Mr. Robinson has discovered that to take Nature as she is is not necessarily to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
Yet this taking of Nature as she is, despite the fact that Mr. Robinson calls the theme a “good deal of a mix up”, in no wise complicates the bare plot. Roman Bartholow, an ailing descendant of an old Maine family, is brought to know again the joy of life by acquaintance with a man that comes to visit him and forgets to go away. This Penn-Raven, though he works a cure for Bartholow, succeeds in doing the opposite for Roman’s wife. He falls in love with her and, before the opening of the poem, has for some time possessed her adequately. Gabrielle is a peculiar character, but let it suffice here to say that the liaison with Penn-Raven is no answer to her problem. In Bartholow she married the wrong man, and the Raven she comes to find intolerable. She is one who has always suffered disappointments. It is no wonder, therefore, that, realizing she cannot fully enter into Bartholow’s renascence as he would have her do, in an effort to save for him his new-found light she drowns herself. Thenceforward the solution is cruelly plain. Bartholow, unaware of Gabrielle’s act and provoked by Penn-Raven, pays him to leave the house. Word is then brought that Gabrielle is drowned. That is in midsummer. It is fall when Bartholow himself leaves the house forever to go whither he will, cherishing the light of his regeneration the while he thinks of Gabrielle who couldn’t follow his rebirth, not being reborn in his manner, and who threw herself away.
These men and this one woman are the persons around whom the whole power of Mr. Robinson’s poetry abides. Yet there is one of whom I have not spoken, a fisherman who, though playing a minor part, frets his useful time upon the stage. He makes his appearance in the two opening cantos and again in the last two. Once in the final scene between Penn-Raven and Gabrielle he is referred to as one who knows more of their relation than even Bartholow. Thus his function is immediately evident. He is the chorus that gives its warning and advice. More than that, he is the mouthpiece to Mr. Robinson’s own thoughts.
That spring when, out of a winter steeped in night, Bartholow was
reborn to breathe again
Insatiably the morning of new life,
there came to him from across the river this prophet-fisherman, this hobo scholiast with his face “to frighten Hogarth” who was at once
Socratic, unforgettable, grotesque,
Inscrutable, and alone.
He came to Bartholow dressed in “a checkered inflammation of myriad hues” and bearing as a peace-offering for his appearance a catch of trout for breakfast. Presumably he came to bring the fish and drink a glass, but incidentally he was curious to investigate this new birth of Roman’s and to discover if it blinded his eyes so that he saw nothing further than acquaintance between Penn-Raven and his wife. Wherefore he sat with Roman and heard recounted the glory of being alive once more. But Umfraville was wise. He was in the eyes of the world “irremediably defeated” and for that reason had hid himself back in the woods where he