Edwin Arlington Robinson

Start Free Trial

Edwin Arlington Robinson American Literature Analysis

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

Although during his lifetime Robinson’s long narrative poems, particularly Tristram, stirred admiration, his short poems set in Tilbury Town became much more popular in subsequent decades. Since these short poems follow established verse patterns (such as the sonnet form), their familiar structures at first seem old-fashioned. These poems, however, are hardly time-locked. Instead, they are thoroughly modern in attitude because their stories stress how difficult it is to detect cause or motive in a basically mysterious world. The poems also emphasize how people cannot escape a sense of personal isolation. In Robinson’s Tilbury Town, people feel lonely because of the limitations of their individual ways of making sense of human experience. As a result, Robinson’s readers are left with shifting truths and unclear explanations about the meaning of life.

Beneath the deceptive, smooth surfaces of the technically precise poetic forms, Robinson’s poems are disturbing, cheerless stories of people living far from their youthful hopes and dreams. The old-fashioned structures of these works, then, are misleading. These familiar verse forms contribute to the poet’s theme that the reassuring appearances which humans tend to trust in life are deceptive. Some deeper meaning lies beneath such ordinary appearances, but unfortunately, this deeper meaning behind people’s unavoidable disillusionment always remains beyond their understanding.

Sometimes Robinson pinpoints specific factors that contribute to human unhappiness. The detrimental impact of industrialism on individual lives, for example, is featured in “The Mill.” “The Clerks” highlights the loss of cultural values in a commerce-driven world, the same world where the narrator of “Karma” has lost his human values. In “Richard Cory,” economic circumstances and class boundaries take a dreadful toll. Gender disparities and social expectations concerning men and women figure in “The Tree in Pamela’s Garden” and “Eros Turannos.” “Miniver Cheevy” and “Flammonde” dramatize the gap between dreamy hopes and uncontrollable circumstances, while “Ben Trovato” raises questions about truth when people try to see the best in others. Time’s erosion of the human spirit is dramatized in “Mr. Flood’s Party,” while the limits of what anyone, even a doctor, can do for another person are assessed in “How Annandale Went Out.”

However, for Robinson, such specific issues always point to some much larger and unknowable explanation for the general sadness haunting humanity. That larger something is hinted at in “The Haunted House,” in which a married couple suddenly sense the scary possibility that they might not really know each other. Robinson’s work suggests that loneliness, a sense of separation from one another, and also from ultimate meanings, is an inescapable human condition. The best humans or art such as Robinson’s can do is sympathetically acknowledge the tragedy of unfilled longing, even though this compassion makes little or no difference in the tragic outcome of human hopes.

“Richard Cory”

First published: 1897 (collected in Collected Poems, 1937)

Type of work: Poem

The impoverished citizens of Tilbury Town admire wealthy Richard Cory and are baffled by his suicide.

“Richard Cory,” which first appeared in The Children of the Night and remains one of Robinson’s most popular poems, recalls the economic depression of 1893. At that time, people could not afford meat and had a diet mainly of bread, often day-old bread selling for less than freshly baked goods. This hard-times experience made the townspeople even more aware of Richard’s difference from them, so much so that they treated him as royalty.

Although the people were surprised that Richard came to town dressed “quietly” and that he was “always human when he talked” (that is, he did not act superior), they nonetheless distanced themselves from him. This distance is suggested...

(This entire section contains 2309 words.)

Unlock this Study Guide Now

Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

by the narrator’s words “crown,” “imperially,” “grace,” “fluttered pulses,” and “glittered.” The townspeople never stopped to consider why Richard dressed and spoke the way he did, why he came to town when everyone else was there, or even why he tried to make contact with them by saying “good morning.”

