'I Rouse Your Spine to Ask What Might Be Done'

The cavalier, half-bored manner in which some parents treat their children can be astonishing. Not overt abuse, beatings or neglect, precisely. More like distraction or indifference, the way we might not notice another passenger on the bus. I knew a boy, a fellow fifth-grader, whose parents forgot him when they left to spend the weekend in Detroit – almost thirty years before Home Alone. He was an only child, an awkward kid, not popular, but this time some of us envied him. He became a modest legend among us. To their credit, his parents returned home a little earlier than planned. Here is the poet Robert Mezey on E.A. Robinson (1869-1935): 

“Edwin Arlington seems a stately enough name, but Robinson hated it. That no doubt had something to do with the way he got it. Having already had two sons, his parents, especially his mother, had their hearts set on a girl; a third son was such a disappointment that they neglected to name him for many months.”

 

Finally, in the summer of 1870, Robinson’s family was vacationing at the coastal resort of Harpswell, Maine. Other guests urged that the child be given a name. Suggestions were scrawled on scraps of paper and “Edwin” was pulled from a hat. The woman who had suggested it was a native of Arlington, Mass. Thus: “Edwin Arlington.” Mezey writes, parenthetically:

  

“(I have sometimes wondered if that nonchalant and offhand christening was not the source of Robinson’s penchant for assigning so many of his characters arbitrary, peculiar, often outlandish name—Tasker Norcross, for example, or Bewick Finzer, Roman Bartholow, Umfraville, Miniver Cheevy, Sainte-Nitouche, to list but a few.)”

 

Scott Donaldson confirms the story in his biography Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (2007), and describes the infant’s name as “rather highfalutin.” Adam Tavel includes the story in his sonnet “Elegy for E.A. Robinson,” published in the Spring 2021 issue of Appalachian Review:

 

“Six months and still your parents couldn’t name

the boy they wished a girl. They let a crowd

of tipsy cooers at their resort pluck

Edwin from a hat. Of course you earned your Bs

at Harvard, left with no degree, and failed

to woo your brother’s fiancée--most lives

can spot themselves in butcher apron stains.

Half of what you penned sad Robinson

just plods, and half of that runs too long. And yet

on nights when gloom, no maudlin thing, knifes through

these rooms like news a fevered child has died

I rouse your spine to ask what might be done.

Down rows of tombs in Tilbury Town you hum

at empty plots, a spade in either palm.”

 

Robinson’s best poems, like good stories and novels, become tools for living in the hands of receptive readers, which is why Tavel says he “rouse[s] your spine.” We can read Hardy that way, and Frost and Housman. When it comes to “outlandish” names, consider Robinson’s sonnet “Reuben Bright”:

 

“Because he was a butcher and thereby

Did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;

For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.

 

“And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.”

 

This might account for Tavel’s “most lives / can spot themselves in butcher apron stains.” You’ll find little condemnation of behavior or cheap moralizing in Robinson’s poems. Often what he feels strongest about is precisely what he never mentions or only glancingly. You can call this “New England repression” if you wish. I prefer to think Robinson’s understanding of human behavior was so nuanced, so appreciative of contradiction, that disapproval would be presumptuous and irrelevant. In a remarkable letter Robinson wrote in 1900 to a friend who was conducting an affair with his brother’s wife (a situation Robinson knew first-hand, except for the sexual part), the poet writes:

 

“What I am most afraid of in your case is that you are in danger of forgetting that even the most hellish of human complexities are not to be considered too bitterly in the beginning. We cannot measure anything until we have seen it through.”

 

[Robert Mezey’s essay is the introduction to his edition of The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999).]