murderer's liquid way

Mary Robinson’s The Haunted Beach, while mimicking the movement of rolling water (see kduglin’s snip beach), in its ranting and extensive, disjointed descriptions is nevertheless about a specific incident. A friend writes that Mrs. Robinson from her window saw two fishermen carrying a body onto shore, which lay there for a few days until being thrown off a cliff. An incident indescribable to Mrs. Robinson where “these circumstances made on the mind of Mrs. Robinson a deep and lasting impression;”. In fact such an “impression” was made that it seems to have killed her but a few months later, as described by her friend. Nevertheless, unlike the story behind it, The Haunted Beach is not as much about a corpse as it is about a murderer.

Robinson describes the murderer as absent from the Haunted Beach where for a full “thirty years his task has been,/ Day after day…wastes..A loathsome life away.” Of this I ask do we as readers not see the parallels between the murderer himself (assuming it is a man, which at this point I can make a pretty safe assumption of) and the author herself. Both are outsiders to the incident looking in, where Robinson stares from the safety of her seaside window aghast with horror, the murderer in a strangely voyeuristic way is bound by chains of guilt. Both feel for something similarly foreign, yet near. The murderer, trying, but unable to completely put the incident behind him, resembles a desperate Robinson who wishes to help, but cannot because she doesn’t hold agency over the burial ceremony being a woman. Her friend writes:

“Mrs. Robinson, humanely indignant at the scene which passed, exerted herself, but without success, to procure by subscription a small sum for performing the last duties to a wretched outcast. Unwilling, by an ostentatious display of her name, to offend the higher and more fastidious female powers, she presented to the fishermen her own contribution, and declined farther to interfere. The affair dropped.”

This brings me to my second point about The Haunted Beach. As kduglin writes quoting kmasters from her E1 entitled Veiled Clarity, “for all its semblance of order, the poem is marked by ambiguity and vagueness;”. She goes on to cite this ambiguity as due to a similar appeal to the irrational and supernatural as that of Coleridge, in say, Kubla Kahn. While undoubtedly true, we also arrive at another similarity between the two poets in their inabilities to act on will, and their frustrating vulnerabilities to helplessness. As an opium addict, himself, Coleridge suffers from an addiction that at times results in loss of control and utterly stupefying sedation. These tendencies are nowhere more evident than in his poetry-Kubla Kahn, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, and The Eolian Harp where he writes of forces stronger and greater than himself exhibiting control at will. He even writes of a similar “window-type” existence as Mary Robinson looking out at her murder scene, in This Lime Tree Bower My Prison. Like Robinson, unable to affect the action at hand, we get the sense that the two poets are constantly restrained and denied. Robinson’s lonely beach-scape can be seen in much the same way as Coleridge’s Lime Tree Bower, where he has “lost /Such beauties and such feelings, as had been/ Most sweet to have remembrance,” (here).

The true solitude of the poem resides in the narrator’s inabilities to focus on a single object, restrained from helping the lost soul at hand. In ambiguity and vagueness, the pooem takes on qualities of profound solitude. Even the water image may be an accurate one, as for Coleridge and Robinson life takes on qualities ungraspable.