J He Is a Friend to the Defeated, Too, Except That They Never Return This Friendship

FRIENDSHIP IN THE LIFE AND POETKY

OF EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

APPROVED:

fh$U/.A~ Jh Major Professor

Minov Professor

g. j>. * Directo •* of the Department of English

Demi of the Graduate School FRIENDSHIP IN THE LIFE AND POETRY

OF EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

THESIS

Presented to the Graduate Council of the

North Texas State University in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

By-

Don Ballew Graham, B. A.

Denton, Texas

August, 1964 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. ROBINSON AND HIS FRIENDS ..... T

HI. THE THEME OF FRIENDSHIP IN THE SHORTER POEMS 46

IV. THE THEME OF FRIENDSHIP IN THE LONGER POEMS 30

V. CONCLUSION 178

BIBLIOGRAPHY 188

iii CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Friendship occupies an extremely significant place in. the life and poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, There is indeed a vital connection between, the role friendship played in his life and the poetry he published.

For without the help of a great number of friends, Robinson would probably n«ver have written as much as he did. Friends aided him in a variety of ways: they provided companionship, encouraged his high sense of purpose, secured Mm publishers, wrote in praia© of his work, found him jobs and living quarters, and gave him money. Few men have ever owed as much to their friends as Robinson owed to Ms, Friendship, or what Ridgely Torrence has called the "cult of friendship,1,1 pervades the two realms of hie existence s his life and his art.

As a concrete basis for his survival and as oae of the highest values in his life, friendship overflowed quite naturally into Robinson's poetry. His first two volumes. The Torrent and the Night Before (1896) and The Children of the Night (1897)? contain several poems like "Dear

Friends, " "An Old Story, " and "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding"

^Ridgely Torrence, Introduction to Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinaon (New York, 1940), p. viii. which deal with the nature, problems, and complexities of friendship.

These short poems introduce aspects of the friendship theme that recur

in poem after poem down the long stretch of Robinson's productivity. An

early narrative like Lancelot (1920) poses the question of betrayal, and

Robinson's last work, King Jasper (1935), poses the same question.

From the beginning to end, over a span of forty-odd years of poetic

creativity, the friendship theme is present and often supremely important

in Robinson's works.

The fact of friendship as a main force in Robinson's personal

development has received much attention from biographers. Robinson's 2 3 primary biographers, Hermann Hagedorn and Emery Neff, have

shown clearly the many valuable services that friends performed for

Robinson. They have also revealed the qualities that made Robinson himself such a good friend. In addition, they have held up individual poems such as "Dear Friends" and Captain Craig as examples of poetic expression having ©merged from incidents revolving around friendship in Robinson's life. Neither writer, however, has probed beyond the surface the theme of friendship as a constant, continuing thread running through a large number of the poems. Other biographical material about

2 Hermann Hagedorn, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Bioeraphv (New York, 1938), pp. 112, 187, 2l7, 247. — 3 Emery Neff, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York. 1948). dd. 111. 130, 139, 171. ^ ~ Robinson ha® also centered upon friendship in the life rather than in the

poetry. Several of Robinson's close friends have written useful pieces

about him. (Hagedorn, incidentally, was also a close friend, J Walter

Rollo Brown's Next Door to a Poet, Esther Willard Bates's Edwin

Arlington Robinaon and His Manuscripts, and Laura E. Richards'8 E. A. R.

all stress aspects of Robinson's personality, his shyness and reserve

for instance, without throwing much light on friendship in either his life

or poetry, Two other biographical articles, Denham Sutcliffe's intro-

duction to Untriangulated Stars : Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to

Harry de Forest Smith, 1890-1905 and Ridgely Torrence's introduction to

Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson, comment upon friendship

in the life but do not mention friendship in the poetry.

Although there has been considerable and fruitful effort on the part of biographers to show the importance of friendship in Robinson's life, there has been almost no attempt by either biographers or critics to illuminate friendship as a major theme in the poetry. Critics have dealt profusely with other dominant themes, such as those of failure, the assertion of spiritual values over material values, and the quest for the Light, and have mentioned friendship only in relation to poems obviously concerned with the subject, such as "Reunion" and "Ben Jons on

Entertains a Man from Stratford. » Critical works by Lloyd R. Morris,

Ben Ray Redman, Mark Van Doren, Charles Cestre, Estelle Kaplan, 4 and Yvor Winters have all overlooked friendship as a theme worthy of separate consideration. Only Ellsworth Barnard in his book Edwin-

Arlington Robinson: A Critical Study has devoted any time at all to the thematic implications of friendship in the poetry. Scholarship of

Robinson1® works in periodicals has been confined mostly to interpre- tations of individual poems; and, as compared with the numerous articles appearing steadily on such poets as T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, there has not been much scholarly interest in any aspect of Robinson's art.

