 As
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Aspects of Robinson (Part One) Edwin
Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson. Columbia
University Press, 2007. 553 pp., $34.95. Edwin Arlington Robinson: Poems, selected and edited by Scott Donaldson. Everyman’s Library, 2007. 254 pp., $12.50. |
To tell the story of the life he led. Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead, And let the worms be its biographers.
—From “Verlaine”
E. A.
Robinson would not have liked to be written about. Already in this early
sonnet he embraces a self-obliterating approach to literature, an approach
he will seldom state this baldly but will never really alter. The gulf
between the outward psychological intensity of the work and the inward
silence of the writer (in accounts of the poet, every third word is
“reticent”) has left a stubborn enigma. Robert Mezey, in the
introduction to his 1999 selection of Robinson’s poems, despaired of
explaining it: “No one yet has
been able to give a wholly accurate account of Edwin Arlington
Robinson’s life, or convey a persuasively vivid sense of the sort of man
he was; it may not be possible.” It has at some length proved
possible, with a few factors working in Scott Donaldson’s favor. The
bulk of Robinson’s correspondence has recently been transcribed (no mean
feat, given his handwriting), and two unpublished remembrances by the
poet’s friends have recently surfaced. There is also the considerable
inspiration of Robinson’s almost jarring wholesomeness as a man, which
so far emerges more clearly the more material comes to light. Donaldson
has achieved a more complete reconstruction of the poet’s personal
circumstances than has yet been possible, and in tactfully overlaying this
reconstruction with criticism of the poems he arrives at a case study of a
major artist that is fascinating far in excess of the facts. For a man
with no life, Robinson, Robinson the phenomenon, proves to be quite
complicated. Robinson
was born in 1869 in Head Tide, Maine, the third of three boys, his name
having been picked out of a hat at a lawn party. He hated “Edwin” for
completing the egregious triple rhyme of his full name, and for resembling
“Edward,” with which it was confused all the time, even in his second
Pulitzer citation and hometown obituary. A
list of poets born within five years of him would include W. B. Yeats,
Rudyard Kipling, Walter De La Mare, William Vaughan Moody, Edgar Lee
Masters, Stephen Crane, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Paul Lawrence
Dunbar. A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy were older, but had similar career
arcs: Housman’s first book of poems came out in 1896, the same year as
Robinson’s (Housman’s was also self-published), and Hardy’s appeared
in 1898. Emily Dickinson died when Robinson was in high school; her 1890 Poems made a brief splash and then subsided. In the
two years after that Melville and Whitman died without followings. It is
difficult to imagine how the poetry of the day could have been worse, any
less accountable to anything outside of its conventions. Here is Richard
Watson Gilder, editor of the Century and self-styled “Squire of
Poesy”: What is a sonnet? ’T is the tear that fell From a great poet’s hidden ecstasy; A two-edged sword, a star, a song—ah me! Sometimes
a heavy-tolling funeral bell. The
nation of Robinson’s youth was in a practical, moneymaking mood and
inclined to ignore this kind of frivolity. Before Robinson turned one the
family moved to Gardiner, an industrious and industrializing town of six
thousand on the Kennebec River. The town was perhaps extraordinarily
class-conscious, with a presiding “Big House” where the Gardiner
family lived. Robinson’s mother Mary Palmer descended from an old New
England family that counted Anne Bradstreet as an ancestor, but she had
married the Scotch-Irish Edward Robinson, who began as a shipbuilder and
then prospered in a variety of occupations and investments, notably timber
speculation. The family enjoyed limited upward mobility throughout the
boys’ upbringings but never quite made it to the aristocracy (Edward
became known as “The Duke of Puddledock”).
Robinson would throughout his life castigate himself for failure to hew to
his models of middle class solidity, and he would never show a sense of
entitlement. In spite of the nominally rising fortunes of Gardiner, he did
not absorb a narrative of optimism and material progress from his
environment, in which he would have observed the cultural obsolescence of
Puritanism and the decline of certain industries and methods, like ice
harvesting on the river (which he worked at briefly) and water power. Robinson’s hard-headed father had a soft spot for poetry, at least as a diversion, and the boy delighted him by memorizing passages out of William Cullen Bryant’s ample Library of Poetry and Song. At six Robinson was reciting “The Raven.” The local high school was rigorous, and he emerged with a little Latin, less Greek, and a serviceable background in the classics. He fell in with a local literary club, and did his apprenticeship in versification there, indebted particularly to a Dr. Alanson Schumann, Gardiner’s poète manqué. Robinson would later estimate the size of the poetry audience in the United States based on the fact that six people out of the six thousand in Gardiner appreciated it (the same fraction, he noted, obtained for drunks). Extrapolating from this figure he arrived at a nationwide total of a hundred thousand people; today the figure would be three times that, probably not far off the mark.
When Robinson was eleven a teacher cuffed him on the side of the head for
daydreaming. She damaged his inner ear, and the injury led to
near-total hearing loss in that ear and recurrent pain all his life
(perhaps this is the second most favorable disability for poets, Geoffrey
Hill being deaf in one ear). The injury had its benefits, in that after
graduation Robinson had to travel to Boston for a series of treatments,
and his father, not otherwise thinking much of college, released funds
enough to let him attend Harvard as a “special” from 1891 to 1893. A
middling student, he did witness the institution in a moment of flower,
attending classes with Charles Eliot Norton, Josiah Royce, and William
James. He published in the Advocate but did not infiltrate the
literary set there, having only enough social clout to blend with the
other specials; the time intensified a sense of belonging with misfits.
Edward Robinson died in 1892 and the family’s fortunes
disintegrated rapidly. The elder brother Dean, whom Edwin held in great
esteem, was a doctor, and had become addicted to laudanum while medicating
himself for neuralgia. He moved back home and hollowed out progressively
over the next decade. The middle brother Herman, perhaps the only human
being Robinson did not think well of, was gregarious and aggressive and
for a time succeeded as a bank representative investing in western real
estate. He married a local beauty named Emma Shepherd, whom all three
brothers were in love with. Emma thought highly of Edwin, but he was too
young to be in realistic competition for her; nevertheless the experience
of watching her bamboozled by Herman’s charm, of watching her choose
shallowness over depth, rattled him deeply. Herman was ruined in the 1893
panic and descended into drink, increasingly unable to care or provide for
his three daughters. Mary Robinson died abruptly and horribly of
diphtheria in 1896. Emma was also infected but recovered. All three brothers and Herman’s family were then living in the same house, Edwin reading, writing, and caring for the property, but languishing somewhat and feeling the pressure to choose a career. Late in that year Herman’s drinking became bad enough that Edwin found himself acting as a surrogate husband and father, and he must have been able to sustain at times the pleasant illusion of being married to Emma. The implications were not lost on Herman, who confronted his brother and demanded he leave.
Robinson moved to New York, which remained his base for the rest of
his life, excepting spells in Boston writing advertising copy and working
as an office clerk at Harvard. He published The Children of the Night, an
updated version of The Torrent and the Night Before, in 1897. It
was received well but not widely. There followed a difficult period of
neglect, impoverishment, and near-alcoholism. Dean died in 1899, a
probable suicide. Robinson’s extraordinary capacity for making fast
friends—as if in compensation for his awkward guardedness—served him
well during this time, as he was often kept afloat by the grace of their
generosity. In 1902, on his sixth try, with friends serving as guarantors,
Robinson succeeded in placing Captain Craig. Periodicals however
remained uninterested in his work. He subsequently worked as a
time-checker in the New York subway diggings. In what is possibly the
weirdest episode in American letters, Theodore Roosevelt came across
Robinson’s poems (a Gardiner acquaintance of Robinson’s was his
son’s English teacher) and wrote Robinson in admiration. Setting aside
the treaty negotiations for the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt took it upon
himself to write a review of Children of the Night, and got
Robinson a job filling a chair at the New York Custom House. The job
lasted until the change of administration. Robinson’s luck was turning. In 1911 he began spending his summers at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where he was comfortable and worked prolifically (though not, in later life, very well). In 1916 he had his first unequivocal critical success with The Man Against the Sky, probably his single best book. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his Collected Poems (1921), The Man Who Died Twice (1924), and Tristram (1927), the latter a bestseller that left him financially secure for the first time. From 1929 until his death he produced mostly long or book-length poems at the rate of one per year. Robinson died of cancer in 1935. ***
Summarized in this way, Robinson’s life does not sound eventful.
