Inventing the Romantic Poet in Lyrical Tales

1784 portrait of Robinson by Joshua Reynolds.

Robinson's Lyrical Tales serves as her bid to be perceived as part of the rising avant-garde of the Lake Poets (who had not yet been identified as such, much less as the English Romantics). She had previously proven her skill at composing "legitimate sonnets" and engaging with the drama of the Della Cruscans, but she now sought to establish herself among the young upstarts by treating similar subject matter, and doing so with impressive technical virtuosity. For Curran, what is notable about Lyrical Tales "is the way in which its abundance of voices, modes of representation, and fertile creativity collide with its sense of a continual thwarting of potentiality to accomplish a thematic tension between means and ends, past and future consummation and consumption characteristic of the greatest Romantic poetry" (WIlson 26). Those contraries emerge as Robinson takes on a number of her “poetical disguises,” or, more correctly, draws on several different literary modes in order to achieve her artistic, political, and economic goals for her work. She sets out to develop the ideology set forth in earlier works like Sappho and Phaon and the Letter to the Women of England, demonstrating the poet's awareness of higher truths and ability to serve as a spur to social progress. 

An 1802 print of Lascar officers by Charles Gold, a member of the Royal Artillery.

To that end, Robinson often draws on already-familiar traditions, as when she uses Della Cruscan sentimentality to promote liberal political causes in her portraits of "The Lascar" and "The Negro Girl." The poet depicts vaguely exotic, but pathetic figures, stripped of love and home, their last hopes crushed by the end of the poem. The "Negro Girl," Zelma, pines for her lost love, Draco (who, we learn in the final stanza, has drowned at sea) and complains of the injustices done to her people.She looks out upon a slave ship that "has oft plough'd the main/With human traffic fraught;/Its cargo,--our dark Sons of pain--/For worldly treasure bought" (109). The deep emotion and suffering of the exploited Africans is contrasted with the unfeeling world of post-Enlightenment Europe, personified in the "Tyrant WHITE MAN" (111). The girl's master is portrayed as possessing the advantages of reason and knowledge, teaching her to read, but lacking the human sympathy to care for the pain he has caused her. The similarly forlorn Lascar longs for his "Indian home" and mother as he starves and dies in the West. He complains, "I sleep upon a bed of stone,/I pace the meadows, wild--alone!/And if I curse my fate severe,/Some Christian savage mocks my tear!"  (32) As Robinson plays her role as the sentimentalist poet, she invites her readers to identify with the "noble savage."


Curran suggests that, beyond the religious and political traditions they are built upon, the poets of sensibility's concern with such down-trodden figures can tell us much about their own position. The impulse that brings someone like Robinson to write on the types of subjects with the range of voices she does is tied to her social status and the resulting alienation from a sense of self. He argues the "void of signification" that exists "at the center of sensibility should alert us to a profound awareness among these poets of being themselves dispossessed, figured through details they do not control, uniting an unstructurable longing of sensibility with the hard-earned sense of thingness" (Curran 205). It is important to keep in mind, however, that the indeterminacy of Robinson's identity in her work, like the seemingly unrelenting sorrow in Charlotte Smith's sonnets, is wielded as an artistic and commercial implement by the poet. Both writers' lives can be read as narratives of brilliant, talented women, profoundly let down by the men in their lives. But their ability to craft affecting work that fills carefully considered niches suggests a fully-realized, and carefully-controlled sense of self.

1792 cartoon by George Cruikshank attacking the slave trade.

Robinson's conception of her own role, coupled with her desire to join her name to the burgeoning rolls of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, is perhaps clearest in "The Poor, Singing Dame." She relates the tale of an old woman (named Mary), who enjoys singing and dancing in the shadow of a curmudgeonly Lord's castle. The impoverished, physically-feeble artist is made the thoroughly feminine heroine of sensibility. Seeing her, "Envy the Lord of the Castle possess'd,/For he hated Poverty should be so chearful,/While care could the fav'rites of Fortune molest" (19). The artist of sensibility's pleasures, gained through acts of creation and her profound ties to nature are privileged above economic and political power. The authoritarian figure can only react by restraining and snuffing out a happiness that transcends the customary power relations. Lacking access to the discourse of sensibility, he must bring her into line with the hegemony that validates his power by having her imprisoned, which results in her death.  Mary's bond with nature is emphasized, not only when she frolics through the forest, but in its sublime aspect as it turns on her enemy. Though she does not seem to take any direct action against him, nature expresses its disapproval of the Lord's crime: "His bones began wasting, his flesh was decaying,/And he hung his foul head, and he perish'd in shame" (21)  With the suggestion that his death is mainly the result of his own shame and misery, the Gothic elements in the poem are kept in a vaguely psychological space. The feudal imagery and supernatural events serve the poem's purposes, but do not become the narrative preoccupation.

Elsewhere, however, Robinson's use of the Gothic is an aspect of her work that sets her significantly apart from the Lake poets. They, of course, also frequently called upon Gothic imagery and conventions in their poems, in spite of the disclaimer from Wordsworth in his 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads that "the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants" (xv). In poems like "The Thorn" and "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," Wordsworth was careful to place the Gothic trappings in the minds of his superstitious rural folk. Coleridge maintained an undercurrent of irony as he constructed his Gothic masterpieces. As they do, Robinson sees the potential in the imagery of superstition for gestures toward transcendent experience. She takes advantage of the Gothic's liminal status in the Memoirs, which, as Linda Peterson has noted, are themselves an "illustrat[ion of] a woman writer's attempt to participate in Romantic myths of authorship" (Wilson 36). Robinson writes of Westminster Abbey, "I have often remained in the gloomy chapels of that sublime fabric till I became as it were an inhabitant of another world. The dim light of the Gothic windows, the vibration of my footsteps along the lofty aisles, the train of reflections the scene inspired, were all suited to the temper of my soul."


