Inscribe a little message for all men.
And few shall read its modest letters there,
And none of them shall ever understand,
Yet all I will perform, nor greatly care,
For I may not be long within the land.
D. G. CARTER.
Gabrielle Bartholow
When Miss Amy Lowell, in an essay upon the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, expressed a doubt whether Mr. Robinson’s recent popularity had not gone to his head and would for the future endanger his work, no one then reading could fully comprehend the ineptitude of her fear. Perhaps the reader severely questioned her, but he could not be convinced until Roman Bartholow appeared to prove that any such statements as Miss Lowell’s were erroneous. Miss Lowell has based her fear, curiously enough, upon the melodramatic poem Avon’s Harvest, in which, though the poet was but playing with dime novel effects, his verse was more masterfully composed than in any of his earlier poems. Avon’s Harvest in its technique alone revealed a tightening of the poet’s art. His cadences were more definite, his vocabulary less elaborate, his construction certain and replete with the artlessness of art. There was to be seen no machinery in this poem, for it had vanished in the poet’s change to an objective method. The faults of Merlin and of Lancelot were due only to construction and that construction itself to an intensely subjective method. In these poems Mr. Robinson did not let the story tell itself as he was wont to do in the now famous short poems, but he must, for Merlin and Lancelot are essentially lyric dramas, sing for himself the love motifs, the tragedies as he himself experienced them. For this reason he must weave the story according to the whispering of his own moods. And in so doing he must lay himself open to attack on the grounds of incoherence of form. Miss Lowell was indeed one of the first of his critics to notice this, yet it is surprising that she should have refused to see in Avon’s Harvest the correction of the faults she censured in the lyrics; to wit, the change of treatment, the growth of sureness that the poet’s objective manner was displaying. That essential objectivity which distinguishes Flammonde, Richard Cory, and Zola, which previously was employed only to etch a character in a paucity of strokes,—that objectivity, with the publication of Avon’s Harvest, Mr. Robinson announced to be the latest of his secrets for the writing of narrative poetry.
Though he followed this poem with others in the objective manner, the most remarkable of which is the little known Avenel Gray, no complete study has appeared until his last narrative poem, Roman Bartholow, a work that is dramatic, expressive, and yet holds about it more folds of dignity and power than even the elegiac The Man Against the Sky. Roman Bartholow, because of its complete and extensive objectivity, impresses one most signally with its inevitability, a characteristic which Mathew Arnold termed the basis for all great poetry. From the opening lines where Bartholow gazes down upon “a yellow dusk of trees” to the close of the last canto there is never a moment when the story does not move silently ahead, dynamically, inevitably, since the author has been able to withhold comment, and since he has purposely avoided an obvious climax. Mr. Robinson can no longer see climax in life, for to him destinies are decided well in advance of any catastrophe, so that the climax that does appear in the poem is one miraculously cast in overtones. No word comes from the poet that it is at hand. No word comes from the characters. The word is found in the reader’s mind, forcing him to believe its presence. He knows that Gabrielle, though she would “shrivel to deny it”, is come to the end of all her hopes. He knows she can only accept her fate. There is nothing more to say. The poet has only set down the theme, for the story has of its own force driven itself to its conclusion with the majestic restraint of an Aeschylean tragedy.