Rhyme and Rhythm in Mary Robinson's The Haunted Beach

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            Mary Darby Robinson's The Haunted Beach is a charmingly creepy poem. Written in response to Henry Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the poem is also about a sunken ship and a lot of dead sailors. However, as an interesting twist, the curse in this poem is not on the sole surviving sailor, but on a fisherman who has murdered that sailor. The poem opens on the image of a desolate and deserted beach, but quickly moves to the lone fisherman's shed. Inside it is the body of a sailor, plundered treasure still held in his arms, but blatantly murdered, as seen by the number of gashes in his skull. Around the corpse wails the ghosts and specters of the man's fallen crewmates, who all died in the storm that caused the sailor to become shipwrecked and fall at the hands of the fisherman.  In the last two stanzas, we finally get some description of the fisherman in whose hut this dead sailor is entombed. However, these lines are rather vague, and don't tell us very much. It mentions that the fisherman "has not the pow'r to stray" (line 78) and is trapped within the walls of this shed, and that he "toil'd in vain" (line 65) for a "full thirty years" (line 73), but it isn't particularly descriptive of what his punishment is or what he is trying to accomplish via his toiling.

            Present in this poem are plenty of your traditional gothic elements, including ghosts/specters, a skeleton, a mystery and doom (namely the fisherman's doomed fate). However, I think that this poem is most interesting when analyzed from a structural perspective. The poem consists of nine nine-line stanzas, all of which include rhymes. I'm not too certain about the significance of the nine here, which strikes me as intentional because not only are the stanzas all nine lines long, but there are exactly nine of them. The end of the poem feels a little too open-ended/vague to me, so I can't help but feel that the nine stanzas was very intentional or held some kind of meaning to Robinson. Her other interesting choice however was the repeated use of rhyming. Robinson used not only end stop rhymes (rhymes made using the last word of a set of lines) but in the third line of every stanza also rhymed the last word with a word in the middle of the line. This kind of rhyming pattern gave each stanza a bit of a momentum push, which is caused by the fact that one line was suddenly split into two shorter lines. This creates a bit of a rushed feeling when reading the poem, because it suddenly speeds up just a little bit. This sort of feeling, combined with the regular patterns of rhyming throughout the rest of the poem gave a very ocean-like feeling, where the rhythm of the piece felt very much like the ebb and flow of the tide, pushing and pulling the reader through the poem. At the same time, the rhyming also establishes a very monotonous feel that can be said to mirror the punishment of the fisherman, which is to waste "in Solitude and Pain/A loathsome life away." (line 80-81)

            I think that Robinson instills a chilling and creepy feeling in the reader through this poem and does so to great effect through her structuring of the poem. On the whole however, the poem does not seem to have any overbearing meaning or theme (other than the obligatory and obvious moral reading of "do not kill", the sin for which the fisherman is punished). Although my opinion/thought process might be biased since I knew going into the poem that it was a response poem, it is still entirely possible that this poem's purpose was nothing other than to entertain, which it certainly accomplished.