'Fullness For the Time That Was to Come'

Donald Justice on Edwin Arlington Robinson: 

“Robinson’s techniques were more or less the same as those of his contemporaries, the meters strict always, so strict and even jingly at times as to suggest light verse. Only—and this makes all the difference—the pieties are not quite in place . . .” 

After two hundred fifty years, America has produced a handful of world-class poets, and many good ones. Robinson I rank as the greatest to emerge between Dickinson and Eliot. His only rival among close contemporaries is Robert Frost. A reader has accused me of exaggerating Robinson’s importance. I’m reminded of Virginia Woolf’s assessment of Middlemarch: “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The same can be said of Robinson. Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Roethke, for instance, write essentially for children and the childish.

 

By “pieties” Justice means the Emersonian bromides and sentimentalities, often religious or warmed-over Romantic in nature, that have dominated so much American verse. That slippery term “realist” applies to Robinson largely because he is seldom naïve about human nature. Neither is he exaggeratedly cynical on most occasions. Robinson’s instincts overlap with the fiction writer’s. Take “Isaac and Archibald” (Captain Craig and Other Poems, 1902). Robinson was a great story teller, among his other gifts. In this poem he encourages the reader to inhabit at least four characters – those named in the title, the narrator and the narrator’s younger self. This complex arrangement of sympathetic ties mirrors our life and the way we preserve it and transform it in memory:

 

“’Look at me, my boy,

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after him, try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

Just as I was to-day. Think of the place

Where we are sitting now, and think of me—

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald.’—The words come back

Almost as Isaac must have uttered them,

And there comes with them a dry memory

Of something in my throat that would not move.”

 

When read aloud the passage sounds almost unbearably plangent – Isaac speaking of himself in the third person, as though already dead, urging the narrator to remember; the narrator’s act of remembrance as a man of the boy he was; the boy’s tacit sense that Isaac’s words are important and deserve to be remembered. And then our narrator remembers his time alone with Archibald and the old man’s warning that echoes Henry James’ Lambert Strether in The Ambassador: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

 

“I’m in the shadow, but I don’t forget

The light, my boy,—the light behind the stars.

Remember that: remember that I said it;

And when the time that you think far away

Shall come for you to say it—say it, boy;

Let there be no confusion or distrust

In you, no snarling of a life half lived,

Nor any cursing over broken things

That your complaint has been the ruin of.

Live to see clearly and the light will come

To you, and as you need it.”

 

There’s another line, almost a throwaway, that makes me look at myself and the boy I was and at my own sons: “And all was as it should be. I was young.” Robinson encourages this sense of mutual vision, of being the see-er and the seen, the remembered and the one who remembers. Isaac and Archibald are at once foolish old men and heroes out of Homer, “the loved and well-forgotten.” The nameless boy remembers that summer moment under the apple tree and his vision of the anticipated future:

 

                                                            “I felt

Within the mightiness of the white sun

That smote the land around us and wrought out

A fragrance from the trees, a vital warmth

And fullness for the time that was to come,

And a glory for the world beyond the forest.”

 

That a poem about a boy and two old men should kindle powerful emotions in a reader is no surprise. When not trivial or pyrotechnical, when the poet subsumes himself in words, a poem can be as humbly potent as a memory.