[In the following essay, Lucas offers an appreciative overview of Robinson's poetry, particularly expressing admiration for his portrayals of ordinary characters.]

When Edwin Arlington Robinson died in 1935, his loss was mourned not only by America's writers but by statesmen and citizens whom one would not readily accuse of an interest in literature. Robinson was a famous man. Now, some thirty years later, the fame has shrunk, and it is my guess that the works are very little read. Certainly it is a matter of some difficulty to find a copy of his collected works. Not that Robinson has been neglected by literary historians or wiped from the record of American poetry. Far from it; his position has never been more secure. But that is just the trouble. Talking recently with some American undergraduates about modern American poetry, I asked them why it was that Robinson was so little read nowadays. ‘Well, you see,’ one of them explained, ‘we know just about where he stands’. The implication was that once you had got your author firmly placed, any need to read his works had more or less disappeared. It was an unnerving instance of what can happen to the ideal of discrimination, and even more of what literary history frequently comes to mean to students of literature. It seems to me worth the effort, therefore, to try to unsettle some of the suavely held convictions about Robinson, not so much in the interest of quarrelling with his standing as to suggest that, whatever that may be, he is a poet whose best work deserves to be kept alive.

But where does Robinson stand? Not very high, to be sure. He comes a long way below Frost, for example, though some way above Jeffers, and it is easy enough to put him in his place. A gesture in the direction of ‘Luke Havergal,’ mention of ‘The Man Against the Sky,’ a word of judicious praise for ‘Eros Turannos,’ and that is more or less that. If more is said, it likely enough consists of making out a table of faults. And since these are obvious, there is no great problem about setting them down. Robinson wrote too much; he fashioned too many long narrative poems out of too little material; his plays are uniformly dull; at times he falls into a ponderous prosiness of style, especially in his later years; his regard for the trivial is often trivial. But I think that the faults can be cheerfully admitted because they do not harm the virtues. When we have done with listing all Robinson's vices and pointing to the pages [that] can be skipped, there still remains a sizeable body of work that anyone who cares about poetry should want to read and re-read. There is also, I have found, work that you prepare to skip and then forget to. For Robinson has the ability to write the plainest of plain tales in which his fascination with the quotidian of life becomes so remarkable that you find yourself either compelled to share it or to speculate on the manner of mind that could retain such open-eyed awe before the trivial.

This awe is an essential part of his vision. It is how he chooses to see and record his America. As is well known, Robinson's America is small-town New England, and he is the most distinguished product of a generation of writers that was rediscovering a need to voice a consciousness of being American. Now that this need has been written into the literary histories it seems obvious enough, but at the time itself it came as a revolutionary impulse. For the story of American poetry at the end of the nineteenth century is largely one of gentle, drab imitative work versus new and for the most part unrecognised efforts to cope with the American experience. The imitators looked East for their models; they hoped for nothing more than to come in a discreet second-best to Europe's literature, and predictably enough their work was highly praised. As late as 1915, for example, Fred Pattee, in A History of American Literature Since 1870, was full of kind words for Celia Thaxter, Richard Hovey, Richard Watson Gilder and Emma Lazarus, among others, while completely ignoring Robinson, and this though much of Robinson's best work had by then been published. True, Pattee thought Emily Dickinson's poems should have been buried with her—‘to compare her eccentric fragments with Blake's elfin wildness is ridiculous’. But this merely provides further proof of how representative he is of what American critics wanted from their poets.

Yet the odd and, in a way, heartening thing is, that several of the poets Pattee so admired had an inkling that their deferential attitude to the old world wouldn't really do. One of them, Emma Lazarus, spoke out on behalf of a native American poetic:

                    How long, and yet how long
Our leaders will we hail from over seas,
Masters and kings from feudal monarchies,
                    And mock their ancient song
With echoes weak of foreign melodies?

