'Yielding to the Change Assigned'

I think of Edwin Arlington Robinson as an autumnal poet, just as certain others are vernal. Even when the ostensible subject is elsewhere, the fall shows up in his work as setting or mood. His was a sensibility sensitive to time’s passage, endings, sundown, the imminence of winter and death. But he’s seldom morbid or maudlin. The title character in “Mr.Flood’s Party” says to himself one night: “‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon / Again, and we may not have many more . . .’” 

On October 5, 1893, at age twenty-three, in a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, before he had written the poetry we remember him for, Robinson writes: “It is a warm and magnificent day after a long cold rain, and I naturally think of the spot where the ashes of our old fires, with a few shrivelled corn-husks, are all there is to tell of the many jolly symposiums we held there only few weeks ago. It beats the devil how time creeps away with those skinny shanks of his.”

 

October, of course, is the true Poetry Month, not the imposter April. The month’s poetic bounty is humbling. Apart from the excellence of most, it would be difficult to generalize about the nature of these October poets. Cummings’ work has a spring-like character, though Keats is an autumn man. Robinson was born in December, which further discredits astrological typecasting. Here is his sonnet “The Sheaves,” which always reminds me of the old gospel hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves”:

 

“Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,

Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;

And as by some vast magic undivined

The world was turning slowly into gold.

Like nothing that was ever bought or sold

It waited there, the body and the mind;

And with a mighty meaning of a kind

That tells the more the more it is not told.

 

“So in a land where all days are not fair,

Fair days went on till on another day

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,

Shining and still, but not for long to stay—

As if a thousand girls with golden hair

Might rise from where they slept and go away.”