But Robinson shows in the Lyrical Tales that she is capable of embracing the Gothic without the ambivalence that the male poets experienced. The mode provides a site in which the woman writer is free to explore the anxieties of her second-class condition in the social order, living under the power of exploitative male authority. Her "Swiss tale," "Golfre" explores this potential, seemingly reveling in the gore and playing up the treatment of women as victims in the Gothic narrative. "The dove-eyed Zorietto/A damsel blest with ev'ry grace" possesses little in the way of personality (182). Nonetheless, her position as a poor, rural woman forced to fill the domestic role demanded by a rich, powerful man possesses significant connotations in the context of Robinson's biography and feminist positions. As the feminist critic Eugenia Delamotte succinctly puts it, "Most of these [Gothic] books are about women who just can't seem to get out of the house" (10). Robinson may not revolutionize the form, but the supernatural world offers a justice that rarely comes about in her more naturalistic work. She describes in gruesome detail the villain's fate when "The rosy dawn's returning light/Display'd his corse,--a dreadful sight,/Black, wither'd, smear'd with gore!" (217) Similarly, the murderer in "The Haunted Beach" finds himself "Bound by a strong and mystic chain" (76). The influence of Coleridge's Rime is apparent in both these works, but where Coleridge depicted a world ruled by implacable and largely senseless forces, Robinson creates more conventional plots. Whether there is "too much" or "too little" of morality in Robinson's works, there is little questioning of the nature of the moral: abuse of power and ruthless acquisitiveness are evil and shall be punished.


More problematic for some critics are Robinson's comic depictions of the rural poor in poems like "Mistress Gurton's Cat," "The Granny Grey," and "Deborah's Parrot." Unlike Wordsworth, who sought wisdom in romanticized glimpses of more "natural" lives, Robinson offers humorous ballads that seem to lack such pretensions. Much closer in social-economic status to those "common" people than the Lake Poets, she tends to depict them as buffoons, given to self-righteous posturing and infidelity. Poems like these have tended to lead critics to concur with Coleridge's assessment of Robinson, based on her newspaper work, as having mind full of "the bad, good, and indifferent." Pascoe suggests that these works, originally published in the Morning Post under the name Tabitha Bramble "and evincing a folksy, often antifeminist sensibility--can be read as bits of comic business meant primarily, if not solely, to amuse" (266). Certainly, as is the case throughout Robinson's body of work, role-playing and commercial considerations are both part of the equation. Nonetheless, some further examination of these "bits of comic business" is warranted.


When contextualized within Robinson's biography and principles, the poems take on weightier aspects. A poem like "Deborah's Parrot" makes light of an old woman "doom'd a Spinster pure to be" (97). As originally published under the Tabitha Bramble signature, the "Village Tale" offers problematic mockery of a de-sexualized and judgmental figure. But given Mary Robinson's history as a character in political cartoons and the foremost example of the Prince's wayward deeds, the closing message that "SLANDER turns on its maker" gathers greater resonance (106). Indeed, rather than simply pandering to readers' desire for amusements, Robinson often enacts a subversive agenda in these seemingly inoffensive poems. On one hand, "The Confessor" (sarcastically subtitled, "A Sanctified Tale") participates in a long tradition of anti-clerical and anti-Catholic satire, its objects set safely in the time "When SUPERSTITION rul'd the land/And Priestcraft shackled Reason" (149). Yet it is clear, especially when the poem is read in conjunction with her comments on the importance of democratizing learning in the Sappho and Phaon preface, that the kinds of "Pious fraud" she mocks are a continuing problem, connected to the patriarchal order that keeps most women silent. In some cases, changes to the newspaper text are made to adapt to the more serious intentions of the book, as when she adds (or restores) two lines to the first stanza of "The Fortune-Teller." The version published in the April 12th, 1800 edition of the Post ends, "The silly, simple, doting Lad/Was little less than loving mad." The Lyrical Tales version adds another couplet, offering a jab at the upper classes: "A malady not known of late--/Among the little-loving Great!" (129) 


Robinson's purpose, ultimately, is to attack sanctimony and hypocrisy in all forms and at all class levels. In the place of an exploitative and repressive social order, she promotes a feminized ideology of sensibility. The romantic depiction of the poet as an inspired visionary capable of perceiving a utopian future for humanity lends credence to the idea that work like hers will be able to help bring about substantive change. The varied approaches to subject matter and poetical voices in Lyrical Tales coalesce in an idealized construction of the poet: engaged with nature, sensitive to the struggles of the powerless, and commanding beautiful ideals with the aesthetic flourishes made possible by a well-trained ear. In Mary Robinson, we see the birth of the Romantic poet, but it is never as simple as that. Her rhetorical strategy, as well as her awareness of her audience, leads her to dwell on the foolishness, suffering, and failure endemic to our corrupted world, even as she seeks hints of a better way of life for herself and her readers. 

Works Cited

Curran, Stuart. "The I Altered." Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. 185-207.

Delamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Pascoe, Judith. "Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace." Romantic Women Writers. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover: UP of New England, 1995. 252-68.


Robinson, Mary. Lyrical Tales. London: Longman, 1800. Full Text.


Wilson, Carol Shiner and Joel Haefner, ed. Re-Visioning Romanticism.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.


Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. London: Longman, 1802. Full Text.