There is no fighting for the partisans, no experimenting with opium, no
clambering up the duchess’s trellis. Robinson once
visited his friend Edith Brower in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and in
his fifties he took a six-week trip to England. Apart from these
occasions, he never left the Northeast. His intellectual life was
similarly circumscribed: his reading was not adventurous, and he did not
maintain the passionate connection to social and political developments
that enabled, to take one instance, the odd updrafts of Yeats. But the
ostensibly simple character of Robinson’s existence makes it possible to
see certain principles reify in his life with an almost judicious
alternation: privilege and deprivation, small town and big city, bohemian
and bourgeois, solitude and camaraderie, learning and common sense. It is
as though Robinson were a subject in an experiment to test the effects of
various conditions on a given artistic constitution.
This constitution can moreover be cleanly delineated. Marianne
Moore characterizes it as “persistently tentative credulity,” which requires only
elaboration. Robinson has an ethical premise, which is a sense of
scrupulousness, even caution, about what statements can be made with what
force on what evidence; as Walter Berthoff puts it, “he will not say what he cannot take technical possession of.”
Robinson has a project, which is the understanding of other people as far
as his premise allows; one could call it a practical demonstration of the
premise. He has an emotional temperament, which appears in his sympathy
(the word will prove problematic) for the meek and misunderstood, and in
his antipathy for the practice of valuing people in terms of their
utility. Finally, he has a style, which is plain but uncasual, averse to
usages one would find in poetry and only in poetry. Robinson’s
intellectual honesty, when brought to bear on people, is tantamount to a
belief in our unknowability to each other. This belief is not simply a
philosophical restatement or recognition of the egocentric predicament,
but entrains anguish at individuation itself, at the loneliness and
recreance it makes possible and the aid and comfort it renders our
miseries. The poems respond to the implacable fact of unknowability with
circumspection, cynicism, humor, even frustrated and willful
hallucination: There be two men of all mankind That I should like to know about; But search and question where I will, I cannot ever find them out. —From “Two Men” What was it that we never caught? What was he, and what was he not? How much it was of him we met We cannot ever know; nor yet Shall all he gave us quite atone For what was his, and his alone; —From “Flammonde” We’ll have no kindly veil between Her visions and those we have seen,— As if we guessed what hers have been, Or what they are or would be. —From “Eros Turannos” To tell what we shall never know. —From “Exit” He must have had a father and a mother— In fact I’ve heard him say so—and a dog, As a boy should, I venture; and the dog, Most likely, was the only man who knew him.
—From “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man
from Stratford” Taken
as a subject this outlook could reasonably be seen as dead-ending in
despair and pessimism, a criticism Robinson was sensitive to. The collapse
of religion in Robinson’s time had left a hole poets were expected to
fill (inasmuch as they were expected to do anything) and failure to
propose consolation, failure to supply a divine backup plan, was not yet
considered a virtue. Robinson was sometimes bewildered by this requirement
to the point of imbalance, prone at times to baseless assertions of an
optimism he had more artful ways of integrating. But the criticism, I
think, misses in the first place the redemptive nature even of art that
ends in uncertainty and a sense of limitation. James Dickey remarks that Robinson’s wariness “allows an unparalleled
fullness to his presentations, as well as endowing them with some of the
mysteriousness, futility, and proneness to multiple interpretation that
incidents and lives possess in the actual world.” Robinson’s poems
may not ultimately come to understand their subjects, they may not arrive
at judgments or diagnoses, but it is not for lack of trying. He patiently
allows his subjects their demonstrations, and then attempts, knowing he
will at some level fail, the finest inference possible of their internal
states from their external ones. This
procedure has in turn strong implications for the texture of the writing.
The focus on the actors is such that a minimum of verbiage is available to
establish setting—the poems are almost devoid of what Mary Kinzie has
called “trivial situating.”
Characters reap the benefit of this emphasis in being quickly
universalized, where more attention to sensuous context would have
cluttered their essential interest. The diction, also, feels a push in the
direction of the abstract. Our language for describing emotions is
comparatively rich: A vision answering a faith unshaken, An easy trust assumed of easy trials, A sick negation born of weak denials, A crazed abhorrence of an old condition, A blind attendance on a brief ambition,—
—From “The Man Against the Sky” Our
language for the affective cues for these faiths, trusts, negations,
abhorrences, and attendances is comparatively poor. Robinson has such
frequent recourse to describing underdetermined looks, tones, and gestures
that these become motifs: We tell you, tapping on our brows, —From “Eros Turannos” something in his way of telling it— The language, or the tone, or something else— Gripped like insidious fingers on her throat, —From “Aunt Imogen” The old man shook his head regretfully And laid his knuckles three times on his forehead. —From “Isaac and Archibald” In a strained way that made us cringe and wince: —From “Fleming Helphenstine” Those old, unyielding eyes may flash, And flinch—and look the other way. —From “The Wandering Jew” “And
how we caught from one another’s eyes The
flash of what a tongue could never tell!” —From “Captain Craig” We saw that fire at work within his eyes And had no glimpse of what was burning there.
—From “Avon’s Harvest” The
limning of character in terms of these kinds of observations might be
expected to yield an art of portraiture, more or less keen as the
observations were more or less keen. Robinson’s transforming insight is
that attributes of character only acquire meaning in a community, whose
common denominators of conduct provide a basis for a response, such as
pity, scorn, bewilderment, or envy. Rather than characterizing a person,
Robinson characterizes a relationship between a person and a group. The
resulting characterization does not constitute a portrait or sketch, if by
these terms one means an attempt to locate the essential qualities of an
individual considered in isolation; individuals in Robinson cannot
meaningfully be said to possess essential qualities. Nor does the
interaction between individual and group constitute a drama, as all
parties have usually already reached equilibrium in the moment of the
poem. As William Pritchard points out, “Robinson
is the least ‘dramatic’ of modern poets, if drama means a development
in consciousness, a sense that the poem is entertaining choices even as it
proceeds to its outcome.” The poems are almost a mode unto
themselves, dispersed and concentrated in their gestures, verbalizing
social forces sometimes tenuous or obscure and registering their action on
an individual. In
the early sonnet “Aaron Stark,” for example, a local miser has grown
shriveled and irretrievably selfish, but not yet absolutely withdrawn: Glad for the murmur of his hard renown, Year after year he shambled through the town, A loveless exile moving with a staff; And oftentimes there crept into his ears A sound of alien pity, touched with tears,— And
then (and only then) did Aaron laugh. No
recluse, Stark finds his murmured reputation satisfying, as if it were
wealth the town generated or interest on an investment. He cannot abandon
this investment, and so remains physically in the town despite his status
as social exile. The only remaining avenue by which he may be disturbed
is, oddly, pity. Far from being jealous, the community weeps on his
behalf, and his half-comprehending response to this—which absolutely
marks the crippling of his spirit—is compensating, derisive laughter.