The theme of friendship has been almost wholly neglected,

Barnard's comments on the importance of friendship in Robinson's poetry are worth looking at; the seven pages he has written about this

subject are the fullest treatment of the theme of friendship in print,

Barnard finds in the poems recurring emphasis on elements such as these: a belief in human brotherhood, the virtue of loyalty in friendship, the inevitable widening of friendships as the friends grow older, the need for helping others, a respect for the individuality of friends, and the 4 8in of self-centeredness. Values such as altruism and loyalty are identified by Barnard as having their direct source in Robinson's adrair- 5 able relationships with Ms friends, In hi® discussion Barnard mentions the following poems as illustrative of friendship acting as a principal

4 Ellsworth Barnard, Edwin Arlington Robinson; A Critical Study (Hew York, 1952), pp. 242-248. ^

5Ibid., p. 244. concern: "Alma Mater, " The Glory of the Nightingales, Roman Barthoiow,

Captain Craig, "The Long Race, " "Reunion, " "Clavering, " "The Cor-

ridor* M "Flammonde, " "Glass Houses, " and "Two Gardens in Linn dale. "

As will be seen later, these are but a handful of this poems that deal

meaningfully with friendship, Barnard has provided a starting point; he

has recognised friendship as a concern of several poems. Still, however,

he does not nam# friendship as a dominant theme. And, while he doe®

mention some of the narratives in connection with friendship, he does

not elaborate upon friendship as an independent, vital theme in the narra*

tives. Moreover, he does not even register one of the pervading and

powerful motifs of the theme—betrayal. These omissions by Barnard

ax® common to every critic of Robinson; not one has examined the subject

of friendship in either the short poems or in the narratives as completely

as the theme merits.

The aim of this thesis is twofold! to recapitulate the influence® o£ friendship upon Robinson's life and to explore in depth the theme of friend-

ship as it is revealed in the short poems and in the narratives, Little attempt will be made to correlate specific poems with specific incidents in Robinson's life. One does not, after all, always gain very much from the searching for the roots of a poem. Robinson himself in a letter to

L» M* Chase (July 11, 1917) commented on the fruitlessnesa of such en- deavor in regard to his works : I do not recall anything of mine that is a direct transcription of experience. The second chapter will confine itself primarily to a sketch of how friends helped shape Robinson's life and how he himself behaved as a friend to others. The third chapter will attempt to elucidate the friendship theme in the short poems. The fourth chapter will analyze friendship in the narratives, in which the theme receives its most comprehensive expression. It is hoped that from this study two things will emerge: a clearer understanding of a humane and civilized Individual who had, as a friend said, a "genius for 7 friendship, " and, above all, a deeper knowledge of the poetry Robinson's friends helped bequeath to the world. 6 Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1940), p. 103.

?Laura E. Richards, £. A. R. (Cambridge, Mass. , 1936), p. 26. CHAPTER II

ROBINSON AND HIS FRIENDS

E, A. Robinson possessed a rare ability to make friends. Yet there was an essential paradox in this gift of friendship. He was not, as one might expect, an extrovert, a backslapper, but was instead the very opposite. His shyness at the height of his fame was almost legendary. In a crowd--a crowd for Robinson being any group of over eight people he seldom spoke; when he did, what he said was often inane. And he was lonely much of his life; he never married; women at close range generally mortified him. Yet this lonely, inordinately shy man was able to make an exceptional number of lifetime friends. Despite his shyness and in* articulateness, he had qualities that meant something. He once said of the colors of hia poetry, when they were termed as browns and blacks and grays by a critical acquaintance at MacDowell's, that they were pretty fast colors. He might have said the same thing about the personal qualities he brought to a friendship. Honesty, integrity, loyalty, unselfish- ness-«these were fast colors also.

