by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Robinson borrowed from both traditions. His weaker poems reveal an Emersonian yearning toward godhead and transcendence, which is an experience somewhat different from believing in God. His stronger poems share with the Puritans a cast of mind that is intensely serious, convinced of the irreducibility of moral problems, and devoted to nuance of motive with the scrupulosity his grandfathers had applied to nuance of theology. Even in an early, unimpressive sonnet like “Credo,” which begins in a dispirited tone characteristic of much late-nineteenth-century writing,
I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere
Robinson still felt obliged to end with an Emersonian piety:
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light.
Whenever that “Light” begins to flicker, so tenuous a symbol for the idea of transcendence, it is a sure sign of trouble in Robinson’s poems. A straining toward an optimism in which he has no real conviction, it would soon be overshadowed, however, by Robinson’s darkening fear, as he later wrote in a long poem called King Jasper, that
No God,
No Law, no Purpose, could have hatched for sport
Out of warm water and slime, a war for life
That was unnecessary, and far better
Never had been–if man, as we behold him,
Is all it means.
Such lines suggest that Robinson’s gift was not for strict philosophizing in verse: he was eminently capable of thinking as a poet, but mainly through his arrangement of dramatic particulars and the casual reflections he wove in among them. What makes Robinson’s concern with God and the cosmos important is not its doctrinal content, quite as vague in statement and dispirited in tone as that of other sensitive people of his time, but the way in which he would employ it as the groundwork for his miniature dramas. Fairly conventional doctrine thereby becomes the living tissue of suffering and doubt.
It is an advantage for a writer to have come into relation with a great tradition of thought, even if only in its stages of decay, and it can be a still greater advantage to struggle with the problem of salvaging elements of wisdom from that decayed tradition. For while a culture in decomposition may limit the scope of its writers and keep them from the highest achievement, it offers special opportunities for moral drama to those who can maintain their bearing. The traps of such a moment are obvious; nostalgia, on the one extreme, and sensationalism, on the other. Most of the time Robinson was strong enough to resist these temptations, a portion of the old New England steel persisting in his soul; or perhaps he could resist them simply because he was so entirely absorbed in his own sense of the human situation and therefore didn’t even trouble about the cultural innovations and discoveries of his time. He made doubt into a discipline, and failure into an opening toward compassion. The old principles of his culture may have crumbled, but he found his subject in the problems experienced by those to whom the allure of those principles had never quite dulled.
III
Many of Robinson’s shorter poems—lyrics, ballads, sonnets, dramatic narratives—are set in Tilbury Town, his Down East locale where idlers dream away their lives in harmless fantasy, mild rebels suffer the resistance of a community gone stiff, and the tragedy of personal isolation seems to acquire a universal character, as if speaking for Robinson’s vision of America, perhaps all of life. Other nineteenth-century writers had of course employed a recurrent setting in their work, and later Faulkner would do the same with Yoknapatawpha County. Yet Robinson’s use of Tilbury Town is rather different from what these writers do: he makes no attempt to fill out its social world, he cares little about details of place and moment, he seems hardly to strive for historical depth. Tilbury Town is more an atmosphere than a setting, it is barely drawn or provisioned, and it serves to suggest less a vigorous community than a felt lack of historical continuity. The foreground figures in these poems are drawn with two or three harsh, synoptic strokes, but Tilbury Town itself is shadowy, fading into the past and no longer able to bind its people. Robinson eyes it obliquely, half in and half out of its boundaries, a secret sharer taking snapshots of decline. To illuminate a world through a glimpsed moment of crisis isn’t, for him, a mere strategy of composition; it signifies his deepest moral stance, a nervous signature of reticence and respect. He seems always to be signaling a persuasion that nothing can be known with certainty and the very thought of direct assertion is a falsehood in the making.
Some of these Tilbury pieces, as Robinson once remarked, have been “pickled in anthological brine.” Almost “everybody” knows “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Corey,” sardonic vignettes of small-town character, Yankee drop-outs whose pitiable condition is contrasted—in quirky lines and comic rhymes—with their weak fantasies. These are far from Robinson’s best poems, but neither are they contemptible. In the sketch of poor Miniver, who “loved the days of old,” there are flashes of cleverness:
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Such pieces lead to better ones of their kind, such as the tautly written sonnets about Reuben Bright, the butcher who tears down his slaughterhouse when told his wife must die, and Aaron Stark, a miser with “eyes like little dollars in the dark.” My experience in teaching these poems is that students trained to flounder in The Waste Land will at first condescend, but when asked to read the poems again, will be unsettled by the depths of moral understanding Robinson has hidden away within them.
The finest of Robinson’s sonnets of character is “The Clerks.” Describing a return to Tilbury Town, the poet meets old friends, figures of “a shopworn brotherhood,” who now work as clerks in stores. The opening octet quietly evokes this scene, and then in the closing sestet Robinson widens the range of his observation with a powerful statement about the weariness of slow defeat:
And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.
