Quote of the Day (Edwin Arlington Robinson, on ‘Art’s Long Hazard’)

“Unfailing and exuberant all the time,
Having no gold he paid with golden rhyme,
Of older coinage than his old defeat,
A debt that like himself was obsolete
In Art’s long hazard, where no man may choose
Whether he play to win or toil to lose.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), “Caput Mortuum,” in Sonnets, 1889-1927 (1928)

Quote of the Day (Edwin Arlington Robinson, on a Tycoon Financially Ruined)

“The broken voice, the withered neck,
The coat worn out with care,
The cleanliness of indigence,
The brilliance of despair,
The fond imponderable dreams
Of affluence,--all were there.
 
“Poor Finzer, with his dreams and schemes,
Fares hard now in the race,
With heart and eye that have a task
When he looks in the eye
Of one who might so easily
Have been in Finzer's place.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), “Bewick Finzer,” originally printed in The Man against the Sky (1916), reprinted in Robinson, Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, 2007)

Quote of the Day (Edwin Arlington Robinson, on the Passing of the Old West)

“Dark hills at evening in the west,

Where sunset hovers like a sound

Of golden horns that sang to rest

Old bones of warriors under ground,

Far now from all the bannered ways

Where flash the legions of the sun,

You fade—as if the last of days

Were fading, and all wars were done.”—Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), “The Dark Hills,” from Collected Poems (1921)

Quote of the Day (Edwin Arlington Robinson, on a Wife’s Fear of Her Mate)

“She fears him, and will always ask

What fated her to choose him;

She meets in his engaging mask

All reason to refuse him.

But what she meets and what she fears

Are less than are the downward years,

Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs

Of age, were she to lose him.”—Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos”, in The Man Against the Sky (1916)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve known several women who’ve fallen victim to either emotional or even physical abuse at the hands of a husband or boyfriend. All too often, I’ve wondered what could have led these women—usually with so much going for them—to choose men so beneath them in every way.

I’m not sure one answer fits all situations, but Edwin Arlington Robinson—born on this date in 1869—provides a key that accounts for a number of these circumstances. The aging wife of this poem (her loss of individuality compounded by the lack of a proper name) is forced, as a younger woman, to weigh fears—the unease that something terrible lurks beneath the “engaging mask” of her lover, versus the dread that she will never know deep long-term intimacy. She decides the latter is a more terrible possibility, to devastating effect.

At the same time, the husband has his own terrors that transform him into a monster. “He sees that he will not be lost” implies that, but for her, he could easily be.

An old Irish proverb says, “Better strife than loneliness.” But the shattering reality of this poem is that strife produces loneliness, as the wife is not only isolated from her spouse, but also from the larger community that can only speculate about what has happened to her—in effect, allowing male dominance to continue unchallenged.

Like so much of Robinson’s poetry, this masterful short piece is set in a seaside town, and it echoes with liquid images, starting with that unusual word, “weirs”—i.e., dams used to obstruct water.

The wife’s psychological “weirs,” of course, are woefully inadequate. Robinson doesn’t spell it out—one of Robinson's persistent themes, of course, is the inscrutability of the human heart—but we can imagine all too well some symptoms: the initial charm she falls for; the first hint of disillusion; his relentless ridicule; his unpredictable explosions; his unapologetic unfaithfulness; the signs of slaps and worse physical mishandling that she tries first to excuse, then to hide; her growing separation from friends and other family members; and the final resigned acceptance that she's invested too much in the relationship to break away (“take what the god has given”).

Robinson tends to be overshadowed by a contemporary five years younger, Robert Frost. His much-anthologized poems “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Cory” (the latter adapted into a Simon & Garfunkel song) reflect the consequences of soul-destroying disenchantment. But I don’t think any of his other works match the psychological acuity and sheer power of “Eros Turannos.”

“Love the Tyrant”—the literal translation of the title—lends itself perfectly to what poet James Dickey pointed out about Robinson around three decades after the three-time Pulitzer winner’s death: “No poet ever understood loneliness or separateness better than Robinson or knew the self-consuming furnace that the brain can become in isolation, the suicidal hellishness of it, doomed as it is to feed on itself in answerless frustration, fated to this condition by the accident of human birth, which carries with it the hunger for certainty and the intolerable load of personal recollections.”