1 Hermann Hagedorn, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Biograohv (New York, 1938), p. 364. * r f 8

All Ms life Robinson was well acquainted with loneliness. He learned about being alone early, as & child growing up in a family that had not expected him and, had its members a choice, on® that would probably not have preferred his coming at all. The family he was born into on December 22, 1869, was already complete and happy, Edward and

Mary Robinson had two delightful aons. Dean, who was twelve that year, 2 and Herman, four. They did not need another. Six months passed before the baby was given a name. Then at a party friends suggested to the mother that, after all, the child ought to be called something. So Edwin was drawn from a lips put in a hat; and Arlington, which happened to be the name of the town where the woman who had supplied the first name s lived, was suitable enough for a middle name.

This third son had all the material comfort a child could want.

Edward Robinson was, according to the standards of Gardiner, Maine, wealthy; he ran a general store, made a great deal of money from investments in lumber, and held a notable position among the townspeople. His wife Mary complemented her husband's success in business. Sensitive, religiously oriented, devoted to her husband, she helped him make their marriage a splendid union. The oldest son, Dean, was an intelligent boy, 2

Ibid., p. 11.

"ibid., p. 13. an excellent student, and his mother's favorite; everybody said lie had a brilliant future ahead. Herman, on the other hand, was like his father, active, strong-willed, exceedingly popular, and also destined, so everybody thought, to a bright business career, * But Edwin Arlington, the last born and belatedly named, did not quite belong; he moved on the fringe of the family. Sensitive, perceptive, intelligent, and lonely, he sensed his aeparateness, his peculiar role as intruder. Hagedorn characterizes the boy's increasing awareness of himself in relation to his family in this fashion;

He became aware, to his dismay, that he was different from others, that he did not fit into the family life, that he was a superfluous and, at bottom, an unwanted item. The discovery was all the more painful because he admired his father and worshipped his mother, and could not understand a love so sufficient and complete that they sometimes did not know that he was there. 5

The father and mother never worried about the older boys; their successes were assured, a question of time. The youngest, however, different, quieter, and less impressive than the other two sons, gave the parents cause for worry. His mother, especially, wondered what would ever become of him. Robinson, always fond of the irony of success and failure in his poetry, created in his own life a deadly irony of his parents' fears,

Ibid. , pp. 21*23.

5Ibid., p. 18. 10 for lie succeeded, while the brothers, with far brighter prospects, failed.

Only Ms parents were not alive to perceive that irony, and Edwin Arlington was too kind, too humble* ever to gloat.

The chronicle of Robinson's friendships begins at Gardiner High

School* where he made several lifelong friends, particularly in the years

1388 and 1889. One of these, Harry Smith, who graduated in 1888 along with Robinson, went on to Bowdoin College, while Robinson remained at

Gardiner for a year of post-graduate study. The relationship with Harry

Smith remained bright all their lives, though the two were seldom to-

gether after Smith's graduation, except for the summer holidays when

Smith came home, Robinson's correspondence with Smith during the

lonely years of 1890-1905 vividly records the poet's struggles, his as-

pirations, his reliance upon friends like Smith, The letters proved a

balm for Robinson; in them he spoke from the heart and evidently received

great delight and sustenance from Smith's replies. In a letter to Smith

in 1891 (June 21), Robinson summed up the importance of his correspond-

ence with his friend:

Our correspondence has been the source of much pleasure to me, not so much for the written words in themselves perhaps, as for the sentiment and friendliness of the thing. 1 have about come to the conclusion that friends are scarce; I can easily count mine upon the fingers of one of my hands and still have fingers to spare. You will understand that I am speaking of friends in the higher sense of the word. I never thought so much of having a host of acquaintances, and in fact my nature 11

is not one to acquire it if I so desired. Once in a great while I meet with, a person in whom I find certain elements that strike a sympathetic chord in my own spiritual anatomy, &

Harry Smith possessed those certain elements that appealed to Robinson.

He was honest, loyal, intelligent, and enamoured of literature. On© of the rich memories for all of Robinson's life was the meetings he and

Harry often held in the "bower, " a secluded spot in, the woods behind 7 Smith's house.

