With his mind clearly at pains to confront and express them, Robert Francis delights in and is disturbed by the incongruities of life. In Dog-Day Night the speaker, realising that the objects of love are self-interested and free, is pained by the vanity of selfless love. Man must look for and never find his identity (The Spy), strain but fail to achieve his aims, and experience the elation and despair of recognizing this truth (The Rock Climbers). Moreover man is a construct of belief and scepticism, freedom and restriction, communion and loneliness, for which polarities he is both praised and damned, distinguished and forgotten (Epitaph). The mind separates by means of symbols the amoral union of vitality and death, and man, once he finds that this truth of being eludes his abstractions, rages at life (As Near to Eden). Conversely, a joyful acceptance of such antinomies and of the illogical variety of life is the intention of Sing a Song of Juniper and Statement.

One of Mr. Francis's favorite figures is iteration: in Hide-and-Seek "hide" acquires a dual coloration in terms of life and death, and in While I Slept, sleep means both the inattention of the beloved and the death of the lover. This figure is excessive in Old Man's Confession of Faith, where the "wind" of chance blows on long after its implications are exhausted, and in The Orb Weaver, where the quasi-synonyms for "art" and "patience" are decorative, not germane to the poem's development.

But many, particularly his earlier, poems, because of the truths, clear judgments, precise structure, and formal rhythms they display, are significant contributions to contemporary lyric verse. (pp. 275-76)