The poem could easily have petered out in a catalogue of facile villain
physiognomy—the “miser’s nose,” the “eyes like little
dollars,” the “thin, pinched mouth”—but achieves some
psychological complication, and the rearing-up of strong emotions, through
the introduction of communal conscience and in articulating the action of
that conscience.
Robinson understood early in his development that this communal
conscience deserved elaboration, and in some poems (“Captain Craig,”
“John Evereldown,” “The Tree in Pamela’s Garden,” “Old King
Cole,” “Mr. Flood’s Party”) this third presence goes by the name
of Tilbury Town, which is roughly congruent to Gardiner (it is not New
York, at any rate), but assumes no qualities beyond those necessary to
illuminate individuals. It has no geography, no history, no internal
structure. It is not Yoknapatawpha County, which Faulkner is able to draw
a map of. It is closer to Masters’s Spoon River, but sentient, a source
of limited authority with which to gossip—not necessarily in the narrow
sense of disapproving—about its wayward elements. Roy Harvey Pearce
calls it “the underworld of
Walden and Paumanok,” a place where individualism has become an
exhausted, absurd idea. Robinson’s abstraction of Tilbury Town—his
lifting it off the map, as it were—allows him to draw on the spirit of
it even when his material has an inspiration in relatively anonymous urban
circumstances where a coherent group conscience is implausible. Of his
move to New York, Robinson wrote to William Vaughan Moody, “I must have the biggest conglomeration of humanity and inhumanity that
America affords.” Gardiner was evidently too small for him. In
practice, though, few of the poems are unambiguously urban—“The Poor
Relation,” “The Wandering Jew”—and Robinson must also have the
murmuring town in the back of his mind to maintain the concept of normalcy
against which he may present his misfits. New York was evidently too
large. Robinson’s resources in this respect are curiously and nakedly
composite. He does not sentimentalize or disparage town or city, and it is
difficult to assign him squarely to either type of sensibility. New York
was wonderful for concentrating his friends, not for providing
alternatives to middle-class respectability, which he could take or leave.
Nor was New York his introduction to the panoply of human wreckage, which
he was obsessed with even before he left Gardiner, and even before his
household fell apart: in the mid-nineties he was working on some dismal
prose sketches called Scattered Lives. In
poems where Tilbury is not mentioned explicitly, it is sometimes evoked
implicitly or virtually in the first-person plural. This is the case in
“Richard Cory,” “Leffingwell,” “Flammonde,” and “Bewick
Finzer.” The most striking use of this choral “we” is in “Eros
Turannos,” where one is led in the first four stanzas through a minor
miracle of compressed narrative to all appearances omniscient. A woman
negotiates with herself the reacceptance of a man who has betrayed her in
some way—he is blithe and perhaps vain of her love for him, and one is
almost nauseated to see that her fear of a lonely future will acquit him
while she continues in a passionless existence of swallowed pride and
cherished illusions lost. In stanza five, though, this narrative is
revealed to be a concoction of sorts, “The story as it should be,”
made up by gossipers who have presumably eavesdropped on the couple’s
quarreling and pieced together various rumors. This chorus recognizes that
the private cores of the woman and of the couple are unknowable, but it
cannot bear the thought that no rendition of events will emerge, and
wishes to place its version side by side with hers, the legend with the
reality: “We’ll have no kindly veil between / Her visions and those we
have seen.” Robinson would have kept up the veil, but the chorus is not
that strong—if it seems intrusive and mischievous, it regards its
actions as ultimately harmless, pabulum to soften the disappointment of
never having been in the presence of the love god. The poem ends with the
chorus gesturing to a sphere beyond itself, reaching for the closest
metaphors it can find: Meanwhile we do no harm; for they That with a god 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. The
stanza pattern (ababcccb) is similar to that of “The Poor
Relation” and “The Unforgiven,” appearing also in The Man Against
the Sky and almost as good. The c rhyme, always masculine,
potentially banal (imagine this stanza without the last line), creates a
plateau which drops into the resolution of the final b rhyme—which
is always feminine, and which would sound rushed and dense if not so
distanced from its two predecessors (imagine this stanza without the sixth
line). The breaking up of the common measure established in the first half
of the stanza is always accompanied by a syntactic break. Except in the
final stanza, the second half always forms an independent clause, which
stands in opposition to or in elaboration of the first half. The triple
rhyme fulfills itself in the final stanza, for the first time, in a list:
the man and particularly the woman accept what love has given—succor,
strife, indecision, fear, doubt—in spite of these gifts’ resemblance
to somewhat cold and superficially consoling features of the
protagonists’ environment (waves and falling leaves were, in stanza
four, the agents of her illusion and confusion). Breaking waves herald
more of themselves; the tree changing colors again repeats itself; the
stairway to the sea is a kind of folie, going nowhere. But these
are the terms of dealing with the tyrant. All good poems make their matter worthy of their form, and vice versa. “Eros Turannos” occupies a certain pinnacle in introducing more human interest than seems possible into a form with extraordinarily demanding symmetries. I can imagine a poem more lyrically pure, but only at the expense of removing some complication. I can imagine a poem more novelistic, but only at the expense of its lyric integrity. To achieve this compression, “Eros Turannos” avails itself to some extent of our expectations regarding marriages and love affairs, but does not deal, in the end, in commonplaces. On the contrary, the poem is under no illusion that “love conquers all,” or that eros stands in opposition to thanatos. Love, it says, can be the covenant of our destruction: terrible. (Emma Robinson saw the poem, as she did “The Unforgiven,” as an explicit record of her ill-fated marriage to Herman—her gloss reads, “Despotic love. E.L.R. [Emma] and H.E.R. [Herman]: their downfall.”) Nominally conventional in form, jarringly modern in content, the poem sits strangely against the skyline of its time. The poets who succeeded Robinson did not tend to work, or did not tend to work successfully, in this kind of contained narrative or argument. Frost is at his smarmiest and most platitudinous in this regime (though Robinson would have disagreed); Stevens would be the exception, in “Sunday Morning.” When Harriet Monroe received the typescript of “Eros Turannos,” she wrote “Jewel” on it, but that was the extent of its luck. The poem appeared in the March 1914 issue of Poetry alongside nine poems by Carl Sandburg. “Chicago” won that year’s Levinson Prize. Robinson’s use of the choral presence is innovative and, in its particular form, remains strikingly rare. It came to him early but not always easily: the drafts of “Eros Turannos” show that the fifth stanza, where the “we” is introduced, went through the most revisions. The Robinsonian “we” is not simply a means of lending generality to discourse or speculation, or a casual way of implicating the reader. It is not the French on. It has an understanding of its point of view, as a point of view, and is capable of distinguishing itself from omniscience. It does not exist to characterize itself, as in certain dramatic monologues, but to characterize another. It would seem intuitive to a playwright, I think, but in poetry in English there is little of it or anything like it—perhaps in Stevie Smith, or James Weldon Johnson’s “Brothers—American Drama.” Robinson’s insight into the possibilities of choral pronouncement arises from a serious consideration of what our collective being is and how individual lives acquire and lose meaning in it, and these directions of thought run contrary or perpendicular to those that the major talents of the twentieth century typically took. One could say that Robinson’s art is thereby enriched and made exceptional, but it seems equally that the balance is impoverished, that it has missed not a poetic idiosyncrasy but a fundamental human valence. *** Perhaps
the most evident commonality in Robinson’s poems is the preponderance of
unheroic heroes: derelicts, sponges, has-beens, posers, and stargazers.