In 1889, when Robinson put in the extra year at Gardiner High, he gloried in a youthful clique called the League of Three. Arthur Gledhill,

Ed Moore, and Robinson constituted the League, whose function was purely convivial in nature and whose normal activities were smoking and conversation. When the school year was over, the League was broken forever, and Robinson lamented its passing. Hermann Hagedorn comments thus on Robinson's feelings: Robinson was desperately lonely. The friends who had been his solace in his boyhood had gone away or withdrawn from him--Arthur Gledhill to college, the three Swantons to en- gineering schools, Ed Moore into the respectable refuge of a job.8

In his letters to Gledhill in 1890, Robinson repeatedly and often senti- mentally stated the melancholy truth that those days of happiness would

L E. A. Robinson, Unti iangulated Stars : Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith, 1890- 1905, edited by Denham Sutcliffe (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), pp. 22-23.

^Hagedorn, p. 47.

®Ibid., p. 56, 12

never return. The sense of loss in this passage from a letter dated

August 14, 1890, is clearly observable t

It is possible, but hardly probable that we, the old "three", together with Doc jjSchumarunT] , will take another "half* day off", and stretch ourselves beneath the shadows of the "Pines'® (you will hear the wind soughing through them yet, sometime when you are alone in after years) as we did in the fail of *87 Yes, it is all over. It will be many years before I shall drift across the common and find you stretched upon the seat where the four walks meet near the G. H. S. . . . ^

Further, in the same letter, Robinson allowed himself to indulge in a bit

of sentimentality worthy of any novice romanticist:

Some dark night you will lie awake and listen to the rain falling upon the roof; your thoughts will travel down to Maine, and your head will be full of belfries, laboratories, "arma virumque cano", Miss Austen, Stuart, Moore, Sawyer, and you may gaze into phantom clouds of smoke and meet the face of ROBINSON10

Another letter to Gledhill three years later (October 28, 1893) reveals the continuing awareness of le temps perdu. Here is Robinson recalling what once (and now through the memory still) sufficed for joy:

Sometimes I almost fancy 1 see you coming into the yard as you used to, with your hands in your trousers pockets. . , . Those were good days* I suppose they have pretty much disappeared from your thoughts by this time, but it is different with me. Some little incident that gave me pleasure five

9. E. A. Robinson, Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1940), pp. 5-6. ~ ' 10_ Ibid., p. 6. 13

or six year® ago will come back to me in all its foolish sim- plicity and cheer me up to an extent that seems incredible,11

One of the poems of those years of loneliness was the "Ballad® of

Dead Friends*" Stanzas like the following might well have grown out of

Robinson'a melancholy and wistfulness :

Life awakes and bums, Age and death defying. Till at last it learns All but Love is dying; Love's the trade we're plying, God haa willed it so; Shroud8 are what we're buying For friends that come and go* 12

With Robinson, it is usually at best conjectural to try to relate specific poems or passages to incidents or moods that might have existed at the

time when the poem was created. Yet this "Ballade" and its refrain,

"For friends that come and go, " must almost certainly reflect some-

thing of Robinson's condition in the years when the high school alliances

were sundered. This poem, published in The Torrent and the Night Before

and reprinted in The Children of the Night, was not preserved in any of 13 the collected editions, Robinson perhaps in time came to realise the

nibid., p. 10.

12 E. A. Robinson* Selected Early Poems and Lettsra, edited by Charles T, Davis {New Vork, 1961), p. 19','

13 Charles T, Davis, editor, Selected Early Poems and Letters (New York, 1961), p. 226. ; ~~ 14 sentimental circumstances surrounding the poem1# composition; at least he realised its particular lack of merit.

Friends moved away, or took jobs; but especially they married.

Matrimony to Robinson was often the most unkindest cut. Emery Neff

describes Robinson's reception of Gledhill's announcement of marriage:

The news of Gledhill's engagement to marry, received just as he came back from Herman's wedding dinner the year before* had made him keenly aware that something set him apart,

Robinson's own words to his friend Gledhill are pertinent: . , you

and Ed Moore are making me feel old, with your marrying and looking 15 out for yourself--excuse me-~yourselves. " Even Harry Smith got

married, and Robinson graciously complimented him: "It is merely a

case of 'not that I loved Robinson less, but--oh, yes, Adela, --more,'

In short I have lost you, and, for your sake, I am heartily glad of it.

