'Like Scattered Lamps in Unfrequented Streets'

“As a mature artist, Hopper was famous for his dour sensibility. His vision of life was as bleak as Robert Frost’s.” 

That’s Hilton Kramer writing in 1979 about an exhibition of Edward Hopper’s early commercial prints and illustrations. I hadn’t previously made the Hopper/Frost linkage, probably because the paintings are so often urban in their subject matter and the poems are rural. Thematically, though, Kramer is correct. Hopper and Frost share a distinctly modern American sense of solitariness and desolation. Often their people are isolated even while in the company of others. Consider Hopper’s “Automat” (1927).

 

The poet I have always  informally associated with Hopper (b. 1882) is Edwin Arlington Robinson (b. 1869). “Without an independent income and a secure place in society loneliness, dispossession, chronic indigence follow,” writes J.V. Cunningham of Robinson. “Finally, the role is vatic: the poet must intuit and communicate a meaning in the universe. So he kept asking the inadmissible question, What is it all about? Especially considering the pain.” That’s also Hopper’s question. Neither artist found solace in religion.

 

Among Robinson’s earliest published poems is “Octaves” (Children of the Night, 1897), a sequence of twenty-three eight-lined, unrhymed stanzas. They differ from the portrait poems Robinson was writing at the same time and that eventually would make up his finest work. They read like short stories (Robinson wrote fiction before verse). By his standards, "Octaves" is unusually abstract and philosophical. Robinson finds a mutedly consoling sense of solidarity in the human condition, knowing that all of us are strangers and alone. Here is VIII:

 

“There is no loneliness:—no matter where

We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends

Forsake us in the seeming, we are all

At one with a complete companionship;

And though forlornly joyless be the ways

We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams

Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there,

Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets.”

 

And here, in XI, is Hopper’s bleakness:

 

“So through the dusk of dead, blank-legended,

And unremunerative years we search

To get where life begins, and still we groan

Because we do not find the living spark

Where no spark ever was; and thus we die,

Still searching, like poor old astronomers

Who totter off to bed and go to sleep,

To dream of untriangulated stars.”

 

Hopper died on this date, May 15, in 1967 at age eighty-four.

 

[The Cunningham passage is found in “Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Brief Biography” (The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1978).]