One accepts at some level that Robinson has an uncomplicated affection for
the underdog, a feeling that he can personally compensate for the
depredations of fortune and, whatever else he may or may not stand for,
not succumb to the Tilbury practice of judging people by their
productivity. Robinson had a somewhat ineffectual and bumbling Gardiner
friend named Seth Ellis Pope, who
was fired from a local teaching job because he could not maintain order
among the students—Robinson’s friend Laura Richards described him as
“a gentle, inarticulate soul” who referred to Robinson as “the
Man.” He inspired Killigrew
the poetaster in “Captain Craig.” Robinson remained loyal to him
throughout Pope’s life, and for several years they were roommates in
Brooklyn. When a visitor made the
mistake of implying Pope was unexceptional, Robinson became enraged—one
of only two losses of temper, as far as I can tell, in his entire life (Prohibition
brought on the other). In Robinson’s poetry, though, the redemption
of Pope-like figures must negotiate a difficult transaction of
compassionate feelings, which Robinson sees, like attributes of character,
as essentially social phenomena not to be taken at face value—indeed,
not having a face value. Stating with precision what Robinson is up to
with his uncomplicated affection turns out to be complicated—one finds,
in his work, a strange and rigorous treatment of feeling, one implication
of which is that the path of virtue cannot be defined in terms of a
homily, not even “love thy neighbor” or “the meek shall inherit.” In
“Aaron Stark” the miser senses condescension in the town’s pity and
matches it with scornful laughter: if the object of the pity is to draw
Stark into the family of man, it fails utterly. In “Eros Turannos” the
woman places the exigencies of love before those of pride: this is, in
terms of some conventional hierarchy of virtues, the correct thing to do,
but she reaps unhappiness. We are perhaps accustomed to regarding love and
compassion as having favorable consequences, as reliably pointing the way
out of danger, but Robinson consistently upends the truisms; as Donald
Justice remarks, “the pieties are
not quite in place.” Pity may be misplaced and feckless, as in
“Vain Gratuities” and “The Tree in Pamela’s Garden,” both poems
about women heedless of the expectations of Tilbury Town and incidentally
in opposition to them. Pity may be an impediment to good judgment, as at
the end of Lancelot, where the hero is left “Not
knowing what last havoc pity and love / Had still to wreak on wisdom.”
Pity may be an evasion of a messier responsibility: Now and then, as if to scorn the common touch of common sorrow, There were some who gave a few the distant pity of a smile;
—From “The Valley of the Shadow” Pity
may turn the recipient in upon himself. In the weird psychodrama
“Avon’s Harvest,” a boy attaches himself to Avon in their school
days and kills him at every turn with kindness, cursing Avon with early
awareness of his smallness. Avon calls his shadow an “evil genius” who
ever incurs That I have not the Christian revenue In me to pay. A man who has no gold, Or an equivalent, shall pay no gold Until by chance or labor or contrivance He makes it his to pay; and he that has No kindlier commodity than hate, Glossed with a pity that belies itself In its negation and lacks alchemy To fuse itself to—love, would you have me say? I don’t believe it. No, there is no such word. If
I say tolerance, there’s no more to say. The self-hatred is clear and brutal: the evil genius exposes a gross defect in Avon, namely, his incapacity for charity, which he can scarcely define. The potential for damage in showing one’s feelings appears up and down the poetry: a pitying triumph that was worse than hate. —From “Cavender’s House” Still none of them Could have a thought that she was living down— Almost as if regret were criminal, So proud it was and yet so profitless— The penance of a dream, and that was good. —From “Aunt Imogen” Genevieve: And don’t say that again!
—From “Genevieve and Alexandra”
Robinson’s poetry comes to a particularly fine point when his
characters possess some of the same knowledge he does, and demonstrate an
awareness of the consequences of emoting or of eliciting emotion. Robinson
would perhaps define tact as comportment with such awareness. In “The
Poor Relation,” a woman is growing old alone in an apartment, roaming
among her memories and half-enduring, half-enjoying her infrequent
visitors. She understands they have been driven to her by a sense of
obligation, and declines to push the moment beyond the socially acceptable
span, which is insufficient to her: Her lip shakes when they go away, And yet she would not have them stay; She knows as well as anyone That
Pity, having played, soon tires. The
quivering lip is the only outward sign of her distress. She does not show
revulsion at being the object of pity, actually or potentially—she might
accept that position, for all we know, if it meant more company. More than
she can bear, however, is the thought of imposing, or imposing further, on
their resources of pity, which she knows she exhausts quickly. It is
significant that the poem does not take place in Tilbury Town, where her
fate would perhaps have been less grim, perhaps not—but would in any
case have had a social reality. In the city she can hardly be said to
exist. She chuckles to herself: Poor laugh, more slender than her song It seems; and there are none to hear it With even the stopped ears of the strong For
breaking heart or broken spirit. In
Robinson’s scheme, this absence of witnesses, even unsympathetic ones,
is death-in-life, an erasure of the possibility of occurrence. The ending
of the poem uses the sharp end of the stick: And given little to long sighing, With no illusion to assuage The lonely changelessness of dying,— Unsought, unthought-of, and unheard, She sings and watches like a bird, Safe in a comfortable cage From
which there will be no more flying. “Comfortable”
is the most awful word here, and not just because the meter makes it
uncomfortable: without the distractions of hardship available, there is no
way left for the woman to strive. Louis Coxe draws attention to this
conclusion for offering “no
vastations, epiphanies, cosmic speculations, psychodramatics,” but
simply registering the character of the woman’s last days with an almost
ungallant clarity. Robinson’s lip is quivering, but he too refrains from
drawing on our resources of pity, having immersed us to the utmost of his
ability in circumstances that warrant it. That restraint is not the same
as saying we are not supposed to feel anything. Dickey remarks on this
ability of Robinson’s to be both extended and withheld, inferring a mind
“both powerful and hesitant, as
though suspended between strong magnets . . . . from this balance, this
desperately poised uncertainty, emanates a compassion both very personal
and cosmic—a compassion that one might well see as a substitute for the
compassion that God failed to supply.” This sublimated compassion,
immanent in “The Poor Relation,” represents the highest service that
Robinson can render his subjects.
In a broad sense “The Poor Relation” is about the considerable
strengths one needs to summon in the course of an ordinary life. In
“Tact” and “Late Summer” Robinson introduces pairs of characters
measuring their effects on one another and similarly trying to preserve
themselves, the web of human relations becoming doubly tangled. “Tact”
presents a man and a woman: the man is visiting the woman, who skillfully
converses around some truth, possibly regarding his unsuitableness for
her. He cannot avoid praising her inwardly for sparing him “the familiar
guile, / So easily achieved.” He chooses not to take the painful hint,
and affects obliviousness to spend the evening with her. They part
amicably, at least on the surface. In the third and last stanza the woman,
alone, permits herself some satisfaction that she has succeeded in her
ultimate ruse, which has nothing to do with letting him down easily, but
with hiding from him something about the fragility of her circumstances: She smiled a little, knowing well That he would not remark The ruins of a day that fell Around her in the dark: He saw no ruins anywhere, Nor fancied there were scars On anyone who lingered there,
Alone below the stars. The
two are entwined without touching; inwardness dwells so far from the
surface that success in their interaction is defined in terms of artful,
overlapping withholdings and circumlocutions, plans within plans, that
preserve the elements of themselves that cannot in any event be
“solved.” What we now call intimacy would result in her breakdown and
his confusion. Neither conversant has demonstrated a flaw—neither is
inarticulate or insensible, and each knows his or her own heart. It is
precisely through the close attention of the man that his deception—the
least awkward outcome of the encounter—is made possible. “Tact”
is somewhat schematic and marred by generic night sky imagery, but one
sees in it no misapprehension that purity or strength of feeling will
surmount the barriers between people; the counterintuitive interactions of
such feeling are likely to dictate the terms of engagement. Herman
Robinson died of tuberculosis in 1909, broken and estranged from his
family (Emma’s sister, upset at his treatment of Emma, had even framed
him for the theft of some valuables). Shortly
before he died, though, he extracted a promise from Emma never to marry
Edwin. The autumn after the funeral, Robinson came to stay with Emma
and his nieces, and probably proposed to Emma. If he did, she refused him.