But as that stanza makes very clear, she herself had to sing in decidedly weak echoes of foreign melodies. Although she has the good sense to realise that:

The echo faints and fails;
It suiteth not, upon this western plain,
Our voice or spirit

Her own voice never emerges from the borrowed language of nineteenth-century English poetry. Before 1890 the only alternative to this appeared to lie in the verse of journalists like Ben King, Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley, whose work amounts to the home-spun wisdom of old codgers tricked out in the various dialects of the middle west. The Leaves of Grass, it seems, was not an example to be followed.

The first, hesitant steps in breaking away from this appalling inheritance of native hayseed and imported pre-Raphaelitism were taken in the verse of William Vaughn Moody and Trumbull Stickney. (I leave out of account Stephen Crane who, though certainly a remarkable talent, was too isolated and exceptional a case to be of any use to his contemporaries.) Here at last was an attempt to write serious verse that could cut free of tepid imitation. Stickney and Moody were Harvard poets, and a certain academicism shows in their verse; they are a little too eager to impose their sense of a classical philosophy on American observations; they dislike much of what they have to record but trust to a well-trained mind and a tasteful stoicism to see them through the worst. Neither is a considerable poet, though Stickney might have become one had he lived, and Moody has some commendable passages. (I take it that one of his better poems, ‘Ode in Time of Hesitation,’ is a starting point for Lowell's ‘For the Union Dead’.)

But more important than their poetic achievements was the climate for poetry that Moody and Stickney did so much to create during their Harvard years. They edited the Harvard Monthly, which under them won an enviable reputation as a magazine of high literary standards, and they set about looking for young contemporaries who could help them achieve the renaissance of American poetry. Curiously, however, they overlooked Robinson. Robinson entered Harvard in 1891, and he soon began publishing verse in the Advocate. But he never made the pages of the Monthly. Why this should be is difficult to say, for he was by far the most gifted of the Harvard poets, and by rights he ought to have been exactly the poet Moody and Stickney were looking for. But his personal situation may account for much. In his study of the American 1890s, Larzer Ziff points out that Robinson ‘was somewhat older than the average freshman, he was not a regular student, he came with academic deficiencies, and he had no social connections.’¹ These are bulky obstacles, and they may be enough to explain why Robinson was not taken up by the reigning literary clique. They may also help to explain a self-conscious literariness that hangs about some of his work. A poem such as ‘Many Are Called’ has something of the auto-didact about it, and others seem to exist more as proof that the academic deficiencies have been made good than because Robinson has anything important to say.

Yet although Robinson achieved no literary fame at Harvard—and indeed after two years he was forced to leave and return to his impoverished family in Gardiner, Maine—the atmosphere he encountered during his university years obviously encouraged him in his determination to succeed as an American poet. That determination was strong enough to carry him through years of poverty, hardship and neglect. It created in him an unswerving loyalty to his craft and a fierce pride in his vocation. One result of this was that when Theodore Roosevelt interceded to get him finally settled in a decent job, Robinson chose to regard Roosevelt's action as that of a patron which required him to honour his part by writing poems on national affairs (they are nearly all poor), and by showing himself capable of steady work at his art. He therefore made it a duty to publish volumes at regular intervals for the rest of his life. But Robinson's early experiences left their scar on him. He held himself aloof from public displays of friendship or admiration. I have been told that when, in 1934, he was to go to New York from his home in Boston to receive a literary award, he deliberately evaded the party of well-wishers that Merrill Moore had organised at Boston station to cheer him on his way. Very probably it is his own sufferings that are reflected in his life-long interest in those defeated yet unyielding figures who people so many of his poems.

In 1896 Robinson published at his own expense a volume of poems called The Torrent and the Night Before. The following year he paid a vanity publisher to bring out The Children of the Night, which duplicated work from the earlier volume and added seventeen new poems. Neither volume brought him the slightest attention, and indeed this only began with Captain Craig and Other Poems in 1902. For though Moody and Stickney might be encouraging new poetry at Harvard, the public at large was still looking for poetry which would prove its worth by looking nearly as good as English verse. And so, in the same year that Robinson published The Children of the Night, John Bannister Tabb brought out to considerable applause his third volume of poems called, simply enough, Lyrics. Here is an entirely representative poem from that collection, ‘My Secret’:

'Tis not what I am fain to hide,
                    That doth in deepest darkness dwell,
But what my tongue hath often tried,
                    Alas, in vain, to tell.

