w i l l i a m k e ac h But whispered o’er my burning brow, “Oh! Do you doubt I love you now?” Sweet soul! I did not Warmly I felt her bosom thrill, I pressed it closer, closer still, Though gently bid not; Till – oh! The world hath seldom heard Of lovers, who so nearly erred, And yet, who did not The predictable masculine urgency in this poem is surrounded by a projection of shared excitement and reciprocal caution The speaker’s “did not” in the middle stanza is framed by shared but differently inflected “did nots” in the first and third What is shared at the end includes a kind of joke with and on “The world” about just saying no Moore’s lyric enacts a moment of mutual seduction that ends in a gesture of playfully resistant deferral It would be easy to dismiss or condescend to this kind of lyric writing from the early 1790s We not need Adorno’s lofty ideal of lyric integrity or Benjamin’s soberly ironized retrospective sense of where Romanticism was heading to discount such lyric wit and return to Blake’s Songs – or to Burns’s, for that matter My point in beginning with Robinson and Moore is to indicate possibilities of lyric performativity that include finely turned gestures of resistance within a poetry of public literary seduction – seduction practiced upon the British reading public by a d´eclass´ee actress and royal consort and by the son of a Dublin grocer Wordsworth and Coleridge had to locate themselves a few years later in a cultural environment attuned to a more complicated and varied lyric spectrum than we are accustomed to recognizing The aura of early British Romantic lyric could be engendered through evocations of playful urban fancy as well as by expressions of radical apocalyptic subjectivity and reflexively cultivated returns to what the speaker in Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” calls “Nature’s holy plan.” And some features of what we have briefly located in these lyrics of Robinson and Moore survive into later Romantic poetry – in Byron and Percy Shelley, and with a very different affective inflexion in the “Cockney” poetry of Leigh Hunt and Keats The case of Byron’s lyric poetry is particularly worth reconsidering in this regard Here, the dynamic of lyric resistance and seduction attains a level of socially and historically constituted intensity that we are not just invited but compelled to read as the function of a uniquely empowered authorial aura Yet the basic stylistic idiom often recalls Moore, to whom Byron sent the earliest of his four lyrics entitled “Stanzas for Music” on May 4, 1814: 226 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008