Mary Robinson’s sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets (1796) appears in the wake of much experimentation by other poets with a form revived in the years leading up to and in the Romantic period, the sonnet. (See the discussion of Charlotte Smith’s Elegaic Sonnets, above.) The sequence presents in lyrical form Sappho’s feelings about her love for the young man, Phaon, and deploys the strict rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan form in cunning tension with the depiction of a ‘mind, enlightened’, as Robinson puts it in her address ‘To the Reader’, ‘by the most exquisite talents, yet yielding to the destructive control of ungovernable passions’.1 Robinson, quoting Milton’s ‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray’ as ‘an example of the measure’ (p. 144) in which she composes, obliges the reader to look hard at the word ‘legitimate’ and the claim for poetic authenticity and authority that it enforces; she ‘is’, in Daniel Robinson’s words, ‘bolder than that of any of the eighteenth‐century poets in explicitly asserting her poetic legitimacy as both a woman and a poet’.2
The sequence shows Robinson’s roots in an idiom of sensibility, dominated by consideration of the rival claims of passion and reason, moving between abstraction, image, personification, and intense feeling. The sequence is rightly said by Jerome McGann to ‘explore the ambiguous significance of passion and reason, chastity and pleasure, feeling and thought’.3 Sonnet XXIV typifies Robinson’s ability to make poetry out of contrast. The moon is addressed in the opening quatrain as ‘Sublimely still, and beautifully pale’ (4), an adept conflation of Burke’s categories of the sublime and the beautiful. Yet immediately a question undermines its emblematic authority and opens up a wholly different picture, that of the passion‐disrupted self:
What can thy cool and placid eye avail,
Where fierce despair absorbs the mental sight,
While inbred glooms the vagrant thoughts invite,
To tempt the gulph where howling fiends assail? (5–8)
The sequence finds its true subject in that phrase ‘inbred glooms’, an inward unhappiness that is generated through the ‘mental’ operations suggested by ‘invite’. Placed in the rhyme‐position at the line‐ending, the verb is seemingly restricted, before the real nature of the invitation extended to ‘the vagrant thoughts’ is brought out by the final line of the octave. The poetry may risk melodrama, but its concern with ‘vagrant thoughts’ is aesthetically redemptive, especially since the phrase catches up and internalizes the earlier mention of Phaon’s ‘vagrant heart’ (IX.13). And in its approach towards a ‘gulph’ the poem cleverly prefigures Sappho’s final suicidal ‘leap of Leucata’ (p. 154), the subject of Sonnets XLI to XLIII. The sestet illustrates Robinson’s control of tone, as it steals away from ‘fierce despair’ and ‘inbred glooms’ to reaffirm ‘the temper’d power’ (9) of ‘Night’. And yet its long melodious invocation of that ‘power’ concludes in a subtle and affecting recognition of nature’s and poetry’s inadequacy: ‘Yet, vain is ev’ry charm! and vain the hour, / That brings to madd’ning love, no soothing dream!’ (13–14). The last two lines are part of the sestet’s interlacing triple rhymes, but they have the adversative kick of a final couplet resistant to what has preceded it. The reader is left grasping at what the poetry wants but cannot supply: a ‘soothing dream’ to provide solace for ‘madd’ning love’.
The poetry manages to avoid self‐pity through its adroit handling of abstractions, as here, as though ‘madd’ning love’ were an incurable illness to be diagnosed in the moment of being felt.4 Mere effusiveness is checked, too, by the poetry’s technical polish. For one thing, words that on their own may seem to risk over‐emphasis, such as ‘madd’ning’, take on nuanced meanings through the fact of skilful repetition: the same word occurs in XLI as emotion colours landscape and ‘madd’ning billows combat with the skies!’ (4). For another, the metrical control is impressive. So in XXVII Sappho asserts, this time looking, in an anticipation of Keats’s famous sonnet, at ‘ye bright Stars’ (1): ‘Love strikes the feeling heart with ruthless hand, / And only spares the breast which dullness shields’ (7–8). The elegant phrasing uses the iambic pulse of the metre to shape a clarity that is both ‘feeling’ and ‘ruthless’. The idea that anyone with sensitivity will suffer the pangs of love is offered wryly as evidence of nature’s way of being ‘capricious’ (9) since it ‘but bestows / The fine affections of the soul, to prove / A keener sense of desolating woes’ (9–11); the rhyme delivers ‘woes’ with a ‘fine’ inevitability.