Tabb throughout his life was a well-received poet, and he continued to enjoy a reputation at least until the publication in 1926 of Robert Shafer's two-volume anthology of American Literature. Shafer called Tabb a true poet who ‘deserves to be read and remembered’ (Pattee, by the way, had said that Tabb's lyrics possessed ‘beauty and finish and often distinction’). Lyrics had a generous press. But this poem met with silence:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Well, it isn't a perfect poem, but it is certainly a remarkable one and especially if you think of it beside ‘My Secret’. It has the plain-jane manner that Robinson loves to affect and as a result of which he gains for himself just the right amount of freedom to let otherwise unremarkable phrases stand out. Taken in context, the phrase ‘imperially slim,’ for example, has an almost sensuous, supple, and therefore slightly mocking grace about it. ‘Richard Cory’ is wry, grim, laconic: it is a typical Robinsonian perception of the bleak comedy of the human condition, and this perception features in much of his best—and worst—work. In addition, the poem has that first-rate anecdotal quality which Robinson shares with Hardy.

Hardy, in fact, was a congenial poet, and Robinson shares some of the Englishman's least impressive and most imitable tactics and attitudes; he too has his poems about life's little ironies, and remarkably predictable they are. More importantly, however, he also shares with Hardy the ability to tell a story in verse in such a way as to let the smallest and most insignificant detail take on meaning and value. (Even the ‘calm’ summer night in ‘Richard Cory’ isn't quite the irrelevant detail it may at first seem, though the point it is making is admittedly an obvious one.) But another English poet was still more congenial. In his first volume, Robinson published a sonnet on George Crabbe, and it shows just how exactly he had taken Crabbe's measure. Crabbe has been forgotten by later poets, Robinson says, and yet his real value is desperately needed and cannot be dismissed (a claim Pound was to make some twenty years later). Crabbe's

                                                  hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows

and we should never forget or deny Crabbe's enviable possession of ‘plain excellence and stubborn skill’. The praise not only memorably catches Crabbe's especial distinction, it points to Robinson's very similar strengths. For Crabbe's ‘plain excellence’ is of course that of the unadorned style. Moreover, the phrase has a sly wit to it, it hints at the unarguable fact of that excellence, and this laconic turn of expression is also common to both men.

In the last analysis, Crabbe's human pulse is the harder. Robinson, like Moody and Stickney, was more apt to be under the sway of the eternal sadness of things. (Though unlike them he wasn't trying to demonstrate this as a cultivated stance, so that his sadness—whether wry, grim or resigned—is more authentic than theirs.) But for all their differences, Robinson shares with Crabbe the ability to write memorably and truthfully about certain very ordinary people. Robinson's people belong to Tilbury, that small New England town clearly modelled on Gardiner; he brings his open-eyed awe to bear on them so intently that he becomes their special poet. He is the first and still the best poet-historian of this essential part of America, just as Sarah Orne Jewett is its first prose historian. (Her collection of stories, The Country of the Pointed Firs, about the Maine fishing village, Dunnet Landing, appeared in 1898.) Because he is the first to write about them, the people he puts into his work are for the first time given an identity in literature. Adam naming the animals, perhaps. Yet the formulation won't really do, because Robinson's eye isn't as innocent as all that; for though his reverence for the quotidian of life suggests something of the sheer wonder of being human at this time and in this place, he tends to focus on moments of sadness, of deprivation and loss. This can be seen here, in ‘Reuben Bright,’ an entirely typical and honourable performance:

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The Singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