An early sonnet that appears to owe its conception explicitly to the marriages of Robinson's friends is "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding, "

The poem is about the drifting apart of friends, the shattering of ties, Yet

Robinson himself later discussed the origins of this poem, and what he

14 Emery Neff, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1948), p. 15.

15 Robinson, letter to Arthur Gledhill, October 28, 1893, Letters, P. 9.

16 Robinson, letter to Harry Smith, May 20, 1894, Untriangulated Stars, p. 153. 15 said totally disagrees with any of the more obvious suppositions on© might make with regard to the pain caused by Gledhill's marriage. He stated;

. . , and the sound of their ringing one evening for the wedding of two people in whom 1 had not the remotest interest brought about a mood in me that made me write "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding, "17

There must have been, however, considerable pain for Robinson in

Smith's marriage, else how could he have written this stricture and carried it out as he did?

When you are married you must not ask me to come to your wedding. I can fancy now the effect it would have upon me,

and the sorry figure I should cut. 18

Whether the poem derived from Robinson's intense feeling® about Ms friends' marriages is less important than the more essential fact that the poem was written. But this instance does show graphically the interrelationship between friendship in Robinson's life and in hi® poetry.

The young Robinson had older friends in Gardiner too. The common bond among them all--Miss Caroline Swan, the probate judge Henry

Webster, Dr. Alans on Tucker Schumann, and Robinson*-was a love of and interest in poetry. This group met regularly at Mies Swan's house in 1887, 1888, and 1889. Of these friends, Dr. Schumann became the closest to Robinson, Hagedorn characterizes the doctor thus : "an odd

17 Robinson, letter to L.N. Chase, July 11, 191?, Letters, p, 103.

18 , Robinson, letter to Harry Smith, May 20, 1894, Untriangulated Stars, p. 157. 16 creature, as lonely as hi® young neighbor; an adequate physician, ruined 19 by poetry; a social being, alienated from his fellows. . . ." Schumann was the first of a long line of queer, downtrodden men whom Robinson was to know intimately and whom he would write about in innumerable poems, Jn 1891 Robinson went to Harvard College, where he stayed two years. Denham Sutcliffe has called this period "the great experience of 20 his young manhood-*even, it may be, of his life, " Besides entering a new, and for Robinson a marvelous, world of books and scholarship and idea#, he also made friends and established contacts that would prove useful the rest of his life. At first, however, friends were hard to find, as

Robinson divulged in a letter to Smith {October 18, 1891) in a most characteristic stance: I have of course had some conversation with quite a number but I have not yet seen one that I have been at all attracted by. This is my nature, and it will probably play the very devil with me all through my life. But as for cultivating familiar- ity with Tom, Dick and Harry, wherever one may be, it is out of the question in my case. 21 In time Robinson did manage to make friend®. One of the first and dearest was Mowry Saben, whom Hagedorn portrays as . . a rebel against

19 Hagedorn, p. 46. 20 Sutcliffe, Introduction to Untriangulated Stars, p. xviii.

21 Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 31. 17

everything-<-hia father, the doctors, the professional moralists, 'society, 22 the whole New England tradition. ..." George Burnham, who had

lost both feet from severe frostbite, became extremely close to Robinson.

If Robinson .did not embrace every Tom, Dick, and Harry a® he himself

admitted, he did seek out those who appealed to him, those-who possessed

rare qualities, those who, as he had told Smith, struck a sympathetic

chord in his nature. The truth is, Robinson had a way of making unusual

friends* Saben and Burnham, like Dr. Schumann and the assortment of

characters Robinson was to be associated with in New York, were far

cries from the humdrum, trapped, and complacent members of the com-

mercial society that Robinson knew and largely despised in his home town, Robinson liked individual man; he wrote of himself in a letter to

Percy MacKaye (September 29, 1920): "I'm a democrat in that I'm as likely to form a lifelong friendship with a coal-heaver as with a million- 23 aire {rather more so, in fact). ..." Hagedorn has commented justly on Robinson's propensity for making friends with diverse types: "He had a catholic taste in friendship which took in clubmen and 'sports', and 24 knew no intellectual snobbery. " Robinson made other acquaintances at

Harvard also; and such men as James R. Tyron and Walter Hubbell, along with Saben and Burnham and of course Robinson, formed the 22 24 Hagedorn, p. 64. Hagedorn, p. 76. 23 Robinson, Letters, p. 121. 18

Corncob Club, an organization similar to the old League of Three in aim

and purpose; that is, it too was dedicated to conversation and convivial- 25

ity. One difference between the two was that the Corncob Club had

the added sophistication of frequent alcoholic stimulation.

