Baron Wormser: Striving with a God

On Edwin Arlington Robinson

By nature, irony is equivocal. To show that things aren’t as they seem is to encourage a sort of fatalist shrewdness. The surprise, alas, is not a surprise. Yet how each irony plays out is unpredictable. The welter of circumstances remains a welter. The ironist’s grim satisfaction is offset by a feel for the random, the cock-eyed determinism that prevails in human affairs. Since socialized surfaces tell us so little, the quest lies in locating what, if any, depth is present, since the irony, replete with incongruities, may be all there is. Or there may be more, what a patient art can search out. 

   Among poets who spent a lifetime on that quest, Edwin Arlington Robinson, known best for the much anthologized “Richard Cory,” stands out for his quiet tenacity. A Mainer by birth, Robinson evinced a temperament steeped in the New England verities, there, where as he put it in his poem “New England,” “the wind is always north-north-east.” Cold comfort was the comfort he knew best. It wasn’t so much the Puritan ashes that he liked to poke but rather the small town constrictions, the mind-set that was, at once, confined in those modest, white clapboard houses yet speculative, rooted in observations and judgments whose narrowness spoke to a knife edge of truth.    

   Robinson was on speaking terms with tragedy, not only with dark, stricken fates (several of his poems are about suicide) but with the commenting chorus. At once readily and warily, he understood the complacency that often rested in the pronoun we. In his best poems, something elemental is occurring – the clash between a lone life and the accrued verity of socialized watchfulness, the adages that are spoken without a second thought. The last stanza of “Richard Cory” begins with the “we,” as in: “So on we worked, and waited for the light / And went without the meat, and cursed the bread.” The envy the townspeople feel for Richard Cory offers a sad escape from the grind of daily living. Appearances not only dissemble; they eat us up alive. The bullet at the poem’s end with which Richard Cory dispatches himself makes for a haunting last line, although the terseness of the suicide feels brittle. Robinson is leaning very hard here, perhaps too hard. The poem is so utterly composed it is almost like an object but fatalism is like that. The moralizing tone that New England bequeathed to Robinson must run into brute fact to register any feeling. And perhaps there is no feeling for Richard Cory, only a confirming or surprised nod from the townspeople when they learn of his demise. He was a notion who conformed to a notion – until he didn’t.

   As a poet, Robinson was an observer of feeling and someone who used his art to register feeling. This creates a sense of something close up yet far away. The modernist sense of discovery, of moving spontaneously from free-verse line to free-verse line, was foreign to Robinson who sought to patiently plumb whatever truths might be lurking. Thus with its very title, a poem like “The Poor Relation” tells the reader the sum of what it is about. A shroud of discouraging platitude encompasses the subject, yet, to his credit, Robinson considered virtually every nuance of the situation– a sobering, relentless, unhappy process that spoke to Robinson’s integrity as a poet. The final stanza begins with these lines: “Bereft enough to shame a sage / And given little to long sighing, / With no illusion to assuage / the lonely changelessness of dying, –” This seems to me to register a delicacy and honesty of a very high order. Robinson’s empathy focused on people but particularly, as I noted, on the situations that people found themselves in. You would not say he was sociologically inclined, more like someone struck by how thorough the human laws were, the laws of money, aging, and loneliness, to name three. For Robinson they were just that – laws from which fleeing was futile. All the striving that the nation-at-large was enamored of and remains enamored of meant nothing to him. “The Poor Relation” ends with these lines: “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.” It was like Robinson to write that she was “safe.” He was ever weighing the consequences, even as he indulged metaphor to say what only poetry could say. 