And … and … and. A story, Forster said, tells you what happened next; it amounts to saying ‘and then’. A plot tells you why something happened next. ‘Reuben Bright’ is a story which has the hint of a plot running through it. The poet doesn't try to interpret the events, he merely sets down how one thing followed on from another, and his tone is seemingly neutral and detached. But inside the tiny anecdote we are allowed to guess at the connection of events and to feel how Reuben Bright's behaviour has been affected almost to madness by his wife's death. He may well appear a ‘brute’ (even his name feels as though it should contract to the word), yet Robinson tells us a great deal about the butcher's crude tenderness of regard in the detail of the ‘chopped-up cedar boughs’. To get away with that a poet must be able to speak without a hint of condescension, and he must also care so passionately for our having the exact facts of the case that he will be prepared to risk the near-bathetic enjambement on ‘an old chest / Of hers’. Who cares whose chest it is? Robinson, of course, just as he cares that his audience shouldn't snigger at Reuben Bright. Why else that inscrutable tone of the opening lines, which is hardly chosen to put an audience at its ease? What it does is to guard against any possibility that Reuben Bright, the small-town epitome of the Protestant ethic, could be dismissed as humanly uninteresting or trivially corrupt. The tone feels at first merely prim, but the more you study it, the slyer it becomes and the more difficult to pin down. It guarantees precisely the grudged interest in its subject that a more defenceless tone might lose. Not that I am wanting to put Robinson forward as defendant of the Protestant ethic; he is more properly described as its sardonic satirist (as in ‘Cassandra’), and after all, it was he who wrote that wicked sonnet on ‘New England’:

Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We're told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the easy chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.

But Robinson is also determined that there shall be no snobbish dismissal of the people he wants to record in his poetry. ‘Miniver Cheevy’ is a fair example of his ability to identify and discomfort the enemy.

It is when you are alerted to Robinson's generous fair-mindedness, the intelligent humility that characterises his attitude to the people he writes about, that you become conscious of just where he is a better poet than Frost. Even Randall Jarrell, Frost's most eloquent admirer, was forced to acknowledge the lack of generosity, the hard vanity and complacency that mar so much of Frost's writing. Robinson has none of these faults. Indeed if it were not for his wit, he would be a peculiarly self-effacing poet. The reason is not hard to find. It lies in the fact that he is so absorbed in the lives he records that his art goes into rendering his characters with all the love, skill and justice he can muster. What Rilke said about works of art applies exactly to Robinson's way with the inhabitants of Tilbury Town. ‘Works of art,’ Rilke wrote to his young friend Kappus, ‘are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just towards them.’ Substitute ‘people’ for ‘works of art’ and you have Robinson's attitude to perfection. Poem after poem testifies to his loving concern to be just to his characters, and through all of them runs the hesitant conviction that people are of an infinite loneliness, since they can never communicate the ultimate truth that the poet is called upon to utter—that life is marked by the defeat of hopes through the agencies of death, of time, or of what he vaguely calls ‘Destiny’. When Robinson is riding the idea of destiny too hard, his poems tend to sink towards a lugubrious sadness; but others, like ‘Calvery's’ and ‘Clavering,’ have the note of resigned, impersonal wisdom that we find in Hardy's ‘An Ancient to Ancients’ and ‘During Wind and Rain’. And such a poem as ‘For a Dead Lady’ survives its worst prosiness to become an unforgettable statement about the ravages of time in the great, apparently plain but in fact singing, humming manner of Turberville or Gascoigne. Here is the last stanza:

The beauty, shattered by the laws
That have creation in their keeping,
No longer trembles at applause,
Or over children that are sleeping;
And we who delve in beauty's lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

Many of Robinson's poems succeed in this way. Turn to any of his volumes and you will find that it is so. Above all, there is ‘Mr Flood's Party’. But what can a critic hope to say about this poem? That it is one of the most beautifully considerate, tender poems about loneliness ever written; that it combines wit and pathos in a way that makes it intensely sympathetic and yet scrupulously intelligent towards its subject? As for its tone—Conrad Aiken once remarked that Robinson's characteristic tone hovered somewhere between the ironic and the elegiac, and this is perhaps as near as we can come to catching the tone of ‘Mr Flood's Party’. The poem is about a lonely, ageing drunkard, a disreputable outcast from his community, more comic than pitiful, a man who has kept his dissolute wits about him. But though Robinson doesn't waste any pity on Mr Flood, sympathy is powerfully present by virtue of the attentiveness, the plain excellence that sets down his story:

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.

