The Poem

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“Miniver Cheevy” is a short poem of thirty-two lines satirizing an embittered town drunkard who bemoans the difference between a romantic heroic past and a mundane modernity and yet does nothing to improve his squalid lot in life. The satire is a double-edged blade, undercutting both the illusions of the do-nothing dreamer and his complaints about the triteness of his modern environment. The weight of the ridicule, however, is leveled primarily against the speaker.

Reared in Gardiner, Maine, Edwin Arlington Robinson created a mythical “Tilbury Town” out of his New England birthplace and populated the fictional place with eccentrics, such as Miniver Cheevy, who lead wasted, blighted, or impoverished lives. Robinson’s work was an American exemplar of the realism permeating European literature, especially novels and short stories, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Appropriately, “Miniver Cheevy” reads like a revealing and realistic short story in verse, providing readers with a snapshot portrait of a main character whose story is a sad case of inaction and arrested development lost in futile reverie.

The poem opens with Miniver Cheevy so wrapped up in dreams of the past that he loses weight and weeps in self-pity. His frustration stems from idealized visions of medieval glory and classical heroism set in Camelot (King Arthur’s legendary castle), Thebes (the realm of Sophocles’ Oedipus), and Troy (King Priam’s doomed city in the Iliad). Sadly, any romance or artistry that once gave rise to epic poetry and grand tragedy seems to him to have dwindled in the present to the stature of a bum on local welfare (“now on the town”).

So it is that Miniver daydreams about legendary personages, such as the Medici rulers of Renaissance Florence, whose wickedness would incite him to perform his own evil deeds, if only he could escape into the past and be a member of that infamous family. He would gladly trade his commonplace clothing for medieval armor, although he still holds on to some modern corruptions, such as his love of money, which otherwise he scorns in his escapist imagination.

Poor Miniver, “born too late,” wastes his life in intense, useless contemplation that leads to confusion of mind. He blames his futility, not on himself, but on the unlucky timing of his existence, as alcohol fuels his irresponsible dreams.

Forms and Devices

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“Miniver Cheevy” is a satire consisting of eight quatrains, each with alternating feminine (weak) end rhymes conveying the futility of the speaker’s escapism through sound effects. Assonance and consonance permeate the poem.

The prevailing meter in the first three lines of each quatrain is iambic tetrameter with variations (“H wépt thǎt hé wǎs évr bórn”). The metrical regularity lends a singsong effect that seems to lull Miniver into his romantic dreaming, until the illusion evaporates in the ironic dissonance of the short fourth line of every quatrain, with its abrupt two iambic beats and a fluttering unaccented sound of the feminine end rhyme (“Ǎd hé hǎd réasǒns”). Thus, readers can almost hear the dreams float away into a vapid realm of comic nonsense (“ǒf írǒn clóthǐng”) or reality (“Ǎnd képt ǒ drínkǐng”).

The poem is a satire, ridiculing the folly of the speaker for the moral instruction of readers. Instances of burlesque—making what is high appear to be ridiculously low—occur in the descriptions of Priam’s heroic compatriots (line 12), romance and art (lines 15-16), the Medicis (lines 17-18), and the wished-for armor (lines 23-24). The medieval and classical allusions to places, figures, and objects create an inappropriate romantic backdrop for modern, mundane Miniver.

The poem is a fine example of ironic compression, with a maximum...

(This entire section contains 518 words.)

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reduction of the number of words to create a bluntness necessary to annihilate the dreamer’s illusions in the minds of readers. The very name “Miniver” suggests, elliptically, both his minimalness and an antiquated medieval knight’s name. Moreover, to call Miniver simply “a child of scorn” engenders a double meaning: that he is an object of scorn to others, and that he is the very personification of one who is scornful of his environment. Again, abrupt phrases, such as “And he had reasons” or “And kept on drinking,” add to the many ironies reverberating throughout the poem.

Robinson characteristically uses diction that mixes the elegant and the mundane (“He mourned Romance, now on the town,/ And Art, a vagrant”), the abstract and the concrete (“He missed a mediæval grace/ Of iron clothing”), as well as the exotic and the flat (“Miniver loved the Medici,/ Albeit he had never seen one”) to achieve the maximum satiric effect, deflating both the dreamer and the dream.

Finally, the repetition of “and thought” in lines 27 and 28, is a brilliant stroke, capturing Miniver’s stupid dedication to fantasy. Speaking volumes about Miniver’s mental dullness and irresponsibility, the repetition appealed to Robert Frost, Robinson’s greater disciple, another twentieth century poet of the New England scene. As Frost noted in his introduction to King Jasper (1935), “The first poet I ever sat down with to talk about poetry was Ezra Pound. It was in London in 1913.I remember the pleasure with which Pound and I laughed over the fourth ‘thought’ in ‘Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,/ And thought about it.’ . . .[Robinson’s] theme was about unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful.”

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