Well, be glad there's nothing worse - Edwin Arlington Robinson's Shakespeare

As much as  I have enjoyed Edwin Arlington Robinson’s books, and as good as The Man against the Sky (1916) is, it may be time for me to switch to his Selected Poems.  Robinson is becoming more abstract; I am becoming more baffled.

Some of the abstraction is a move to an attempt to describe feelings or ideas at a more character-free level – at least I often can’t figure out who the characters are supposed to be – and some of it is a natural side effect of pared-down Robert Browning-like monologues.  I am supposed to be doing a lot of the work, I get that.

Begin with the title of “Bokardo.”  It is a term from formal logic, pure gibberish to me, given as a name to a man stricken with remorse and guilt to the point where he has perhaps attempted suicide.  He is confessing or complaining to the poet, who is unsympathetic.  The 120 lines are the poet’s ironic dismissal of Bokardo’s self-pity:

There’s a debt now on your mind
    More than any gold?
And there’s nothing you can find
    Out there in the cold?
Only – what’s his name? – Remorse?
And Death riding on his horse?
Well, be glad there’s nothing worse
    Than you have told.

Those last lines are brutal, as are a number of others.  It is possible that Bokardo is meant to be Robinson’s brother, who sold the family home at a loss and etc. etc., some list of irritating but petty nonsense that explain nothing about the poem, nor add anything to its imagery or moves toward wisdom:

They that have the least to fear
Question hardest what is here;
When long-hidden skies are clear,
    The stars look strange.

The great treat for me in this collection was the least abstract poem, “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford,” a 25-page monologue of one great poet talking about a greater.  Jonson is having a drink with a Stratfordian:

And I must wonder what you think of him –
All you down there where your small Avon flows
By Stratford, and where you’re an Alderman.

Nominally, he is grilling his guest about Shakespeare and his mysteries – Jonson presents Shakespeare as something of a cipher – but Jonson ends up doing all the talking.  This is all entirely plausible.

I gather something happened in his boyhood
Fulfilled him with a boy’s determination
To make Stratford all ‘ware of him.

The time of the poem is around Shakespeare’s retirement form playwriting, and he is given some kind of crisis of mortality:

“No, Ben,” he mused; “it’s Nothing.  It’s all Nothing.
We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re done;
Spiders and flies – we’re mostly one or t’other –
We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re done.”

Jonson suggests that Shakespeare get a dog, and dang it get his plays published (“what he owes to Gutenberg”).

He’ll do it when he’s old, he says.  I wonder.
He may not be so ancient as all that.
For such as he, the thing that is to do
Will do itself.

Just a wonderful tribute to “this mad, careful, proud, indifferent Shakespeare!” and to Jonson, too.  “I love the man this side idolatry.”

No post tomorrow.

No more than twilight on a ruin - Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Town down the River

I believe I will continue to spend the week rummaging through old books of poems.  No pretensions to any insight.  Look at this; look at that.

Today, The Town down the River (1910) by Edwin Arlington Robinson, his third or fourth book of poems, depending on how I count (#2 contained all of #1).  It was his first book published after acquiring an unlikely patron, President Theodore Roosevelt.  Robinson was no longer a struggling bohemian, and as if to justify his new status, the book contains the most famous poem he would ever write, “Miniver Cheevy.”

I mean, this was once a genuinely famous and popular poem, widely memorized, a common cultural reference, which staggers belief.  It has shriveled up because it is all too relevant.

Miniver loved the days of old
   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
   Would set him dancing.

Too obsessed with King Arthur, World of Warcraft, Renaissance Fairs, etc., dismissive of ordinary life –

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
   But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
   And thought about it.

– he becomes a failure, joining a host of other Robinson characters.  The poem is ripe for an update.

What else is in this book.  As usual, the better poems are shorter, although “An Island,” the Robert Browningish monologue of Napoleon’s last words, is fun.

Ho, is it you?  I thought you were a ghost.
Is it time for you to poison me again?
Well, here’s our friend the rain, -
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine…
Man, I could murder you almost,
You with your pills and toast.  (ellipses in original)

But mostly, the characters are American, from Robinson’s childhood, like “Uncle Ananias,” the story-teller – “Of all authoritative liars / I crown him best” – or more small-town failures like “The Doctor of Billiards”:

Of all among the fallen from on high,
We count you last and leave you to regain
Your born dominion of a life made vain
By three spheres of insidious ivory.

