'There Are No Millers Any More'

I’ve just learned of the suicide of a woman I knew casually a long time ago. Such news is always unsettling, as though a fundamental law of nature had been violated. Given what we know of the person, and it may be very little, we apply her circumstances to our own and conclude, “There had to be another way.” But there wasn’t. Such events remind us of our ignorance, our lack of insight into the lives of others, even those we think we know well. Thirteen year ago a friend drove to the top of a hospital parking garage and jumped – an act that seemed utterly antithetical to his nature, or what I had confidently concluded was his nature. I know the common explanations – depression, alcoholism, money troubles. That doesn’t help. 

In his poems, Edwin Arlington Robinson tends to obliquely hint at suicide, as in “Luke Havergal,” “The Growth of ‘Lorraine,’” and “The Man Against the Sky.” Only in his most famous poem, “Richard Cory,” does he bluntly describe it. In “How Annandale Went Out,” the cause of death is ambiguous, as was the death of his eldest brother, Dean, a doctor addicted to laudanum who may have purposely overdosed. In “The Mill” (The Three Taverns, 1920), Robinson reminds us that his earliest serious writing was prose fiction, and he remained a storyteller in verse: 

 

“The miller's wife had waited long,

The tea was cold, the fire was dead;

And there might yet be nothing wrong

‘There are no millers any more,’

Was all that she had heard him say;

And he had lingered at the door

So long that it seemed yesterday.

 

“Sick with a fear that had no form

She knew that she was there at last;

And in the mill there was a warm

And mealy fragrance of the past.

What else there was would only seem

To say again what he had meant;

And what was hanging from a beam

Would not have heeded where she went.

 

“And if she thought it followed her,

She may have reasoned in the dark

That one way of the few there were

Would hide her and would leave no mark:

Black water, smooth above the weir

Like starry velvet in the night,

Though ruffled once, would soon appear

The same as ever to the sight.”

 

As technology changes, as workers are unable to adapt to new circumstances and their skills are no longer needed, some disappear – a reality that seems remarkably pertinent today:  “There are no millers any more.” Robinson was born on this date, December 22, in 1869 and died at age sixty-five in 1935.