It is the withheld word that does the trick: not wearily, but ‘warily’. This old man has too much native wit to be the object of sentimental pity. For Robinson to draw our attention to this fact is proof enough of the comic regard in which he holds Mr Flood, but it surely emerges in the very way the story opens. How can you resist a poem that starts as this one does? It is so compelling, so much in the manner of the born story-teller. As the poem continues, the tale becomes more comic, more outrageously strange, more humanly fascinating. Robinson is so completely in command that he can switch the changes in the third stanza from the near-mocking grandiloquence of the opening lines to the closing lines, which shame our smiles:

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honoured him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim.

Yet the closing lines clearly need the bracing effect of the mock-heroic that plays about the first half-stanza if they are not to stray into mere pathos. And consider how much Robinson risks, and brings off, in the fourth stanza:

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

The control of language in that stanza is as perfect as anyone could wish for. The simile of the tipsy old man setting his jug down, like a mother, with ‘trembling care,’ is so audacious and yet so obviously written out of regard for him and not for cleverness' sake, that it doesn't seem the least bit ingenious or self-regarding. Moreover, the laconic phrase, ‘knowing that most things break,’ strikes me as exactly the sort of triumph that Robinson's style can bring him: it quite miraculously holds the balance between the poet's resistance to bathos and his need to honour that slightly indulgent but sure knowledge that Mr Flood carries with him. So it is with the rest of the poem. But here I have simply to quote:

‘Well, Mr Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!’
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
‘Well, Mr Flood, if you insist, I might’.
‘Only a very little, Mr Flood—
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.’
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—
‘For auld lang syne’. The weary throat gave out,
The last words wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

There is really nothing to say about that, except how wonderful it is. You can note the great line ‘There was not much that was ahead of him,’ the wit that is unwaveringly attentive towards Eben's caution (‘Secure, with only two moons listening’), the comic ‘Convivially returning with himself’; and so on. But ticking off the points that make ‘Mr Flood's Party’ a masterpiece comes to feel a very trivial exercise. What perhaps is worth saying is that it is precisely because Robinson finds such scenes worth recording that he is so invaluable a poet. For the subject of ‘Mr Flood's Party’ hardly seems to warrant a poem at all and certainly not the major poem that Robinson fashions. Yet it is just because of his shrewd, sad, but comically receptive open-eyed awe that Robinson can find the right way of recording his ordinary citizens. This is his distinctive role as poet: he is spokesman for the inarticulate, for those who, whatever the reason, have been forced into incommunicable loneliness. So he becomes the historian of people as Masters, with his slick cynicism, and Sandburg, all squashily sentimental, could not hope to be. ‘Mr Flood's Party’ belongs not with them but with the Frost of ‘Home Burial’ and ‘Death of the Hired Man,’ which is not to deny that Frost is the greater poet. It is, however, to say that Robinson deserves to be set beside the great poets of the language.

Figures like Mr Flood recur throughout Robinson's poetry, even when he is not writing about Tilbury Town. Not all of them are comic, but they have in common the fact that invariably they are old men who have known repeated disappointments and defeats and yet have sufficient resilience to journey on to the defeat of whatever hopes are left to them. They include the Dutchman, the Wandering Jew and Rembrandt. All of them possess the Jew's ‘old, unyielding eyes,’ and they are therefore far too tough to surrender to their gnawing self-doubts. It is, of course, utterly characteristic of Robinson that he should have written a monologue for the Rembrandt of the late self-portraits. Clearly he recognised those great remorseless studies for what they are: indomitable self-scrutinies that triumph by their willingness to face and acknowledge the worst. Robinson's Rembrandt is perhaps rather less fiercely courageous than his real-life counterpart; and for that reason the poem does not provide the great kick at misery that Rembrandt's self-portraits do. But it does testify to Robinson's ceaseless curiosity about human nature, his wanting to track down the way a man thinks and suffers and lives in his mind.