One of the things that most disturbed and worried Robinson during

hi® two years at Harvard was his constant, grating awareness of his

life's goal--to be a writer--and the respectability and conformity repre-

sented by his dear friends back in Gardiner. Robins on undoubtedly over-

magnified in hi® own mind what he thought Gardiner was saying about

him. He had not taken a job, nor had he married; further, he wanted to

write. Consequently he knew that the people, the friends, in Gardiner looked upon him with derision. The truth is that Gardiner, Maine, prob-

ably regarded Robinson with no more interest than it did any other of its departed sons. Time and again in the letters.. Robinson can be seen pondering Gardiner's collective opinion of him.

He was afraid of failure in grades at Harvard. In a letter to

Harry Smith (November 2, 1891) he proposed getting a job in Boston should he fail his courses, and added, "That would be better than being at home for everybody--my 'dear friends'--to cast their remarks at and 2 & hold up as an example." In his last letter to Smith before he left Har- vard to return to Gardiner (June 21, 1893), Robinson ended the letter 25 26 Ibid,, p. 71. * Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 36, 19

with dismay:

If you are not at home through the hot weather I don't know what I shall do with myself. When a man seta himself down to it he can generally count the frienda ol his native town upon the fingers of one hand, and then have digits to a pare. At least, I can. 27

The final position that Robinson arrived at in regard to his "friends"

in Gardiner (he always used the quotation marks for sarcastic emphasis)

wa® expressed in his first letter to Smith (October 13, 1893) after his 2g return to what he later termed "this ray town of banishment" (letter

to Smith, May 6, 1894):

I am afraid that my "dear friends" here in Gardiner will be disappointed in me if I do not do something before long, but somehow I don't care half as much about the matter as I ought»29

Though Robinson the man suffered from this abiding sense of failure, it

ia almost certain that this conflict resulting from what he felt Gardiner

demanded of him and what he instinctively demanded of himself served

in a most advantageous way the growth of his poetic skill. The early

sonnet "Dear Friends, " for instance, is unquestionably a poetic expres-

sion of this recurring problem in the letter a--the same problem, incidentally, as Frost's in "The Road Not Taken'—the difficult choice of going his own way regardless of his friends' safer paths. The sonnet's final

2?*bid-> P- 103• 29Ibid., p. 107.

23 IbicL i p. 149# 20

lines record Robins on* s ultimate conviction:

The shame I win for singing i® all mine,

The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours.

H&gedorn has seen in "Dear Friends" a confrontation on the poet*® be-

half of his whole ancestral heritage: "The 'Dear Friends', whom he

addressed in another sonnet, were, in part, at least, Palmers and

Woodbridges, Dudleys and Pearsons, reincarnated in his own troubled 31 being. " Whether the poem's message is directed to the ancestors of

Robinson'a past or to his contemporary society, the message did apparently

derive in large measure from the circumstances that prevailed at the

time when Robinson composed the poem.

The enduring impact of Robinson's Harvard friends upon his per-

sonal and artistic development can hardly b® overstated. In his two years

there he had achieved a permanent union with several men who were to

provide financial as well as moral support in all the lean years that fol-

lowed. Sutcliffe epitomizes the Harvard experience thus: More important, he carried a memory of friends who had taught him what in Gardiner he had begun to doubt, that he could win the esteem of men who shared his standards of achievement. They had not changed, they had established, his conviction that the poet's function is an honorable one and that he could not be making a fool of himself if he tried to fulfill it. Latham, Saben, Tyron, Burnham, Ford, Butler,

30 ^ E. A, Kobinson, Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1954), p. 84. * 31 Hagedorn, p. 88. 21

Hubbell, Johnson were closer names in Ms memory than even Norton's, the only Harvard man to whom he would give the

epithet "great. "

Robinson returned to Gardiner in 1893 to face an appalling number of family misfortunes. That year Herman's investments in Western real estate collapsed, and the family's finances were irreparably damaged.

The father had died the preceding year. Now Dean lived at home, hope- lessly incapacitated by dope addiction and bad health, while Herman, guilt-ridden and despairing, fared no better than his older brother. The mother died an excruciating death, of black diphtheria, in 1896, with no one to bury her but her sons. Those years from 1893 to 1897 were infinitely unhappy for Robinson; it is difficult to see how they could have been otherwise.