Richard was wealthy, but (as his name hints) he was not rich at the life-core of himself. Despite his efforts at communal connection, Richard’s wealth isolated him from others. He was alone. If the townspeople wished they were in his place because of his wealth, he in turn wished he were one of them because they were rich in one another’s company. The townspeople failed to appreciate the value of their mutual support of one another, their nurturing communal togetherness. So one hot, breezeless summer night (before the availability of electric fans or air conditioners), Richard lay awake, unable to sleep or to stop painful thoughts. Depressingly lonely, he ended his friendless life. The poem’s reader is supposed to understand what the townspeople did not understand about Richard’s suicide: that there was a price, in a human rather than in a monetary sense, that he paid for being perceived to be “richer than a king.”

“Miniver Cheevy”

First published: 1907 (collected in Collected Poems, 1937)

Type of work: Poem

Miniver Cheevy, an alcoholic who has accomplished nothing in his life, believes that he would have been successful if he had been born centuries earlier.

“Miniver Cheevy,” which first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine and later in The Town Down the River, presents a character whose name suits him. His name sounds as if it belongs to the medieval past that he wishes still existed. His name also satirically hints at his minimal achievements in life. Miniver maintains that he was born too late, that he should have lived many centuries ago. He childishly romanticizes the Greeks’ siege of Troy, Alexander the Great’s attack on Thebes, and King Arthur’s combat near Camelot, as if such battles were fun. Such mistaken fantasies of past warfare inform his rejection of the khaki military uniform of his own time as too deficient in grandeur. When Miniver speaks of the gracefulness of medieval armor, the outlandishness of his claim is evident because medieval body armor was not graceful.

Besides modern warfare, Miniver finds fault with contemporary politics, which he says fails in comparison to the Renaissance rule of the passionate Medicis in Florence, Italy. Believing he should have been born rich, Miniver will not work and looks down on people who succeed financially. The more readers hear about Miniver, the angrier he seems to become until he curses the change of seasons. This moment, like his notion of graceful body armor, undercuts Miniver’s credibility. It is senseless to rail at something so natural and inevitable as the change of the seasons or the passage of time.

When in the last stanza Miniver coughs and “call[s] it fate,” for him the word “it” refers to his ill-timed life. However, the immediate referent of that word is “cough,” and by joining of two meanings around “it,” the narrator suggests that Miniver’s life is finally no more significant than a mere cough. Notable, too, are the rhymed stanza lines ending in two syllables. The second “weak” syllable of each of these rhymes is not stressed, a limp-ending effect that conveys a sense of Miniver’s lack of personal courage.

The satiric tone of this poem makes clear that the narrator disapproves of Miniver’s outlandish excuses, his self-serving thoughts, and his drinking to drown his discontents. However, Miniver’s interior self is unavailable to readers, leaving an unanswered question: Is he only a dreamer whose experience of disappointments has led him to drink, or is he merely a drunk who speaks of disappointments only to justify himself? Since readers are unable to answer these questions for sure, their moral judgment of Miniver is hampered by what they do not know about him.

“Flammonde”

First published: 1915 (collected in Collected Poems, 1937)

Type of work: Poem

A man who hints that he is descended from royalty charms various Tilbury Town residents into paying for his upkeep.

“Flammonde,” which first appeared in the magazine The Outlook and later in The Man Against the Sky (1916), depicts a con-artist loner with a secret background who one day suddenly appeared in Tilbury Town and then just as suddenly disappeared. Aged fifty and bearing a French name, Flammonde encouraged people to compare him to royalty. He represented himself as “the Prince of Castaways” as if some European event well before World War I had “banished him from better days.” Although most likely his background was actually disreputable (tarnished), he nonetheless succeeded in conning people. A surprising number of sympathetic townsfolk aided him financially. “What he needed for his fee/ To live, he borrowed graciously.” These so-called loans would never be repaid.

A fraud, one normally thinks, would have a negative impact on people. Oddly, Flammonde had a positive influence. He revised the community’s image of a woman with a “scarlet” reputation. He also productively tutored a boy whom others thought was uneducable. He ended a long-standing feud between two townsfolk, among other notable good effects in Tilbury Town. In short, Flammonde was able to help people prosper, although paradoxically he was never able to help himself succeed in life. After he vanished from town, he left people wondering about who he really was and what inner secrets were hidden behind the protective “shield” of his charming personality. Flammonde (whose name translates into “flame of humanity”) represents the unpredictable successes and failures, as well as the unexplainable gap between surface impressions and inner self, that generally dominate human experience.