That said, Robinson is often at her most persuasive when she portrays her speaker as least in control of her feelings. Sonnet VI uses a series of anaphoric questions governed by ‘Is it’ to ask about the nature of love and gives a credible sense of love’s obsessiveness:
Is it to chant one name in ceaseless lays,
To hear no words that other tongues can say,
To watch the pale moon’s melancholy ray,
To chide in fondness, and in folly praise? (5–8)
Coleridge admired Mary Robinson, and she him, as ‘To the Poet Coleridge’ reveals, with its series of dazzled and dazzling references to Kubla Khan,5 as when she writes intertextually: ‘I’ll mark thy sunny dome, and view / Thy Caves of Ice, thy fields of dew!’ (13–14). The above lines conclude with a possible source of his ‘Words of unmeant bitterness’ (665) in the Conclusion to Part 2 of Christabel. Simpler here than elsewhere, Robinson is also nuanced, as she implies through the near‐chime of her two rhymes the concern of the lover with the ‘one name’ of her beloved. The sonnet sustains itself with great skill until it concludes: ‘Is it to loath the light and wish to die? / For these I feel, – and feel that they are Love’ (13–14). The poem gives the impression of feeling what might be called generic emotions with a vivid subjectivity.
The sequence is remarkable for its inwardness. It studies with poise a ‘mind’ – the word is central to Sonnet XI, among others – that is aware it is not master over its own unruly household. This poem pays ironic homage to ‘Reason! vaunted Sov’reign of the mind’ (1), as the very rhyme words prompted by ‘mind’ indicate: it is asked mockingly whether it can ‘the vagrant fancy bind’ (4), where ‘vagrant’ again serves as a marker of an instability that cannot be stilled; it has to reckon with ‘sighs of Love’ (6) that are ‘capricious as the wav’ring wind’ (5) and with the sobering fact that ‘Pleasure’s hands the sheaves of Truth unbind’ (8). The cumulative effect of the poem is to subvert the very idea of rational control, even as the poem’s idiom maintains an air of analytic grasp. There is a proto‐Shelleyan quality to this duality, and the poem ends with lines that would not be out of place in some of Shelley’s more disenchanted writing: ‘Then, what wert thou? O! Idol of the wise! / A visionary theme! – a gorgeous shade!’ (13–14). Certainly, in her blend of precision and passion, Robinson offers in Sappho and Phaon one of the Romantic period’s most compelling delineations of the clash between sensibility and the bitter facts of experience.
The English Review sorrowfully regretted the presence of ‘the contortions and dislocations of Della Crusca’ in the sequence, opining that ‘If she had followed nature, seldom more justly and elegantly represented than in her own mind, free from the shackles of imitation, she would have produced sonnets nearer akin to the natural, pathetic, and passionate Sappho’.6 Ironically, the reviewer wanted Robinson to be more ‘natural’, ‘free from the shackles of imitation’, more, as we might say loosely, ‘Romantic’, closer to the example of Smith in her Elegiac Sonnets. But Romantics are also poets who need a mask to say what they think and feel, and the adoption of the persona of Sappho gives Robinson access to a forebear that makes possible her own commitment to rhetorical intensities of feeling and complexities of figuration. Sonnet XXXV is an example of how ‘imitation’ licenses an extreme yet artful language of despair and anguish: ‘Phaon is false! and hopeless Sappho dies!’ (8), writes Robinson, as she goes on to imagine what Phaon might have said to take the edge off his alleged falsity. As often in Romantic poetry, ‘passion’ is not simply expressed; it is psychologized, subjected to reflective ‘dislocations’, so that the speaker’s emotions analyse themselves in the process of expression. This poem’s sestet reads as follows:
‘Farewell! my Lesbian love, you might have said,’
Such sweet remembrance had some pity prov’d,
‘Or coldly thus, farewell, Oh! Lesbian maid!’
No task severe, for one so fondly lov’d!
The gentle thought had sooth’d my wander’ing shade,
From life’s dark valley, and its thorns remov’d! (9–14)
The exclamation marks hardly suggest the presence of a cool presiding intelligence, but such an intelligence is, indeed, present. The quoted lines are from Pope’s Sappho to Phaon, involving a further layer of intertextuality.7 Robinson makes them part of a dialogic, internalized drama, one in which the artifices of poetry serve affective self‐exploration. The speaker enters a realm of conditional reprieve: the ‘had’ of the penultimate line means ‘would have’ and the final rhyme suggests a knowingly futile wish to be ‘remov’d’ from the struggles involving love and proof articulated earlier in the poem and in the sequence as a whole. The reader is made doubly aware of ‘life’s dark valley and its thorns’ as the speaker expresses her wish to escape them. Through such double motions of poetic art and affective recoil the sequence establishes its claims upon us.