'Good for More Than One of Us That He Was Here'

Edwin Arlington Robinson was nineteen in 1890 when he met Emma Shepherd, who was four years his senior. Like a million other men, he was smitten and naïve, hopeless in the ways of courtship and romance. Shepherd was a renowned beauty, sensitive and thoughtful. Robinson wrote in “The Night Before” (The Torrent and the Night Before, 1896):

 

“I loved that woman, —

Not for her face, but for something fairer,

Something diviner, I thought, than beauty:

I loved the spirit — the human something

That seemed to chime with my own condition,

And make soul-music when we were together . . .”

 

Interesting precursor to what became known in the sixties as “soul music.” Shepherd and the poet became close friends and remained so, even after she married Robinson’s brother, who became an alcoholic and estranged from Shepherd and their children. He died from tuberculosis, impoverished, in 1909. Shepherd believed Robinson wrote “Richard Cory” about his brother.

 

Robinson is one of the masters of the sonnet. Among his finest is “A Man in Our Town” (Dionysus in Doubt, 1925):

“We pitied him as one too much at ease

With Nemesis and impending indigence;

We sought him always in extremities;

And while ways more like ours had more to please

Our common code than his improvidence,

There lurked alive in our experience

His homely genius for emergencies.

 

 “He was not one for men to marvel at,

And yet there was another neighborhood

When he was gone, and many a thrifty tear.

There was an increase in a man like that;

And though he be forgotten, it was good

For more than one of us that he was here.”

 

In his notes to The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999), Robert Mezey tells us Shepherd and her daughter Ruth, after the poet’s death in 1935, put together a commentary on the poems. As best I can tell, this document has never been published, though Mezey had access to the manuscript. He quotes Shepherd, who describes the sonnet “a beautiful tribute to his brother Dean. Even after he was so completely subjected to the fetters of opium that he no longer practiced his profession, or operated his drug store, he was called back to the Savings Bank to help balance their accounts, and called to the medical emergencies of neighbors.”

 

The poet’s eldest brother, Dean, was a pharmacist who became a morphine addict and took his own life with an overdose in 1899. Shepherd’s autobiographical understanding is no doubt accurate but there’s more to the sonnet than that. All of us have known people like “the man in our town,” confounding mixtures of good and evil, virtues and selfishness, loveable and heartbreaking.