“Late Summer” was published in 1920, more than ten years later (at
which point Robinson had been in love with Emma for thirty years), but can
plausibly be read as a conversation between them during that visit. The
poem is in alcaics, and not simply the syllabic interpretation of them
such as Auden uses in “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (one can hear the
choriambic feet clearly in phrases like “honor ineffably” and
“driving his argosies”). A man and a woman are walking on the beach,
the woman unaccountably happy, making light of a difficult past and
spending kindness on the dead which the man feels would be better spent on
him. Happiness is at hand if she will only concede the actuality of him.
Seeing the worst coming, he forces the moment to its crisis, saying of the
dead man, “I climb for you the peak of his infamy That you may choose your fall if you cling to it. No more for me unless you say more. All you have left of a dream defends you: “The truth may be as evil an augury As it was needful now for the two of us. We cannot have the dead between us. Tell
me to go, and I go.” The
truth—meaning the woman’s ultimate intentions—is both evil, in the
sense that the man stands to have his hopes dashed and his relationship
with the woman ended or changed forever, and needful, meaning he can no
longer suppress his desire for certainty. She thinks, and says, “What you believe is right for the two of us Makes it as right that you are not one of us. If this be needful truth you tell me, Spare
me, and let me have lies hereafter.” She
resents, perhaps, the prospect of being talked out of fidelity to the
past: she would not be able to trust someone who would not respect this
fidelity, nor would she be able to trust herself. She prefers her illusion
of the dead man’s worth, where at least her integrity remains intact.
Told to go, he goes. She stays there alone, until dark comes on and after,
the poem ending in the dubious comfort of “The whole cold ocean’s
healing indifference,” a moment of unguardedness and flat declaration
having changed the two irrevocably. Robinson
wrote a long poem, “The March of the Cameron Men,” on a similar theme.
In it a doctor pays suit to a woman whose husband is dying. He rows her
out on a lake and says, There was no happiness in him alive, And none for you in your enduring him With lies and kindness. It was a wrong knot You
made, you two. In
her copy of the Collected Poems where this passage appears, Emma
left an unknotted coil of blue silk. In
“Late Summer” the woman arguably chooses self-delusion over truth in
sugarcoating the dead man’s liabilities. In addition to the poems where
good intentions have bad outcomes, there is in Robinson a smaller, less
clear-cut class of poems like this one, where some degree of cravenness,
while not exactly producing good outcomes, yields the protagonist a kind
of strength. This is the case in “The Gift of God,” where a mother
overestimates the talents of a son she has impractical ambitions for, but
is at least intensified and confirmed in her maternal love. In
“Flammonde” an inimitable sponge and charlatan proves to have a knack
for diplomacy in the community, and his objective ethical effect is
strangely divorced from his interior. In “Veteran Sirens” the poet is
gazing at some ageing barflies, perhaps prostitutes, and marveling at
their endurance; the tone is more ironic than usual but not quite the
mock-seriousness of “Miniver Cheevy” or “Old King Cole.” The
sirens “fence with reason” in the very fact of their carrying on,
refusing the graceful exit and the consolation prizes of age. Robinson
characterizes them peculiarly, treating the attributes they have
sacrificed, lost, or damaged as third parties not to be confused with the
women themselves: The burning hope, the worn expectancy, The martyred humor, and the maimed allure, Cry out for time to end his levity, And age to soften his investiture; But they, though others fade and are still fair, Defy
their fairness and are unsubdued; The
women’s hope, expectancy, humor, and allure are all mentioned with
definite articles, not possessive pronouns, and then are personified as
crying out. They are also in syntactical antithesis to “they,” the
women, who defy their fairness (yet another third party) and remain free.
The effect of this dissociation is that the hope, expectancy, humor, and
allure are all pitiable, but the women are not. They are almost the
torturers. The effect is explicit in the closing: Poor flesh, to fight the calendar so long; Poor vanity, so quaint and yet so brave; Poor folly, so deceived and yet so strong, So
far from Ninon and so near the grave. (Ninon
was a 17th century French courtesan.) The women go unmentioned
in the litany of compassion, which is naked but oblique—the poet pities
the flesh, vanity, and folly which seem to have been press-ganged into
service. Rhetorically, this obliqueness allows Robinson to introduce
“brave” and “strong” without sounding sentimental, and
“quaint” and “deceived” (and “vanity” and “folly,” for
that matter) without sounding judgmental. The result is a poem of praise
that nevertheless exposes the insalubrious (but effective) mechanics of
the sirens’ longevity.
Robinson’s deepest analysis of this kind of perverse strength is
in “The Wandering Jew,” a poem about a striking, vituperative figure
seemingly stepped out of the Old Testament. The poem is set in New York
and the encounter is strictly face-to-face, with no communal conscience
present to inflect the characterization. In a careful procession of twelve
eight-line stanzas, Robinson arrives at an understanding of the man which
is unsparing but not aggressive, perhaps a sublimated judgment analogous
to the sublimated compassion of “The Poor Relation.” Unusually, only
half the lines rhyme, yielding an unhurried, more deliberative tone than
is typical in the short poems. The poet meets the modern-day Ahaseurus and is impressed by how lonely and out-of-place he seems,
even by the standards of the city. He hopes he is not letting his
compassion show, but discovers he has failed to mask a greater offense: Pity, I learned, was not the least Of time’s offending benefits That had now for so long impugned The conservation of his wits: Rather it was that I should yield, Alone, the fealty that presents The tribute of a tempered ear To
an untempered eloquence. Ahaseurus
has grown inured to pity, to its condescension and distancing, and has
composed himself as a social being to operate at a remove from the people
to whom he delivers his fiery prophecies—“his ringing wealth / Of
manifold anathemas”—which are pitched for the apathetic. What disarms
him is that someone should take him seriously. As the poet listens, the
template of the man’s morality becomes clearer: the future is a
“crumbling realm awaiting us,” ruined by our present perfidy, and the
past, while nominally immutable, is like a mirage in which one may see
whatever casts the present in the worst possible terms. The revolutionary
and the reactionary converge—the present is always inadequate, and the
past is always better. Ahaseurus has in this sense grown addicted to
difference and become a sort of moral shark which must keep moving to
survive. Seeing this, the poet says, New lions ramping in his path. The old were dead and had no fangs, Wherefore he loved them—seeing not They were the same that in their time Had
eaten everything they caught. Robinson
then comes on the knot at the center of the man: if the world is
unredeemable in perpetuity, there is no point in trying to save it, and no
ultimate purpose for him in it. He is wasting his breath. With respect to
this conundrum And I believe his only one, That hushed as if he beheld A Presence that would not be gone. In such a silence he confessed How much there was to be denied; And he would look at me and live, As
others might have looked and died. “Live”
and “died” are of course not literal here; Ahaseurus possesses, to his
misery, the same understanding that the poet has just come to, but his
peculiar strength is to be able to soldier on in his mode where another
person would have “died,” crumbled, given up to the currents of
history and contingency. The source of this strength is a core of pride
which triumphs even when “Humility seemed imminent,” and which
“relegates him out of time / To chaos.” He cannot participate in the
stabilizing orders, however flawed, of the present, or make incremental
corrections to them. The poet can only leave him to his fate, closing, as
he opened, with a description of the eyes—noticing now that they are not
merely “unyielding,” but that they also “flinch—and look the other
way.”