“Mr. Flood’s Party”

First published: 1920 (collected in Collected Poems, 1937)

Type of work: Poem

During an autumn night, Eben Flood, old and friendless, slowly walks toward his empty home while drinking and talking to himself about the sorry outcome of time’s passage.

“Mr. Flood’s Party,” which first appeared in The Nation and later in Avon’s Harvest (1921), is a sad portrait of a friendless man who has witnessed “many a change” and has now outlived his time. Eben feels that he has lived too long. The harvest moon he sees underscores his situation. Harvested crops have a use at the end of their cycle, whereas Eben has outlived the late-autumn stage of his life and is of no use to anyone, not even to himself. The townspeople do not welcome him, probably because they think he is a mere drunk. He is so lonely that, tipsy with drink on the way to his empty hilltop house, he talks to himself as if he were two people celebrating together.

There is, however, more to Eben Flood than meets the townspeople’s eye. Despite his name’s close sound to “ebb and flow,” they do not think about what ups and downs he may have experienced in his life. Unlike the townsfolk, readers overhear Eben and learn that he believes everyone leads “uncertain lives” in a hard world where precious “things break” all too easily. When he says this, he is remembering the loss of his family and his many long-gone friends.

In his younger years, Eben apparently possessed an appreciation of the arts, especially poetry. He still quotes from folk poet Robert Burns (“For auld lang syne”) and Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (“the bird is on the wing”). Now his birdlike inner spirit lifts up with drink instead of verse. However, it is a sorry substitute, “like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.” In the epic poem The Song of Roland, young Roland blew his ivory horn to summon help from his king; in contrast, old Eben’s raised jug in the night far from town is a hopeless gesture silently summoning only cheerless memories.

“Demos and Dionysus”

First published: 1925 (collected in Collected Poems, 1937)

Type of work: Poem

In a conversation, Dionysus defends the independence of the human spirit while Demos insists on a rational end to the disorder that comes from such freedom.

“Demos and Dionysus,” which first appeared in Theatre Arts Monthly and later in Dionysus in Doubt (1925), is a heated dialogue between two characters: Dionysus, whose name recalls the ancient Greek wine god associated with the resurrection of new life each spring, and Demos, whose name derives from the word for ancient Greek administrative districts that governed local citizens. Together they represent competing impulses within humanity. Dionysus defends human freedom, an independence of inner spirit that fosters love and art. Demos dismisses love and art as merely frivolous “playing” with “feeling and with unprofitable fancy.” Disgusted by “the insurgent individual/ With his free fancy and his free this and that,” Demos wants people to be controlled by a more economically productive rationality.

Dionysus speaks for Robinson, who viewed forced social conformity, including the eighteenth constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol in 1919, as a threat to human happiness and creativity as well as to American democracy. Dionysus calls Demos’s version of utopia a prison of “amiable automatons” (robots) and “compliant slaves.” He also contends that Demos hides a secret desire behind his efforts to convert the world into a beehive of worker drones. He accuses Demos of deceitfully wearing a “suave and benevolent mask” to conceal his real motives, which he “dare not show” to his followers. His secret is the wish to be the king over subdued humanity, though Dionysus substitutes the word “tyrant” for “king.”

Demos’s impulse to order the self only toward productive ends derives from within humans just as does Dionysus’s love of unruly, creative freedom. The Demos side of humanity has a legitimate claim, and so does the Dionysus side. Humans experience a tug-of-war between both inclinations. However, Robinson maintains that trouble develops when one side gets out of balance. Robinson remains hopeful despite the problems he sees in the 1920’s. Demos may win for now, Robinson suggests, but not forever because the joyous and free Dionysian spirit in humanity always returns like the season of spring.

Next

Edwin Arlington Robinson Poetry: American Poets Analysis

Loading...