Without pretending to close analysis, I would like to glance at a few of the perceptual and verbal refinements in these six lines. The opening “ache . . . to be sublime” has its workaday irony that prepares for the remarkable line which follows: to “feed” with “your descent” is a characteristic Robinsonian turn, which in addition to the idea of consuming oneself through age suggests more obliquely that indulgence in vanity which claims distinction for one’s decline. Poets and kings who are “clerks of Time” are helplessly aligned with the Tilbury clerks, yet Robinson sees that even in the democracy of our common decay we cling to our trifle of status. For in the “dull webs of discontent” which form the fragile substance of our lives, we still insist on “tiering” ourselves. Coming in the penultimate line, the word “tiering” has enormous ironic thrust: how long can a tier survive as a web? And then in the concluding line Robinson ventures one of his few deviations from standard English, in the use of “alnage,” a rare term meaning a measure of cloth, that is both appropriate to the atmosphere of waste built up at the end and overwhelming as it turns us back to the “shop-worn” clerks who are Robinson’s original donnée.
Now, for readers brought up in the modernist tradition of Eliot and Stevens, these short poems of Robinson will not yield much excitement. They see in such poems neither tangle nor agony, brilliance nor innovation. But they are wrong, for the Tilbury sonnets and lyrics do, in their own way, represent a significant innovation: Robinson was the first American poet of stature to bring commonplace people and commonplace experience into our poetry. Whitman had invoked such people and even rhapsodized over them, but as individual creatures with warm blood they are not
really to be found in his pages. Robinson understood that
Even the happy mortals we term ordinary or commonplace act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to believe possible. . . .
The point bears stressing because most critics hail poets like Eliot and Stevens for their innovations in metrics and language while condescending toward Robinson as merely traditional. Even if that were true, it would not, of course, be a sufficient reason for judgments either favorable or hostile; but it is not true. Robinson never thought of himself as a poetic revolutionary, but like all major poets he helped enlarge for those who came after him the possibilities of composition. The work of gifted writers like Robert Lowell, James Dickey, and James Wright was enabled by Robinson’s muted innovations.
His dramatic miniatures in verse—spiritual dossiers of American experience, as someone has nicely called them—remind one a little of Hawthorne, in their ironic undercurrents and cool explorations of vanity, and a little of James, in their peeling away of psychic pretense and their bias that human relationships are inherently a trap. Yet it would be unjust to say that Robinson was a short-story writer who happened to write verse, for it is precisely through the traditional forms he employed—precisely through his disciplined stanzas, regular meters, and obbligatos of rhyme—that he released his vision. Robinson’s language seldom achieves the high radiance of Frost, and few of his short poems are as beautifully complexioned as Frost’s “Spring Pools” or “The Most of It.” But in Robinson there are sudden plunges into depths of experiences, and then stretches of earned contemplativeness, that Frost can rarely equal. Here, for example, is the octet of a Robinson sonnet, “The Pity of the Leaves,” that deals with an experience—an old man alone at night with his foreboding of death—which in “An Old Man’s Winter Night” Frost also treated memorably but not, I think, as well:
Vengeful across the cold November moors,
Loud with ancestral shame there came the bleak
Sad wind that shrieked and answered with a shriek,
Reverberant through lonely corridors.
The old man heard it; and he heard, perforce,
Words out of lips that were no more to speak—
Words of the past that shook the old man’s cheek
Like dead remembered footsteps on old floors.
It is always to “the slow tragedy of haunted men” that Robinson keeps returning. One of his greatest lyrics on this theme, the kind of hypnotic incantation that happens to a poet once or twice if he is lucky, is “Luke Havergal”: a grieving man hears the voice of his dead love and it draws him like an appetite for death, a beauty of death quiet and enclosing.
The greatest of these Tilbury poems, and one of the greatest poems about the tragedy of love in our language, is “Eros Turannos.” Yvor Winters aptly calls it “a universal tragedy in a Maine setting.” It deals with a genteel and sensitive woman, advancing in years and never, apparently, a startling beauty, who has married or otherwise engaged herself to a charming wastrel with a taste for the finer things of life:
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him. . . .
With a fierce concentration of phrase, the poem proceeds to specify the entanglements in which these people trap themselves, the moral confusions and psychic fears, all shown with a rare balance of exactness and compassion. The concluding stanza reaches a wisdom about the human lot such as marks Robinson’s poetry at its best. Those, he writes, who with the god of love have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
Thinking of such poems and trying to understand how it is that in their plainness they can yet seem so magnificent, one finds oneself falling back on terms like “sincerity” and “honesty.” They are terms notoriously inadequate and tricky, yet inescapable in discussing poets like Robinson and Thomas Hardy. It is not, after all, as if one wants to say about more brilliant poets like Eliot and Yeats that they are insincere or lacking in honesty; of course not. What one does want to suggest is that in poems like Robinson’s “Eros Turannos” and “Hillcrest,” as in Hardy’s “The Going” and “At Castle Boterel,” there is an abandonment of all pretense and pose, all protectiveness and persona. At such moments the poet seems beyond decoration and defense; he leaves himself vulnerable, open to the pain of his self; he cares nothing for consolation; he looks at defeat and does not blink. It is literature beyond the literary.