Yvor Winters comments that the poem “should
not be construed, I think, as an attempt to evaluate Jewish character, if
such an entity may be said to exist; it is rather an attempt to examine a
spiritual vice which may occur in any group at a fairly high intellectual
and spiritual level.” The vice is a species of pride; “the result
is spiritual sickness,” a willed inability, in the name of humaneness,
to be human. Close in theme to Louise Bogan’s “Cassandra,” the poem
is about the danger of setting oneself up as a prophet. Although published
in 1920, “The Wandering Jew” can be read as the companion piece to the
earlier “Captain Craig” (1902), which is about the complementary
danger of never listening to prophets in the first place, of remaining
spiritually complacent. The poems probably share the same model in Alfred
H. Louis, a member of the bohemian
circle Robinson fell in with when he first moved to New York.
The circle included the flamboyant William Henry Thorne, who for his part
probably inspired “Flammonde” (Thorne and Louis together were the
models for the New England codgers in “Isaac and Archibald”). Louis
was a small, ancient, and Catholic English Jew—also a Cambridge-educated
lawyer, sometime mental patient, and intimate (he said) of Ruskin,
Meredith, and Trollope. He was rumored to be the illegitimate son of
Benjamin Disraeli. Unkempt and smelling like a goat, he played the piano
expertly and recited reams of poetry. He could talk about anything, and
did at length. While working at
Harvard, Robinson’s eye caught the name “Louis Craig Cornish” on an
application: Alfred Louis became Captain Craig, and was transplanted
to Tilbury Town.
“Captain Craig” was cheekier in its time than it perhaps
appears now, being an extended study of, and kind of paean to, an
ostensible failure. It is a two thousand line blank verse poem that begins
with a line that does not scan (“I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury
Town”). In 1900 Robinson was
calling it a “twentieth century comedy.” Its length relegates it
(with most of Robinson’s long poems) indefinitely to the attic of
American poetry, but it is marvelous—a philosophical portrait that does
not exhaust itself in philosophy or portraiture, in which lives of quiet
desperation are given articulation and spiritual coherence. There is a
humor in Robinson, a wit that is neither facetious nor gloomy, which he
generally cannot find room for in his short poems, but which in “Captain
Craig” bubbles reliably to the surface. Robinson also finds in the
poem’s hero a way of diverting an interest in people into an exposition
of ideas, which, purely considered, he is always somewhat awkward with.
The thinking in the poem is furthermore closer in nature to practical
wisdom, to a phenomenology of human weakness, than it is to a statement of
ultimate beliefs, and is as such less brittle. Owing largely to this
quality “Captain Craig” is a far more successful statement of position
than the later “The Man Against the Sky” or the earlier “Octaves.”
It is tempting to read “Captain Craig” as an interview with
Emerson—Craig is even referred to as “The Sage” at one point, and
Hyatt Waggoner sees him as “an
aged Emerson whom [Robinson] puts to tests more severe, as he supposes,
than any that Emerson had faced, in order to watch the results.”
Commentators generally assert something similar without citing points of
contact, which I find difficult to make. At a crude level, where Emerson
exhorts you to “Trust yourself,” the Captain is opposed in his fiber
to an inner reclusion from other people. It is difficult to imagine him
saying “Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.” While the poem has
Emersonian ingredients (Robinson was rereading him in 1899-1900), Edwin Fussell points out
that its presiding spirit might rather be Ibsen, whom Robinson at the time
thought had the best grasp of the brittleness of the old order and of the
temper of the new one. The Captain makes a novel and sharp critique of
Tilbury Town, and his creed feels arrived at rather than asserted; his
wisdom feels demonstrable and annealed by its passage through the
consciousness of the narrator. On the assumption that no one will actually
read the poem again, I will consider it at some length. The
poem is an account by a callow young poet of a relationship, over several
months, with Captain Craig, a dying, derelict old eccentric. Craig is a
sort of prophet and in the course of the poem delivers three epistles and
a final testament. His disciples consist of the narrator and half a dozen
friends, who take it upon themselves to care for him. There is a hierarchy
of consciences: the town’s, the group’s, the narrator’s, and
Craig’s. Craig, the product of a lifetime of self-invention, sticks out
in Tilbury “like a jest in Holy Writ.” When we meet him he is captain
only of the leaky bark of himself, living by the marginal kindness of
strangers, and there is something in the constitution of the town that
cannot assimilate him. His programmatic uselessness, like Bartleby’s, is
unsettling,. When provoked in conversation, he is casually blasphemous,
weirdly allusive, given to “lettered nonchalance”: “You are the resurrection and the life,” He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings; O
Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.” Notwithstanding
the town’s treatment of him he is content in his role as “outcast
usher of the soul.” On one occasion he begins to pontificate to the
narrator about human efforts to grasp the divine, which the narrator
retorts is so much “nineteenth-century Nirvana talk.” The captain
rises to this, issuing a sermon full of parables and types, including a
starveling child and a hapless soldier who “had a brass band at his
funeral, / As you should have at mine.” He touches almost immediately on
the importance of social interaction to human meaning. The child sets out
in despair to drown himself, and is perched on a rock above a stream: “There came along a man who looked at him With such an unexpected friendliness, And talked with him in such a common way, That life grew marvelously different: What he had lately known for sullen trunks And branches, and a world of tedious leaves, Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind That once had made the loneliest of all Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music; And water that had called him once to death Now
seemed a flowing glory.” The
man proves to have been the soldier, and Craig will have further recourse
to the child, somewhat winkingly, as a mascot of enlightenment. One
gathers an inkling of the role the Captain wants to play in the lives of
his disciples. Craig has a picture of the perfectibility of the race, but at the moment—he seems to critique Puritanism or its legacy—he finds something fear-nourished and faint-hearted in the worship he sees about him, something burdensome that will not be cast off until “you learn to laugh with God.” Craig is at his most Whitmanian at this point, but the narrator is uncompelled, even bewildered that the Captain can seem both pitiable and smug at the same time. The narrator decides pitiable is closer to the truth than smug, and is shaken in retrospect to see how close he came to losing the Captain’s company to pride. At
the tavern that evening his friends mock him: They loaded me with titles of odd form And unexemplified significance, Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,” “Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,” “Bread-fruit
for the Non-Doing,” He
is irritated, less by them than by their immaturity: Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass, Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made Remarks.
The learned Plunket made remarks. He has trouble falling asleep that night, until he admits to himself an affinity with Craig. Through
the end of winter Craig continues “the peroration of his life,” and
the narrator is increasingly convinced of his profundity. When he tells
Craig he will be leaving and will be away for several months, Craig shows
some anxiety, presumably because he has much to tell, has finally found a
sympathetic ear, and fears he does not have long to tell it. Leaving town,
the narrator feels the Captain’s absence in a lessening of the intensity
of his being, “As if the strings of me had all at once / Gone down a
tone or two.” In the days to come he thinks of Craig often, and relates
that Craig wrote a series of letters during their separation (the
epistles), which he warns us will seem dreary, but for his circle were
articles of cheer, though he admits to some condescension on their part to
make them so. In
the first epistle it is May, and Craig is rhapsodic, at first affirming a
Romantic faith in the child as the standard of spiritual health: “
’tis the child, / O friend, that with his laugh redeems the man.”
