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.