There are occasions when this brings him face to face with a blank wall. The monologue given to Ben Jonson, in which Jonson is made to tell of his acquaintance with Shakespeare, ends in disappointment because there is nothing Robinson can have Jonson say that we don't already know; and Robinson is clearly not the poet to invent when he is dealing with the actual. With Rembrandt he has the paintings to help him; but with Shakespeare there is really nothing, once he has decided not to see Prospero as an autobiographical figure, or Measure for Measure as written in time of personal distress. Accordingly, Robinson's best monologue and narrative poems are the ones which are entirely works of invention. Though many are too slight and respectful to the mundane, a few stand out as among the supreme achievements of their kind. Of all the narrative poems, ‘Isaac and Archibald’ is the surest triumph.

It has its faults, of course, and they are very representative ones. There are, for example, moments when diction and cadence imitate Tennyson imitating Wordsworth:

                                                                                and the world
Was wide, and there was gladness everywhere.

Some lines are blatantly stuffed out to fill up the pentameter:

At the end of an hour's walking after that
The cottage of old Archibald appeared.
Little and white and high on a smooth round hill
It stood.

Once or twice the poem falls into unfocused Miltonics, as when the narrator tells of going down to Archibald's cellar:

                                                                                                    down we went
Out of the fiery sunshine to the gloom,
Grateful and half sepulchral

Yet the flaws stand for amazingly little compared with what the poem achieves. In outline, at least, it is simplicity itself. A man recalls a summer day of his childhood when he had gone with an old man, Isaac, to see the man's equally aged friend, Archibald. As they walk along, Isaac tells the boy he is worried Archibald will not have cut his field of oats, and this is the pretext for him to add that he is certain Archibald will shortly die. ‘The twilight warning of experience’ has made him aware, he says, that ‘Archibald is going’. But when they arrive at Archibald's cottage they find the field of oats newly cut and a spruce Archibald extending them a ready welcome. Isaac goes for a walk and instructs Archibald to stay ‘and rest your back and tell the boy / A story’. Archibald does so, and he also tells the boy that he fears Isaac will shortly die. ‘I have seen it come / These eight years', he says. Isaac returns, and the two old men play cards while the boy day-dreams and keeps score for them. And that is all.

But no account of this tale can hope to do justice to its beauty and integrity of manner. It tells of loneliness and the defeat of hopes; but it is also full of humorous warmth. And it is considerably less simple than appears. For it isn't only that Isaac and Archibald upset each other's point of view and in so doing comically illustrate the difficulties of truthful communication (are they lying or mistaken?); behind their words is the fear of death that neither can quite bring himself to voice. Yet the old men are not defenceless objects of pity. Like Mr Flood, they still have their wits about them. As the boy observes, when he is striding along in the fatiguing heat with Isaac:

                                                                                First I was half inclined
To caution him that he was growing old
But something that was not compassion soon
Made plain the folly of all subterfuge.

The old men are also partly comic creations. This is not just a matter of their anxious solicitude for what each insists is the other's failing health. It is more, because the poem is everywhere soaked in the affectionate comedy of observation. As here, early on:

                                                                                                    The sun
Was hot, and I was ready to sweat blood;
But Isaac, for aught I could make of him,
Was cool to his hat-band. So I said then
Something about the scorching days we have
In August without knowing it sometimes;
But Isaac said the day was like a dream,
And praised the Lord, and talked about the breeze.

Isaac praises the Lord a good deal, and especially when he is drinking Archibald's cider:

‘I never twist a spigot nowadays,’
He said, and raised the glass up to the light,
‘But I thank God for orchards’.

Archibald is also fond of his own cider, which he declares to be newly tapped and ‘an honor to the fruit’. Under a barrel

Glimmered a late-spilled proof that Archibald
Had spoken from unfeigned experience.

But neither Isaac nor Archibald is a figure of fun. The comedy of this poem is in no sense reductive. On the contrary, its observations and memories let us in on the affectionate regard with which the narrator holds the old men. Take this, for example:

There was a fluted antique water-glass
Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest,
There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort,
That feeds on darkness. Isaac turned him out,
And touched him with his thumb to make him jump,
And then composedly pulled out the plug
With such a practised hand that scarce a drop
Did even touch his fingers.

That tells us a great deal about Isaac, just as we are told much of value about Archibald when his

                                                                                                    dry voice
Cried thinly, with unpatronizing triumph
‘I've got you, Isaac, high, low, jack, and the game!’