Craig is almost preternaturally articulate, and in these passages one in
struck by how well Robinson distinguishes and modulates the various voices
in the poem, how peculiarly he contained and orchestrated his multitudes.
Craig waxes Wordsworthian; today, he says, I feel “Primevally alive, and have the sun Shine into me; for on a day like this, When chaff-parts of a man’s adversities Are blown by quick spring breezes out of him— When even a flicker of wind that wakes no more Than a tuft of grass, or a few young yellow leaves, Comes like the falling of a prophet’s breath On altar-flames rekindled of crushed embers,— Then do I feel, now do I feel, within me No dreariness, no grief, no discontent, No
twinge of human envy.” Many
poets, even good ones, would have been content with this; for Robinson, it
is only one lemma in an emerging argument. Craig has not always been this
happy, he admits, and confesses that he has at other times made himself
miserable in the name of wringing compassion out of himself: The sunlight and the breezes and the leaves To think of men on stretchers or on beds, Or on foul floors, things without shape or names, Made human with paralysis and rags; Or some poor devil on a battle-field, Left undiscovered and without the strength To drag a maggot from his clotted mouth; Or women working where a man would fall— Flat-breasted miracles of cheerfulness Made neuter by the work that no man counts Until it waits undone; children thrown out To feed their veins and souls on offal … Yes, I have had half a mind to blow my brains out Sometimes; and I have gone from door to door, Ragged
myself, trying to do something—” He
leaves the narrator with the important question of whether this sort of
sympathetic misery is a waste, and whether one ought to, for the
sufferers’ sake, just enjoy the day. The question, as he sees it, boils
down to this: “What does the child say?” To
answer, Craig introduces two figures, a woman and a man, to embody the two
extremes of outlook and comment on each other. The woman is affluent and
breezily happy, “spendthrift of a thousand joys,” and a sort of
accidental Samaritan. She has everything you could ask for in life
“Except an inward eye for the dim fact / Of what this dark world is.”
The man on the other hand has such an inward eye, is in fact a terminal
grouch, and mocks her and her generosity: “ ‘What is a gift without the soul to guide it? “Poor dears, and they have cancers?—Oh!” she says; And away she works at that new altar-cloth For the Reverend Hieronymus Mackintosh— Third person, Jerry. “Jerry,” she says, “can say Such lovely things, and make life seem so sweet!” Jerry can drink, also.—And there she goes, Like a whirlwind through an orchard in the springtime— The world and the whole planetary circus Were
a flourish of apple-blossoms. Look at her!’ ” For
her part, she confides in the Captain: And he will tell you it is very sweet, But only for a day. Most wonderful! Show him a child, or anything that laughs, And he begins at once to crunch his wormwood And then runs on with his “realities.” What does he know about realities, Who sees the truth of things almost as well As Nero saw the Northern Lights? Good gracious! Can’t you do something with him? Call him something— Call him a type, and that will make him cry […] Or one of those impenetrable men, Who seem to carry branded on their foreheads, “We are abstruse, but not quite so abstruse As
possibly the good Lord may have wished;” ’ ” In
one case the child is “In ominous defect,” in the other in excess.
Craig rephrases the question: “Is it better to be blinded by the lights,
/ Or by the shadows?” One
could reasonably answer the lights, since the woman at least does some
objective good in the world. Craig here begins to chart his middle way,
which involves acknowledging the “demon
of the sunlight,” the dark side of optimism, apprehension of which
is a high order of self-knowledge (here, the notion of the child
allegorically disappears). Beholding this demon, we may then find “sympathy, which aureoles itself To superfluity from you and me, May stand against the soul for five or six Persistent and indubitable streaks Of irritating brilliance, out of which A man may read, if he have knowledge in him, Proportionate attest of ignorance, Hypocrisy, good-heartedness, conceit, Indifference,—by which a man may learn That even courage may not make him glad For laughter when that laughter is itself The
tribute of recriminating groans.” This
indictment of sympathy is not surprising given its treatment in the short
poems, but the point is forcefully sermonized. The indictment arises not
from despair but from a willed and vigilant attempt to avoid it.
The narrator responds to the first epistle, he thinks perhaps too
lightly. The second epistle dates from July and is “facetious and
austere.” The Captain seems to be in a worse mood, almost goofily
nihilistic, comparing himself to “a frog on a Passover-cake in a
streamless desert.” As if to deprecate himself, or to telegraph his
awareness of the portrait of him forming in the narrator’s mind, he
introduces his own “friendless, fat, fantastic nondescript,” “A
vagabond, a drunkard, and a sponge,” “a poet and a skeptic and a
critic” and an accomplished pianist, improbably named Count Pretzel von
Würzburger the Obscene. Pretzel sounds like a Craig clone but
was inspired by Joseph Lewis French, perhaps the most erratic of
Robinson’s friends—he alternated between such gestures as writing
hatchet jobs of Robinson and campaigning to get him the Nobel Prize, and
even showed up at his deathbed to
cadge twenty-five dollars. Pretzel is given to improvisation (not just
in his music), because, he says, something in him prohibits complete
fidelity—his life is a series of “Confessed vagaries.” He
nevertheless has, Craig thinks, “That phosphorescence of sincerity” of
the true artist. One night Pretzel reads to Craig the only sonnet he has
ever composed, a Robinsonian self-parody about a daft and hapless
gentleman named Carmichael who has three green china frogs on his wall and
claims they are Aristophanes’s: “
‘God! how he laughed whenever he said that; And
how we caught from one another’s eyes The
flash of what a tongue could never tell! We
always laughed at him, no matter what The
joke was worth. But when a man’s brain dies, We
are not always glad … Poor Carmichael!’ ” Pretzel
maintains that there is more to him than meets the eye and cautions Craig
not to mistake him for a mere beggar. The “device” of Pretzel sort of
collapses as Craig imagines him memorialized in the narrator’s poetry,
and conflates himself with what is presumably his invention: Then some time in the future, past a doubt, You’ll have him in a book, make metres of him,— To the great delight of Mr. Killigrew, And the grief of all your kinsmen. Christian shame And self-confuted Orientalism For the more sagacious of them; vulture-tracks Of my Promethean bile for the rest of them; And
that will be the joke.” He
makes fun here of his own and Emerson’s brands of prophecy, and Robinson
preempts the reception of “Captain Craig.” Craig closes the second
epistle with a nearly favorable report on Killigrew. Some
time elapses before epistle three arrives. The narrator hears in the
meantime from Killigrew, who includes some of his terrible verses and
assures him “The Sage” (Craig) is doing well enough. The third epistle
then arrives, with a pall of “mortuary joy” on it belying
Killigrew’s report. Craig has made friends with three birds, which he
likens to the Fates. His sanity is not in question however, and he issues
a sort of apologia for the tone of all of “Captain Craig”: Because in my contented isolation It suits me at this time to be jocose, That I am nailing reason to the cross, Or that I set the bauble and the bells Above the crucible; for I do nought, Say nought, but with an ancient levity That
is the forbear of all earnestness.” Craig
relates a dream of lying in a forest, clutching some tools and
contemplating suicide while not daring to fall asleep. A figure
approaches, presumably God, examining his tools and asking what he is
doing there. “I was a carpenter,” says Craig, “But there was nothing
in the world to do.” The figure admonishes him to resharpen his tools
“And then go learn your trade in Nazareth.” Craig marvels at the
curiosity of the dream, and reverts facetiously to a critique of
Killigrew’s doggerel (critique perhaps being a form of Craig’s
carpentry), which is about a talking nightingale met on the way to London
Town:
(Lightly swung the feather)—
‘Pardie, a true and loyal maid’
(Oh, the swinging feather!)—
‘For us the wedding gold is weighed,
For us the feast will soon be laid;
We’ll make a gallant show,’ he
said,—