During all the loneliness and grief, however, there remained the solace and support offered by friends. Robinson corresponded with his old friend Smith and associated some with both old and new acquaintances in Gardiner. A letter to Smith in December, 1893, reflects the kind of isolation that Robinson had to endure and stresses the importance of the conviviality that he needed and lacked: "To live week after week without a soul to speak to on any congenial topic is hell for a man of my nature.

32Sutcliffe, Introduction to Untriangulated Stars, p. xix. 33, Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 121. 22

Certainly the solid, respectable mass of Gardiner society offered ao con- solation for his loneliness, Gardiner's aims and values ware different from Robinson's, and he could not embrace such a society. He once speculated upon this inability to move freely and fluently in the social world: "I often wonder whether I should be happier if I had the power, 34 or gift, of making friends with everybody,l! Of Gardiner'a-»or the world's—ordinary pursuits, he had almost no interest; invariably he shrank from the Gargantuan and blatant world of commerce, He confided to Gledhill in a letter (October 28, 1893): "I do not know much about the ways of successful men and the thing called 'business1 was always a bug- bear and a mystery to me. Business men are necessities I suppose, and all I ask of them is to keep themselves as such out of my way. " But

Gledhill and Smith were not business men, and Robinson always turned to men like them for companionship. He confided to Smith in a letter

(November 19, 1893): It is much more to me to be able to write a letter to you and know that it will be read with a friendly eye than to converse an hour with someone who is no more to me than are the majority of good fellows who make the world. 36

34 Ibid., letter to Harry Smith, March 4, 1894, p. 135.

35 Robinson, Letters, p. 9.

36 Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 119. 23

Receiving a letter was no less a joy, a deliverance; a letter, he said, 37 was "an event. "

Robinson's reliance upon friends, upon kindred spirits like Smith

and those he met at Harvard, was essential to his enduring the crumbling household and what appeared to him the harsh society of Gardiner. He

saw clearly the importance of the connection that friendship permitted him to maintain with the outside world. He wrote Smith (May 20, 1894):

"The only thing that saves me from total discouragement is the knowl-

edge, or at least the belief, that such men as you, Tyron, Saben, Butler, 38 and Ford, look upon me as a person worth knowing, " Again to Smith,

in a lighter vein, however, he uttered the same necessity of dependence upon friends : "Two or three good friends {if 1 keep on writing letters

like this, I may lose one of them) and some oatmeal porridge are the 39 things that keep me going." Adrift in Gardiner while that bright galaxy

of friends at Harvard graduated and separated, Robinson regretted the

loss of these friends as keenly as he had the loss of his high school companions . He wrote in 1894:

37 Ibid., letter to Harry Smith, May 6, 1894, p, 150.

"^Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 154.

39 Ibid., letter to Harry Smith, May 22, 1896, p. 249. 24

, , » the feeling that the last of my friends leave Harvard this spring is not pleasant. That is the way of this life; we meet and get acquainted* and then we are scattered, over the country--hundreds of miles apart. 40

Yet these four years were not so utterly barren as the letters sometimes make them appear. There were, to be sure, friends in

Gardiner. Among his old friends, the ones he had known most of his life, there were three--Arthur Blair, a banker; Seth Ellis Pope, a teacher; and Linville Robbing, also a teacher—with whom he banded together to form another of those close groups that he seemed so fond of,

Laura Richards» one of Robinson's closest women friends, has commented on Robinson's penchant for small clubs : "For a person who was certainly not 'clubable' in the ordinary sense of the word, E. A. was from his childhood singularly surrounded by groups or clubs of congenial 41 spirits. " Robinson gave to Smith (April 4, 1897) this account of the origin of the Quadruped: At last I have a down-town den to crawl into. Blair, Pope, Robbins and myself have engaged a room over Brown's store (up two flights) at two dollars a month, stove included and we find it most advantageous. I have always wanted something of the kind. ... 42 Hagedorn analyzes the Quadruped's members thus :

40 Ibid., letter to Harry Smith, May 6, 1894, p. 149. 41 . , Laura E. Richards, E.A.R. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 28. 42 Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 282. 25

The four were boyhood acquaintances whose common needs had now made them friends; unequal in gifts, divergent in aim and temperament, alike in gentleness and sincerity and courage and a preference of ideal values over the flesh-pots.*'3

