'Till Death Itself Is Less Than Change'

Edwin Arlington Robinson remembered his brother Herman’s death in 1909 from the combined effects of tuberculosis, alcoholism and poverty, and feared dying in the crowded ward of a public hospital. About the blunt reality of death itself he was more sanguine. In January 1935, friends secured him a room in the recently opened New York Hospital in Manhattan. Robinson, sixty-five, suspected he was suffering from colitis and perhaps ulcers. Tests were inconclusive and his doctor moved him into his own home. Back in the hospital on January 28, a surgeon performed an exploratory abdominal operation and discovered that inoperable pancreatic cancer had metastasized to his lungs. Friends were divided over whether he had been informed by the doctors of the diagnosis.

 

On March 25, Robinson dictated his final letter, to his niece Marie Robinson. Typically, he was more concerned about George Burnham, his oldest and closest friend from their time at Harvard. He writes:

 

“I seem to be a fixture in this place, until my rather obstinate phlebitis disappears. Perhaps I have never made it quite clear to you that I have been wrestling with a duodenal stasis, an inflamed pancreas, and phlebitis -- which should be enough for one visitation.”

All of his life Robinson had been supported, financially and otherwise, by friends, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who admired his poems. He had one vocation and was qualified for only one job: poet. “Robinson need not have feared dying alone or neglected,” Scott Donaldson writes in his biography of the poet. “Many friends and admirers came to see him in the hospital. His nurses and doctors felt themselves in the presence of a remarkable human being.” Interns and residents were eager to visit him, this American poet who had won three Pulitzer Prizes.

 

In 1956, the poet Winfield Townley Scott published a brief remembrance of his final visit to see Robinson: “And speaking of what so many critics had found to be a ‘philosophy of failure’ in his poetry, he said, ‘I’ve always rather liked the queer, odd sticks of men, that’s all. The fat, sleek, successful alderman isn’t interesting.’ He smiled and, said again, ‘He isn’t interesting.’”

 

Robinson died on April 6, 1935. The poet J.V. Cunningham described him as “a man almost without biography,” adding: “And he knew we do not really know about others; we do not know about him.” Inevitably, when thinking about Robinson’s last days I think about my brother and his final weeks in the hospital and hospice. Three doctors called me into the hall and confirmed what we already suspected. The cancer, first diagnosed in his esophagus, had metastasized to his lungs, liver and cerebrum. That day they moved him to hospice. For five days he was unconscious and then he died.

 

Among Robinson’s abiding themes is stoical endurance. My brother never complained. Robinson writes in “Hillcrest” (The Man Against the Sky, 1916):

 

“Who knows to-day from yesterday

May learn to count no thing too strange:

Love builds of what Time takes away,

Till Death itself is less than Change.”