‘She and I together.’ ” Here is the Captain’s take (would that Robinson had written more poetry criticism): Barring the Town, the Fair Maid, and the Feather, The dialogue and those parentheses, You cherish it undoubtedly. ‘Pardie!’ You call it, with a few conservative Allowances, an excellent small thing For patient inexperience to do: Derivative, you say,—still rather pretty. But what is wrong with Mr. Killigrew? Is he in love, or has he read Rossetti?— Forgive me! I am old and garrulous … When
are you coming back to Tilbury Town? The
narrator returns home to find the Captain bedridden. Craig’s humor is
still good but he cannot provoke the narrator to laughter. Craig notices
his grimace, and scolds him for not having yet learned his lesson about
sympathy: “Your sympathetic scowl obtrudes itself, And is indeed surprising. After death, Were you to take it with you to your coffin An unimaginative man might think That you had lost your life in worrying To find out what it was that worried you. The ways of unimaginative men Are
singularly fierce …” He
promises on the morrow to read his testament. He and the narrator hold
hands for a moment, the Captain looking scared and his fluent manner
belied. It
is now October. The next day Craig reads his testament to the disciples,
having nothing left but words to dispense: “I, Captain Craig, abhorred iconoclast, Sage-errant, favored of the Mysteries, And self-reputed humorist at large, Do now, confessed of my world-worshiping, Time-questioning, sun-fearing, and heart-yielding, Approve and unreservedly devise To you and your assigns for evermore, God’s universe and yours. If I had won What first I sought, I might have made you beam By giving less; but now I make you laugh By giving more than what had made you beam, And
it is well.” He
sees himself as going to take his final place in a tradition of sages, and
sensing his last chance to impart his insights he again decries the
“devil in the sun” and exhorts his disciples to aim upward without
making “crashing an ideal.” He quotes a lugubrious passage of poetry,
possibly the narrator’s, about the sea. Craig criticizes the
“fleshless note / Of half-world yearning in it” and advises that one
should give oneself neither to “flesh contempt” nor to “flesh
reverence.” He realizes he is becoming preachy but begs their indulgence
for a final sermon, in which he remarks on the fine line between
selfishness and love, and indulges in an ostentatious demurral (one of
several) to compare himself to Socrates. A facile negativity, he warns,
has an allure of seriousness, and seems to hold the promise of preempting
despair, but will in the end sequester them and damage them profoundly: There are these things we do not like to know: They trouble us, they make us hesitate, They touch us, and we try to put them off. We banish one another and then say That we are left alone: the midnight leaf That rattles where it hangs above the snow— Gaunt, fluttering, forlorn—scarcely may seem So cold in all its palsied loneliness As we, we frozen brothers, who have yet Profoundly and severely to find out That there is more of unpermitted love In
most men’s reticence than most men think. Craig
feels he has won through in the end, not as a monk or “moral pedant,” “But as a man, a scarred man among men.” He
rejoices in this knowledge and its securities, and upholds his particular
brand of jocular inquiry as a reliable method of exposing those poses that
would otherwise pass as self-deception: In any multitude or solitude, Or mask yourselves in any studied guise Of hardness or of old humility, But soon by some discriminating man— Some humorist at large, like Socrates— You
get yourselves found out. Craig
imagines his funeral procession and being eulogized as “an humorist”
against the background of the brass band and, he anticipates, its
“cornets and trombones.” The best that can be said of him, he thinks,
is that he “Maintained his humor: nothing more or less.” Craig
finishes but is not quite done. The next day he relates a bizarre dream of
meeting Hamlet rooting around on the banks of the Lethe, and then riding
with him on the back of a crocodile. The narrator nearly laughs at him, as
he would have at Carmichael, for making much of little, but realizes in
some final way that Craig is far from deluded: “For the Captain had no
frogs: he had the sun.” In the awkward silence Killigrew is drawn into
discussing the dream, and relates his own comparatively impoverished one
of being sung to by “a sad man.” The Captain approves sarcastically
and falls asleep. The disciples move to go, but he wakes and calls them
back, realizing death is upon him. He begins to speak as if to the air,
but nevertheless sees on their faces an expression of—he cannot tell
which—fear or grief. Behind the one, he says, is an unimproved optimism
that cannot look death in the eye; behind the other an unimproved
pessimism that cannot justify its having listened to the Captain while he
lived. Craig presents his death as the test of the maturity he has been
preparing them for: “But I would have that your last look at me Be not like this; for I would scan to-day Strong thoughts on all your faces—no regret, No still commiseration—oh, not that!— No doubt, no fear. A man may be as brave As Ajax in the fury of his arms, And in the midmost warfare of his thoughts Be
frail as Paris …” He
asks their forgiveness for his abrasiveness. At last he is able to refer
to himself as Socrates, and asks for the cup. His eyes clear. He smiles as
if he hears something, and he utters his last word: “Trombones.”
The death is in a small way redemptive, the teachings a small
success: the friends meet at the tavern again in fair spirits, and know
enough to refrain from platitudes. Plunket begins to pluck some quiet
music on Morgan’s fiddle, but Morgan seizes it and plays “roaring
chords and acrobatic runs,” surpassing himself. The narrator closes
with his memory of the funeral the following day, which is dreary and
cold, but warmed virtually by “the large humor of the thing.” People
pass on the road and stop. The Tilbury Band, presumably including
trombones, plays Handel’s Dead
March in Saul, as it had at Dean’s funeral (and the piece would
be played at Robinson’s as well). The Captain is, in the end, a
somebody. “Captain Craig” makes a human being available to the reader with a focus and exposure practically unknown in American poetry, but throughout its considerable length Robinson maintains the same balance that in the shorter poems allows his subjects to keep their dignity even as they elicit our feeling or judgment. Robinson’s achievement works uphill against a contemporary prejudice, namely, that a worldly failure is ipso facto an implausible source of wisdom. This prejudice has disappeared and even inverted itself, but this only reduces the pressure on Craig’s teachings to justify him. Those teachings—notably on optimism, pessimism, and the nature of mature compassion—nevertheless subsume at a stroke an issue which remains even now extremely vexing to the art, and they neither dilute nor are diluted by Robinson’s humane imperatives. If talk of Robinson’s redemption of his subjects seems hokey or seems to overstate the case for the power of his poetry, consider Alfred Louis’s response when Robinson, with understandable hesitation, gave him the manuscript (then called “The Pauper”): Louis returned it, Robinson said, “with hands trembling and eyes full of tears, saying that perhaps now he knew why he was still in the world, and that it was his best justification for being.” Moody wrote Robinson to tell him that “Roosevelt is said to stop cabinet discussions to ask [John] Hay, ‘Do you know Robinson?’ and upon receiving a negative reply, to spend the rest of the session reading ‘Captain Craig’ aloud.” Trumbull Stickney wrote a review of Captain Craig which unfortunately did not appear until more than a year after the book’s publication, too late to undo the general damage. In it, he wrote (of Robinson), “The honesty and simplicity of his mind, the pathos and kindness of his heart, and above all the humor with which his imagination is lighted up continually have made me begin life over again and feel once more that poetry is part of it, perhaps the truth of it” (emphasis in original). Stickney was dead within a year of a brain tumor; they probably never met. Robinson garners in these responses praise which is extraordinary not in degree but in quality—it is not praise of the typical, literary kind where the work in question is approved of for its resemblance to others that have been approved of. Robinson has changed his reader. The poem has worked. Continued Next Month: Part Two |
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