IV
Robinson was also a master of a certain genre poem, Wordsworthian in tone and perhaps source, which Frost also wrote but not, in my judgment, as well. These are poems about lost and aging country people, mostly in New England: “Isaac and Archibald,” “Aunt Imogen,” and “The Poor Relation.” The very titles are likely to displease readers whose hearts tremble before titles like “Leda and the Swan,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and “The Bridge.” A pity!
“Isaac and Archibald” is the masterpiece of this group, a summer idyll tinged with shadows of death, told by a mature man remembering himself as a boy who spent an afternoon with two old farmers, lifelong friends, each of whom now frets that the other is showing signs of decay. The verse is exquisite:
So I lay dreaming of what things I would,
Calm and incorrigibly satisfied
With apples and romance and ignorance,
And the still smoke from Archibald’s clay pipe.
There was a stillness over everything,
As if the spirit of heat had laid its hand
Upon the world and hushed it; and I felt
Within the mightiness of the white sun
That smote the land around us and wrought out
A fragrance from the trees, a vital warmth
And fulness for the time that was to come,
And a glory for the world beyond the forest.
The present and the future and the past,
Isaac and Archibald, the burning bush,
The Trojans and the walls of Jericho,
Were beautifully fused; and all went well
Till Archibald began to fret for Isaac
And said it was a master day for sunstroke.
Another kind of poem at which Robinson showed his mastery, one that has rarely been written in this country, is the dramatic monologue of medium length. “Rembrandt to Rembrandt,” “The Three Taverns” (St. Paul approaching Rome), and “John Brown” are the best examples. The pitfalls of this genre are notorious: an effort to capture the historic inflections of the speaker’s voice, so that both conciseness of speech and poetic force are sacrificed to some idea of verisimilitude; a tendency toward linguistic exhibitionism, blank verse as a mode of preening; and a lack of clear focusing of intent, so that the immediate experience of the speaker fails to take on larger resonance. Robinson mostly transcends these difficulties. He chooses figures at moments of high crisis, Rembrandt as he plunges into his dark painting, St. Paul as he ruminates upon his forthcoming capture, and John Brown as he readies himself for hanging. The result is serious in moral perception, leading always to the idea of abandonment of the self, and dignified in tone, for Robinson had little gift for colloquial speech and was shrewd enough to maintain a level of formal diction.
It is Frost who is mainly honored for this kind of dramatic poem, but a sustained comparison would show, I think, the superiority of Robinson’s work. Though not nearly so brilliant a virtuoso as Frost, Robinson writes from a fullness of experience and a tragic awareness that Frost cannot equal. Frost has a strong grasp on the melodramatic extremes of behavior, but he lacks almost entirely Robinson’s command of its middle ranges. Frost achieves a cleaner verbal surface, but Robinson is m
ore abundant in moral detail and insight.
There remains finally a word to be said about Robinson’s Arthurian poems, Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram, the first two of which are very considerable productions. I am aware of straining my readers’ credulity in saying that Merlin and Lancelot, set in the court of King Arthur and dealing with the loves and intrigues of his knights, are profound explorations of human suffering.
Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, dealing with the same materials, is mainly a pictorial representation of waxen figures, beautiful in the way a tapestry might be but not very gripping as drama. Robinson’s Guinevere and Lancelot, however, are errant human beings separated from us only by costume and time; his Merlin is an aging man of worldly power and some wisdom who finds himself drawn to the temptations of private life. Long poems are bound to have flaws, in this case excessive talk and a spun-thin moral theorizing that can become tedious. There is the further problem that any effort at sustained blank verse will, by now, lead to padding and looseness of language. Still, these are poems for mature men and women who know that in the end we are all as we are, vulnerable and mortal. Here Merlin speaks at the end of his career, remembering his love:
Let her love
What man she may, no other love than mine
Shall be an index of her memories.
I fear no man who may come after me,
And I see none. I see her, still in green,
Beside the fountain. I shall not go back . . .
If I come not,
The lady Vivian will remember me,
And say: “I knew him when his heart was young.
Though I have lost him now. Time called him home,
And that was as it was; for much is lost
Between Broceliande and Camelot.”
In my own experience Robinson is a poet who grows through rereading, or perhaps it would be better to say, one grows into being able to reread him. He will never please the crowds, neither the large ones panting for platitude nor the small ones supposing paradox an escape from platitude. All that need finally be said about Robinson he said himself in a sonnet about George Crabbe, the eighteenth-century English poet who also wrote about commonplace people in obscure corners of the earth: