THE MASTER MARINER
My grandsire sailed three years from home,
And slew unmoved the sounding whale:
Here on a windless beach I roam
And watch far out the hardy sail.
The lions of the surf that cry
Upon this lion-colored shore
On reefs of midnight met his eye:
He knew their fangs as I their roar.
My grandsire sailed uncharted seas,
And toll of all their leagues he took:
I scan the shallow bays at ease,
And tell their colors in a book.
The anchor-chains his music made
And wind in shrouds and running-gear:
The thrush at dawn beguiles my glade,
And once, ’tis said, I woke to hear.
My grandsire in his ample fist
The long harpoon upheld to men:
Behold obedient to my wrist
A grey gull’s-feather for my pen!
Upon my grandsire’s leathern cheek
Five zones their bitter bronze had set:
Some day their hazards I will seek,
I promise me at times. Not yet.
I think my grandsire now would turn
A mild but speculative eye
On me, my pen and its concern,
Then gaze again to sea—and sigh.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in the village of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, the Robinson family moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, which figures prominently in Robinson’s poetry as “Tilbury Town.” In 1891 he entered Harvard College. A little collection of verse was privately printed in 1896 and the following year marked the appearance of his first representative work, The Children of the Night (1897).
Somewhat later, he was struggling in various capacities to make a living in New York, five years passing before the publication of Captain Craig (1902). This fine piece of psychology, in the cryptic vein of Browning but in Robinson’s own idiom, was brought to the attention of Theodore Roosevelt (then President of the United States), who became interested in the work of the poet and, a few years later, offered him a place in the New York Custom House. Robinson held this position from 1905 to 1910, leaving it the same year which marked the appearance of his most characteristic volume, The Town down the River. Robinson’s three books, up to this time, showed his clean, firmly-drawn quality; but, in spite of their excellences, they seem little more than a succession of preludes for the dynamic volume that was to establish him in the first rank of American poets. The Man Against the Sky, Robinson’s fullest and most penetrating work, appeared in 1916. (See Preface.)
In all of these books there is manifest that searching for truth, the constant questioning, that takes the place of mere acceptance. As the work of a verbal portrait painter nothing, with the exception of some of Frost’s pictures, has been produced that is at once so keen and so kindly; in the half-cynical, half-mystical etchings like “Cliff Klingenhagen,” “Miniver Cheevy,” “Richard Cory”—lines where Robinson’s irony is inextricably mixed with tenderness—his art is at its height.
Technically, Robinson is as precise as he is dexterous; there is never a false image or a blurred line in any of his verses which, while adhering to the strictest models and executed according to traditional forms, are made fresh and surprising. It is interesting to observe how the smoothness of his rhymes, playing against the hard outlines of his verse, emphasizes the terse, epigrammatic vigor of poems like “The Gift of God,” “The Field of Glory” and “The Master,” one of the finest evocations of Lincoln which is, at the same time, a bitter commentary on the commercialism of the times and the “shopman’s test of age and worth.”
Robinson’s blank verse is scarcely less individual. It is, in spite of a certain unblinking seriousness, always modern, always packed with the instant. In “Ben Johnson Entertains a Man from Stratford” we have the clearest and most human portrait of Shakespeare ever attempted; the lines run as fluently as good conversation, as inevitable as a perfect melody. In his two reanimations of the Arthurian legends, Merlin (1917) and Launcelot (1920), Robinson, shaming the tea-table idyls of Tennyson, has colored the tale with somber reflections of the collapse of old orders, the darkness of an age in ashes.
Although he is often accused of holding a negative attitude toward life, Robinson’s philosophy is essentially positive; a dogged if never dogmatic desire for a deeper faith, a greater light. It is a philosophy expressed in Captain Craig:
... Take on yourself
But your sincerity, and you take on
Good promise for all climbing; fly for truth
And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight,
No laughter to vex down your loyalty.
A collection of the poet’s later verse, The Three Taverns (1920), reflects the same high standards of conciseness and craftsmanship. Robinson lives in Peterboro, New Hampshire, during the summer; his home in the winter is in Brooklyn, New York.
MINIVER CHEEVY[[17]]
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
THE GIFT OF GOD[[18]]
Blessed with a joy that only she
Of all alive shall ever know,
She wears a proud humility
For what it was that willed it so,—
That her degree should be so great
Among the favored of the Lord
That she may scarcely bear the weight
Of her bewildering reward.
As one apart, immune, alone,
Or featured for the shining ones,
And like to none that she has known
Of other women’s other sons,—
The firm fruition of her need,
He shines anointed; and he blurs
Her vision, till it seems indeed
A sacrilege to call him hers.
She fears a little for so much
Of what is best, and hardly dares
To think of him as one to touch
With aches, indignities, and cares;
She sees him rather at the goal,
Still shining; and her dream foretells
The proper shining of a soul
Where nothing ordinary dwells.
Perchance a canvass of the town
Would find him far from flags and shouts,
And leave him only the renown
Of many smiles and many doubts;
Perchance the crude and common tongue
Would havoc strangely with his worth;
But she, with innocence unwrung,
Would read his name around the earth.
And others, knowing how this youth
Would shine, if love could make him great,
When caught and tortured for the truth
Would only writhe and hesitate;
While she, arranging for his days
What centuries could not fulfil,
Transmutes him with her faith and praise,
And has him shining where she will.
She crowns him with her gratefulness,
And says again that life is good;
And should the gift of God be less
In him than in her motherhood,
His fame, though vague, will not be small,
As upward through her dream he fares,
Half clouded with a crimson fall
Of roses thrown on marble stairs.
THE MASTER[[19]][[20]]
(Lincoln as seen, presumably, by one of his contemporaries shortly after the Civil War)
A flying word from here and there
Had sown the name at which we sneered,
But soon the name was everywhere,
To be reviled and then revered:
A presence to be loved and feared,
We cannot hide it, or deny
That we, the gentlemen who jeered,
May be forgotten by and by.
He came when days were perilous
And hearts of men were sore beguiled;
And having made his note of us,
He pondered and was reconciled.
Was ever master yet so mild
As he, and so untamable?
We doubted, even when he smiled,
Not knowing what he knew so well.
He knew that undeceiving fate
Would shame us whom he served unsought;
He knew that he must wince and wait—
The jest of those for whom he fought;
He knew devoutly what he thought
Of us and of our ridicule;
He knew that we must all be taught
Like little children in a school.
We gave a glamour to the task
That he encountered and saw through,
But little of us did he ask,
And little did we ever do.
And what appears if we review
The season when we railed and chaffed?
It is the face of one who knew
That we were learning while we laughed.
The face that in our vision feels
Again the venom that we flung,
Transfigured to the world reveals
The vigilance to which we clung.
Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among
The mysteries that are untold,
The face we see was never young,
Nor could it ever have been old.
For he, to whom we have applied
Our shopman’s test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,
As he was ancient at his birth:
The saddest among kings of earth,
Bowed with a galling crown, this man
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,
Laconic—and Olympian.
The love, the grandeur, and the fame
Are bounded by the world alone;
The calm, the smouldering, and the flame
Of awful patience were his own:
With him they are forever flown
Past all our fond self-shadowings,
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown
As with inept Icarian wings.
For we were not as other men:
’Twas ours to soar and his to see.
But we are coming down again,
And we shall come down pleasantly;
Nor shall we longer disagree
On what it is to be sublime,
But flourish in our perigee
And have one Titan at a time.
AN OLD STORY[[21]]
Strange that I did not know him then,
That friend of mine!
I did not even show him then
One friendly sign;
But cursed him for the ways he had
To make me see
My envy of the praise he had
For praising me.
I would have rid the earth of him
Once, in my pride!...
I never knew the worth of him
Until he died.
RICHARD CORY[[21]]
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.