Perhaps he is the same doctor, “’Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,’” who is on trial for a mercy killing a few pages later in “How Annandale Went Out.”  He is acquitted in the last line – “’You wouldn’t hang me?  I thought not.’”  I would write more about the poem if I understood it, but the title character was introduced in “The Book of Annandale” in (1902) and returns in some way in “Annandale Again” (1932).  There is more to this story that I don’t know.

Robinson’s Tilbury Town device has some kind of cumulative effect.

We go no more to Calverly’s,
For there the lights are few and low;
And who are there to see by them,
Or what they see, we do not know.
Poor strangers of another tongue
May now creep in from anywhere,
And we forgotten, be no more
Than twilight on a ruin here.  (from “Calverly’s”)

But it is really Robinson’s melancholy, ironic temperament or stance that brings the Tilbury world to its dim, sad life.

At some point, I should perhaps give up the original volumes of poetry for Robinson’s Selected Poems.  Not yet, though.

E. A. Robinson's abhorred iconoclast, Captain Craig - guest appearance by Count Pretzel von Würzburger, the Obscene

                                                Time throws away
Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows
No death denies not one:  the books all count,
The songs all count…  (p. 5)

Some lines from “Captain Craig” by Edwin Arlington Robinson, a poem that can only be found in one of those books that has been thrown away, Captain Craig: A Book of Poems (1902).  The poem is a discursive, philosophical narrative of 85 pages in the original, which means it is doomed.  No one putting together a Selected Poems of E. A. Robinson or an anthology of American poetry can afford to keep it.

Other poems from Captain Craig go in the anthologies: “Erasmus” (“There were some of them did shake at what was told / And they shook best who knew that he was right”) and the sweet (and just short enough at 15 pages) “Isaac and Archibald,” about two old friends worried each other’s mind is going.  But not “Captain Craig.”

It is an interesting poem just for its subject, the title character.  He is an early example of a great American type, the Bohemian who ends up on the bum.  A hobo or folk singer or poet.  Joe Gould or Neal Cassady or maybe, earlier, Henry David Thoreau.

“I, Captain Craig, abhorred iconoclast,
Sage-errant, favored of the Cosmic Joke,
And self-reputed humorist at large…  (56)

He is beginning his testament, like François Villon, one of his ancestors.  “Sage-errant” is a good pun.  These types are highly unreliable sages.  One of the smart touches in “Captain Craig” is that the narrator and his friends are attracted to but also suspicious of old Captain Craig’s wisdom.

There is a story, but not much of one.  The poet and semi-Bohemian friends have befriended Tilbury, Maine’s eccentric Captain; the poet leaves town but corresponds with Craig; the poet returns for Craig’s death.  Along the way there are a lot of ironic stabs at wisdom and stories of people even nuttier than Craig, the best of whom is

“Count Pretzel von Würzburger, the Obscene
(The beggar may have had another name,
But no man to my knowledge ever knew it)”  (35)

The Count is ““a poet and a skeptic and a critic” and a musician who

“Played half of everything and ‘improvised’
The rest: he told me once that he was born
With a genius in him that ‘prohibited
Complete fidelity,” and that his art
‘Confessed vagaries,’ therefore.”

Another of the classic type, a more extreme version.  Some of these phrases made me doubt the date of the poem, but these are proto-Beatniks.  Count Pretzel provides a perfect parody of the kind of E. A. Robinson sonnets that impressed me so much in Robinson’s previous book, The Children of the Night (1897); never let me say Robinson does not have a sense of humor about himself.

                                            I had sinned
In fearing to believe what I believed,
And I was paying for it…  (13)

Perhaps that gives an example of the kind of wisdom available not necessarily from the mouth but from simply knowing Captain Craig.  “I knew / Some prowling superfluity if child / in me had found the child in Captain Craig” (13).  Robinson was himself one of the types, just not so much as Captain Craig.

At some point I will give up Robinson’s original books and finish him off in a Selected Poems. But not yet.

the flicker, not the flame - E. A. Robinson's favorite poets

Edwin Arlington Robinson made a useful move in The Children of the Night (1897), which I remind myself is his first (and also second) book – he included a series of poems paying tribute to his influences.  Perhaps “tribute” is not the right word.  They are mostly sonnets, scattered through the book, just like the Tilbury Town poems.  They are character sketches, except the drunk is not an inhabitant of a little Maine town but is Paul Verlaine, dead in 1896:

Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?  (from “Verlaine”)

It’s an attack on gossip about artists, really – “let the worms be its biographers.”