   He possessed the pride and the courage of the undeceived, yet he also had a sense of how legendary some lives were, how they told more than a simple particular story and how much submerged drama lay in those legends. “The Wandering Jew” is a good example of this impulse. The legend is of a Jew who scorned Christ when Christ was walking toward Calvary. In return, Christ doomed the man to live and wander the earth until the Second Coming, creating a legend of an ultimate outcast, a legend of anguish, a legend of what cannot be undone and must be borne as a fate yet a fate that was self-created, and – not the least – a legend of how human life truly goes nowhere. The marvel of the poem is how thoroughly Robinson enters into the mind and being of the Wandering Jew while maintaining a distance created by the narrator, an “I” who “knew him.” We can take the phrase to be metaphorical in the sense the Wandering Jew was a legend. We can take the phrase to be realistic in the sense that Robinson had such deep feeling for the actuality of the legend. 

   As far as his ability to investigate a complex moral and spiritual situation, Robinson, in a poem like this one, has few peers. (Baudelaire comes to mind and, indeed, Robinson, who knew his French poets, wrote a sonnet about Verlaine.) As the critic Yvor Winters pointed out, Robinson could think, which is to say in this poem he could register the back and forth of trying to come to terms with someone who is unimaginable yet who in a strong sense exists. In prose, Henry James would be a confederate, someone who had the ability to keep looking at the different facets of a situation and not turn away in perplexity, someone who could entertain different points of view and give each its convincing due, someone who was in no rush to come to an emotional conclusion but who, all along, acknowledged the well spring of bitter feeling, how Christ’s agony made for another agony, a seemingly imperishable one. Coleridge’s great “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” also deals with a curse but the curse is clearer in that poem. Robinson treats of the duress of ongoing life where each step signals confinement.  

   The poem consists of twelve eight-line stanzas that deserve to be read and reread in their entirety. I can, however, give the flavor of the sort of exchanges that Robinson favored as where he registers the Jew’s sense of being touched forever: “Yet here there was a reticence / And I believe his only one, / That hushed him as if he beheld / A Presence that would not be gone.” Or where the narrator reflects: “Pity, I learned, was not the least / Of time’s offending benefits / That had for now 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.” At the poem’s end, Robinson notes what must be noted, the Wandering Jew is still alive. The Second Coming has not come. The Jew’s “old, unyielding eyes” must behold the human world again and yet again, a world “that he had long reviled / As fit for devils, not for seers.” Modernity of course has killed such legends, which would only lead Robinson to give an ironic shake of his seer-like head. 

   Given Robinson’s talent for acute consideration, one might not think he would delve into the passions of Eros but in “Eros Turanos” (“Turanos” meaning “tyrant” in Greek) he does. The six eight-line stanzas feel like falling into a drama that has the lingering power of tragedy yet one that would be mitigated once more by the chorus of villagers, the communal “we” that is well-acquainted with the anodyne of pathos. The story is of a woman who is drawn to a worthless man and who remains with him even as he is coldly content since “Tradition, touching all he sees / Beguiles and reassures him.” She merely hides, “While all the town and harbor side / Vibrate with her seclusion.” The townspeople speculate – “The story as it should be” about the lovers who “with a god have striven.” The poem ends with three desolating similes, the final of which has more than a touch of self-conscious tragedy: “Or like a stairway to the sea / Where down the blind are driven.” 

   Robinson wrote before the mass advent of psychology with its explanations and designations, its offers of objective understanding based on a more or less scientific methodology. Yet he wrote after the time when the collective psyche of a New England village could stigmatize as it saw fit. Robinson’s America is one characterized by a species of hopeless individualism where each person suffers alone because suffering has no currency amid the upbeat din of innovation for the sake of innovation. As he put it in “The Wandering Jew”: “I should have held it safe to guess / That all the newness of New York / Had nothing new in loneliness.” Robinson’s art has a quietly stubborn streak, the temper of disillusion. You know the conclusion before it comes yet you feel – and this seems an inarguable aspect of his genius – its accuracy. Robinson came from a very old place where allegory, the imperative play of virtues and vices, was real. With him, it remained real. 

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Baron Wormser’s books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry Press, 2023). Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. Click here to see a list of his books.

Copyright 2025 Baron Wormser