Here is a link that takes you to the hub post linking all my posts on my selection of Mary Robinson: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). How I’m doing and why I’m doing it.
‘The Progress of Liberty’, a late poem, from 1797-9, is also one of Mary Robinson’s more ambitious poems, a two-book epic in fact. She salami-sliced it for excerpt-poems in magazines, and in other selections of her work, the poems are presented in this way. I decided I wanted to give it a go as a complete work, but, of course, there’s not enough room, and I still had to excerpt. I chose the final sections of each book, and then thought I might smuggle in another part. Alas it doesn’t work, quite, but I want to post that smuggled passage here, as a taster for the whole.
In ‘The Progress of Liberty’ superstition and servitude are several times rhetorically swept away, and a uniquely British sense of ‘liberty’ is proposed: a rational constitutional settlement of the separation of powers, as prefigured in, and enacted by, Magna Carta: ‘When her bold BARONS ratified their deed,/ Freedom has smil’d triumphant and secure.’ In the poem, superstition (despotic Catholicism allied to absolute monarchy, though it is never named as such) is attacked, but so are the tithes the British peasantry was obliged to pay to lords and landlords. (Her radicalism is pre-Industrial, of course, and a long way from that of the London Corresponding Society, for example, who had been unsuccessfully tried, somewhat chaotically, for treason in 1794.) The emphatic reference to ‘laws/ FORM’D FOR THE PEASANT AND THE PRINCE ALIKE’ may bring her former lover Prince George to mind (check out my 'life' here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) but it is a more general point about the ideal (if not actual) equity of the law. The presiding ‘Nature’s God’ is difficult to completely reconcile to the Christian deity; ‘he’ is more of a Romantic pantheistic energy as he manifests frequently in the poem, an instrument of a universal reason that is aligned to, but is not distinguishable from, liberty. ‘The Progress of Liberty’ is an impressive political poem, and being cast in epic form, its ending (conventionally) invokes the Muse:
REASON, pow’r sublime!
Accept the strain
spontaneous from the MUSE,
Which nurs’d on
Albion’s cliffs, delights to sing
Of LIBERTY, and thee, her ALBION’S boast.
Ultimately, for Robinson, it is poetry that will proclaim ‘REASON ratified’, ‘Shall bless her BRITISH shores’, and ‘BRITAIN’S sons,/ The sons of REASON! UNAPPALL’D and FREE!’ With these words, the two book epic ends, bringing reason to rest with freedom. However, its historical narrative occasionally can be specific; ‘Marat and Robespierre’ are referenced in footnotes to the lines ‘Two arch demons, the phalanx led /Lawless and cruel,’ but this welcome political specificity is rare. As expected, for a poem working at an epic level, its least effective and less affective lines are those in which abstractions are addressed directly and personified. Abstractions are not merely inert but are replete with the energy of live political debate, especially when animated by narratives of struggle and community. At the same time, the poem contains some of Robinson’s best-written and elevated blank verse (Miltonian in derivation, precursorily Wordsworthian) which carries the rational but passionate message across the rhythmical waves of its verse paragraphs. Here’s that passage from Book One. In it, Robinson presents a political prisoner or prisoner of conscience, as we say now, who is condemned to death. (In the previous lines the reader is presented with a deservingly condemned murderer.) His dedication to reason and freedom, virtues of the entire poem, gives him inner strength.
In his low cell
The
patient child of persecution sits,
Pensively
sad. His uncomplaining tongue,
His
steadfast eye, his lean and pallid cheek,
Grac’d
with the stamp of dignified disdain,
Wait
the approach of death. No haggard glance
Ruffles
the placid orb, whose lustre, dimm’d
By
dungeon vapours, like a dewy star,
Gleams
’midst surrounding darkness. On his lip
Smiles
innocence, enthron’d in modest pride,
And
eloquently silent! On his breast
His
folded arms (shielding his guiltless heart
From
the damp poisons of a living grave),
Are
firmly interwoven; while his soul,
Calm
as the martyr at the kindling pyre,
Holds
strong with resignation. Who will now
Breathe
the contagious mischiefs of his cell?
Who
quit the gorgeous splendours of the sun,
To
watch with him the slowly-wasting lamp,
Dim
with obtrusive vapours? Who will share
The
bread of misery, and with the breath
Of
sympathy more palatable make
The
cup of human sorrow? Who resign
The
midnight revelry of happier scenes,
Turn
from the banquet and illumin’d hall,
The
throne of flaunting beauty, gaily deck’d,
The
costly shows of life, to count with him
The
silent hours of anguish? Tell, O TRUTH!
Thou
heav’n-descended judge! what has he done?
Has
he refus’d to bend the flexile knee
Before
the blood-stain’d foot of ruthless pow’r?
To
fawn upon the bloated, lordly fool,
Who
claim’d his vassalage? Has he refus’d
To
load the groaning altars of the church;
Libell’d,
by truth, some wanton, courtly dame;
Or,
like an arrogant, rebellious knave,
Dar’d
talk of freedom? Say, O vengeful MAN!
Are
these thy destin’d victims? Is it thus
Thou
deal’st the meed of justice? Dost thou think
Thy
petty rage will sever them from HIM,
Whose
attribute is mercy, and whose grace
Mocks
all distinctions? O! let NATURE speak,
And
with instinctive force inform thy soul,
That
LIBERTY, the choicest boon of heav’n,
Is REASON’S birth-right, and the gift of God!...
Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com (don’t use the Edge Hill or the supanet emails); website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com