The other poems about writers: “Zola,” “Walt Whitman”, “For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold,” “For a Book by Thomas Hardy,” “Thomas Hood,” and most importantly “George Crabbe.”

Hardy is a kindred pessimistic spirit, although I would not guess that from the poem, which is almost cheery:

Then, through a magic twilight from below,
I heard its grand sad song as in a dream:
Life’s wild infinity of mirth and woe
It sang me…

But of course it cheers the pessimist to meet someone who feels the same way.  Earlier he says that Hardy helps him escape pursuit by “hordes of eyeless phantoms,” whatever that means.  I wish I knew which book Robinson meant, but the answer is likely any of them, all of them.  That line about “mirth and woe” is a fine tribute.

George Crabbe is Robinson’s great precursor , at least of the Tilbury Town poems.  Crabbe’s books The Borough (1810) and Tales (1812), among others, describe small town life in England.  Crabbe’s stories are not universally grim, but the best ones like “Peter Grimes” sure are.  He usually needs three to four hundred lines to tell a story, a contrast with Robinson’s sonnets.  He is highly readable.

The most depressing thing about Robinson’s “George Crabbe” is his sense, likely true, that Crabbe is unread:

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, -

My volumes of Crabbe are on the most prominent shelf in the house, between William Cowper and Rubén Darío, but set that aside:

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

I have been revisiting Crabbe to remind myself of what he is like, and I think Robinson is overegging the pudding a little there, but I suppose he is also thinking about himself, unknown and self-published.

The poems about poets are not as vivid as the Tilbury poems but they sure are useful.  Editions of Robinson’s selected poems neglect these poems, including just a few of them, or none.  They are not the best reason to read Robinson, but are a good reason to read The Children of the Night as such.

Edwin Arlington Robinson and the doom we cannot fly from - the dark will end the dark, if anything

Edwin Arlington Robinson is a good example of why I wanted to turn to American writers for a while.  I last read him 25 years ago and came away with one tag, that his best poems are mostly narrative poems.  I have at hand a little book titled Tilbury Town: Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1953) that collects only these poems, little stories or character sketches set in a little town in Maine.  He wrote them over his entire career, from his first book in 1896 to the 1930s.  “Minniver Cheevy,” “Richard Cory,” etc.

A better reader might have remembered something about the poems themselves.

I have revisited Robinson with his second book (an expansion of his first), The Children of the Night (1897).  I do not believe that the title refers to the finest passage in Dracula, which was published in the same year.  I don’t see how it could. I wish it did.

Robinson is a classicist and formalist (so I have some new tags for him).  He is also, in this book, at least, a poet of unrelenting grimness and pessimism:

The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.  (from “The Wilderness”)

His little narratives are full of suicide and quiet despair.

But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half a paradise.  (from “Luke Havergal”)

In that poem, the ghost or dream of a woman is urging the title character to despair and suicide.  Is he guilty of something?  Did he abandon her, or murder her?  No clue.  I really just wanted that one line, “[t]he dark will end the dark,” which perfectly describes the book.

Most of the narrative poems in The Children of the Night are sonnets.  Robinson does not need much room to conjure up a person.  This one, Robinson’s idea of happiness, is worthy in Housman's spirit:

Cliff Klingenhagen

Cliff Klingenhagen had me in to dine
With him one day ; and after soup and meat,
And all the other things there were to eat,
Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine
And one with wormwood. Then, without a sign
For me to choose at all, he took the draught
Of bitterness himself, and lightly quaffed
It off, and said the other one was mine.

And when I asked him what the deuce he meant
By doing that, he only looked at me
And grinned, and said it was a way of his.
And though I know the fellow, I have spent
Long time a-wondering when I shall be
As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is.

The narrative poems even connect at one point, when John Evereldown, who is tormented by cheap booze and cheap women:

So the clouds may come and the rain may fall,
The shadows may creep and the dead men crawl,-
But I follow the women wherever they call,
    And that’s why I’m going to Tilbury Town.”  (from “John Evereldown”)

Anyway, thirty pages later in “The Tavern” this “skirt-crazed reprobate” seems to have murdered the tavern keeper, who is now a ghost “[w]ith his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze,” says the poet.

I wish I knew why I didn’t remember any of these poems.  They are the memorable kind of poem.