The poem is full of these loving observations, and if that were all there was to it ‘Isaac and Archibald’ would still be a considerable achievement. But there is so much else. In the first place, we are bound to notice the elegiac air that hangs over it, and which supplies us with the clear hint that the narrator is drawn to his memories because he has found his life very different from the innocent and hopeful day-dreams in which he indulged while Isaac and Archibald were playing cards:

                                                                                Now and then my fancy caught
A flying glimpse of a good life beyond—
Something of ships and sunlight, streets and singing,
Troy falling and the ages coming back,
And ages coming forward: Archibald
And Isaac were good fellows in old clothes,
And Agamemnon was a friend of mine:
Ulysses coming home again to shoot
With bows and feathered arrows made another,
And all was as it should be. I was young.

Going with this hint of defeated hopes is the suggestion that he has come to a saddening recognition of the limits of friendship. In his childhood dreams he was the friend of Agamemnon and Ulysses, but now, years later, he is led to recall the two old friends who had been unable to communicate their fears of death to each other. He also, of course, realises that life isn't art or literature.

But what more than anything stands out from the memories of that far-off day is the fact of loneliness. Isaac tells the boy that he cannot expect to understand ‘the singular idea of loneliness’. It is a paradoxical effort at communication, and both Isaac and Archibald talk to the boy in the hope of making him understand their own predicaments. Thus Archibald tells him to remember what he has said about ‘the light behind the stars’. Yet he knows the boy cannot understand his words and what they imply:

                                                                                                    ‘But there, there,
I'm going it again, as Isaac says,
And I'll stop now before you go to sleep—
Only be sure that you growl cautiously,
And always where the shadow may not reach you.’
Never shall I forget, long as I live,
The quaint thin crack in Archibald's voice,
The lonely twinkle in his little eyes,
Or the way it made me feel to be with him.

Beyond all else, the old men want to be remembered. Archibald says to the boy, ‘Remember that: remember that I said it.’ But the actual words are not really what he's talking about; for, facing the ultimate loneliness of death, the old man wants somehow to be assured that his identity will survive in another person's acceptance of him. And the same holds true for Isaac. He says:

                                                                                                    ‘Look at me, my boy,
And when the time shall come for you to see
That I must follow after him, try then
To think of me, to bring me back again,
Just as I was today. Think of the place
Where we are sitting now, and think of me—
Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,
When you set out with him in August once
To see old Archibald.’—The words come back
Almost as Isaac must have uttered them.

‘Almost as Isaac must have uttered them.’ The narrator of this poem is too truthful not to accept that much that Isaac and Archibald hoped would be saved in fact had to die with them.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that the poem settles merely for the sadness of incommunicable isolation. While acknowledging that this must be so, it also pays tribute to the power of human regard that in some measure, at least, triumphs over the loneliness in which each person must be trapped. For the narrator honours and celebrates Isaac and Archibald simply by the vitality of memories that clamber from years of neglect in order to testify to the enduring warmth of affection he has for the old men, and the memories savour the cadences of remembered speech so that the old men return almost like Hardy's ghosts. Besides, the poem doesn't end on a dying fall but with a last hint of a companionship that almost throughout had seemed beyond reach:

I knew them and I may have laughed at them;
But there's a laughing that has honor in it,
And I have no regrets for light words now.
Rather I think sometimes they may have made
Their sport of me;—but they would not do that,
They were too old for that. They were old men,
And I may laugh at them because I knew them.

These last lines are beautifully just; they bring the poem to a close by accepting the inscrutability of human behaviour at the same time as matching it with the kind of knowledge derived from a source that implies communication. They suggest a good deal about Robinson's characteristic method. For if, like his admired Crabbe, Robinson is the poet of plain realities, he is also like Crabbe the poet of surprises, and these are likely to show themselves in the precise ways he responds to the mysteriousness of people, no matter how ordinary they may seem. This is the hallmark of an unfailing curiosity, and it makes Robinson one of the necessary poets.

Note

1. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press 1980).