is unsure whether or not the words were actually spoken by the exile: “Methinks the wretched wanderer cries— / ‘Guilt seeks the grave—the coward dies, / While virtue nobly dares to suffer and to live!’”(34-6). This conclusion to a poem about suicide as a solution to despair is highly suspicious in that we cannot be sure about its sincerity. But the lines are made even more ambiguous because Robinson does not explicitly attribute the comments to the exile. Moreover, the lines seem a weak, patly epigrammatic attempt at an argument against suicide rather than a satisfying resolution to the difficult issues involved. Either way, the ending remains existential. These concluding lines serve as reminders of the complexity of solutions involved in a contradictory existence in which a continual ethical struggle exists between a “guilty” suicide and a “virtuous” but suffering life.

Robinson's “Reflections” sufficiently summarizes her philosophies as a response to optimism and the promise of hope, love, fame, friendship, joy, and beauty. The first stanza of the poem expresses the rhetoric of the optimist:

Ah! who has power to say,
To-morrow's sun shall warmer glow,
And o'er this gloomy vale of wo
Diffuse a brighter ray?

(1-4)

Not only does one need power and position to utter such words of optimism, but even if it is possible that tomorrow will be brighter, says Robinson in her response, it is equally possible that the brightness will not last: “Ah! who is ever sure … / These raptures will endure?” (5,8). Nothing lasts in the poet's world; Hope's aid fades, love's dart leaves a wounded heart, Fame is but a name, Friendship's beam is but a dream, and beauty goes quickly to the tomb. Her only advice to fellow pessimists appears to be the carpe diem message of a cavalier, but it is ultimately existential: “Let conscience make each minute gay, / And brave the shafts of Death!” (59-60). Conscience and pity and feeling for all of humankind are necessary for one to be gay, but one engages in them not so much to seize the day, but rather to escape death. Once again, Robinson's concluding lines seem to posit a contradiction between being brave in life or guilty in suicide or death.

In much of her poetry, then, Robinson illustrates the plight of the exiled, the alienated, and the orphaned. Robinson, the public figure and public observer, records in her poetry the diverse and often devastating effects on society of both personal and political social conflicts. Robinson is adept at scrutinizing the society around her, as is evident in “January, 1795,” which Curran has called a “poetic montage” which “artfully refuse[s] to reconcile [its] discords” (190). Contradictory images are part of the poet's motif:

Lofty mansions, warm and spacious;
Courtiers cringing and voracious;
Misers scarce the wretched heeding;
Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.

(5-8)

The disparities heighten the devastating dichotomy between the private and the public; we can assume the bleeding soldiers, if they survive at all, will return to London as “gallant souls with empty purses” (37).

Furthermore, there are no abstractions in this poem; all the images are concrete, like snapshots of public and private life of the haves and the have-nots. Along with the characters and personas, one sees and hears and feels a tangible reality in stanzas like this and others, which document the widespread disparities that afflict nearly all sectors of human society.

Not all of Robinson's poetry is existential. As Judith Pascoe has demonstrated, Robinson was often able to “[find] within the metropolis a sustaining, rather than alienating vision” (170). Still other poems celebrate the beauty of Nature, solitude, and youth. Yet her most passionate poems display the morally, ethically, and emotionally contradictory nature of problems and solutions, of contentedness and despair. Robinson's vision is an honest one, sounding more like the realistic dissonant notes of forthright internal dialogue than a harmonious symphony of dogmatic statements. And like a snapshot, her vision imprints on the reader's mind a vivid impression of the multiple incongruities of late eighteenth-century British culture.

Notes

1. Judith Pascoe is currently editing a more complete collection of Robinson's works.

Works Cited

Barrell, John, and Harriet Guest. “On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem.” Ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. The New Eighteenth Century. New York: Methuen, 1987. 121-143.

Curran, Stuart. “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context.” Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837. Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1994. 17-35.

———. “Romantic Poetry: The I Altered.” Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. 185-207.

Fergus, Jan, and Janice Farrar Thaddeus. “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820.” Ed. John Yolton and Leslie Ellen Brown. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 191-208.

Jackson, J. R. de J. Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.

Pascoe, Judith. “The Spectacular Flaneuse: Mary Robinson and the City of London.” The Wordsworth Circle 23.3 (1992): 165-71.

Robinson, Mary. “Mrs. Mary Robinson.” Beaux & Belles of England. London: Grollier, n.d.

———. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson: Including the Pieces Last Published. London: Jones, 1824.

Woodring, Carl R. Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1961.