Robinson apparently derived much benefit from the meetings of the Quad* ruped. Through lively and intelligent conversation with sensitive people, he could escape for a time, however brief, the dreary Robinson household as well as the rude and unfeeling social world. The Quadruped acted as a safety valve for loneliness and long hours of hard labor, Emery Neff has identified the banter and conviviality at "The Chrysalis" in Captain

Craig as a reflection of the actual gaiety that prevailed in the meetings 44 of the Quadruped,

Robinson made two new friends in Gardiner who were to prove invaluable in time to come. On® was Laura Richards; the other was John

Hays Gardiner, whom Robinson met at the Richards's home. Both

Mr®, Richards and Hays Gardiner were interested in literature; both grew to respect, admire, and love Robinson, so much so that they, particularly Gardiner, were to become two of the main benefactors in Robin- son's struggle to exist and get his poetry written and published.

For the record of Robinson's friendships after 1897, it is necetsary to depend almost exclusively upon the biographies. The letters after this

43 44 Hagedorn, p. 93. Neff, p. 116. 26 period, such as are published, deal less with, hi® personal life and problems and more with the external affairs of publishing and literature and business in general. Bibliographical problems complicate the question also. The letters to Harry Smith collected in Sutcliffe's Untriangulated

Stars extend only to 1905; moreover, just sixteen were written after 1897, when Robinson left Gardiner for good. In addition, most of the letters

(many are scarcely more than notes) in Selected Letters of Edwin Arling- ton Robinson are concerned with literary subjects. Few indeed (excepting of course the early ones to Arthur Gledhill) reveal the personal, intimate side of Robinson. Even fewer touch upon friendship. Another consideration that might be noted is that as Robinson grew older, he became, it would appear, less given to outbursts of emotion concerning his own condition. He ceased to lay bare his soul. Even to Harry Smith h© grew more reticent as the years passed. The letters of the later years show a restraint, control, and maturity often missing in the youthful epistles to Gledhill and Smith. But then, of course, in 1905 Robinson was thirty-sir and no longer the high school sentimentalist of 1890. On the other hand, there is proof also that Robinson did not cease to write highly personal, self-revealing letters. His correspondence with Laura

Richards (beginning about 1899, while he was in New York) was evidently of a most intimate nature, as indicated by Hagedorn's comments: 27

There was a pact between them that no letters should be kept—though, she reserved the right to preserve passages that were not too sharply revealing--and he talked as in a confessional; a self-depreciating, endlessly self-tormented soul; agonizing over his inadequacies# wondering what she or anyone could think of him, *5

The letters that Laura Richards destroyed were probably much akin to those Robinson had written Smith in the dark years of 1893-97. The loneliness continued* as did the persistent notion of failure.

So he moved to New York in 1897, left Gardiner and the "dear friends, " and set out irrevocably on his mission to write. He was not long in New York before he had established indelible relations with a number of men who were to occupy major roles in his life for many years to come. Four--Titus Munson Coan, Craven Langetroth Betts, William

Henry Thorne, and Alfred H. Louis--along with Robinson, composed the Clan, a group in the tradition of the Corncob Club and the Quadruped.

The Clan held forth frequently at various restaurants where food was cheap and drink abundant. None of these four new friends was ordinary, bourgeois, crass, or Gardiner-ish, Coan, a manuscript doctor who offered to doctor Robinson's poems and a pursuer of the ladies, possessed a keen interest in poetry and pornography and found the two quite compatible. Craven Betts, an itinerant book-dealer, had but recently discovered life and poetry; at forty-odd, he reveled in both. William

ak; 46 ~Hagedorn3 p. 160. Ibid., p. 132. 28

Henry Thorn®, who had served since 1897 as a special patron of Robin - son (he published many of Robinson's early poems in Ms quarterly,, the

Globe, upon the instigation of Miss Caroline Swan, Robinson's old Gardi-

47 ner friend), with his fluctuating Catholic seal, was hardly a conven- tional type. The most eccentric, however, the one most removed from any convention of Philistinism, the really gauche member of a gauche

Clan, was Alfred H. Louis, who became the impetus and model of Robin- son's first long narrative. Captain Craig, Hagedorn provides this de- scription of Louis : He was a little man in his late sixties, a Jew, bearded like a prophet, with little feet and delicate hands, and a goatish smell as though he slept in a stable. His long frock-coat was green with age and dirt, his waist-coat stained with grease, his collar grimy; his trousers were frayed and his shoes broken; but his eyes had in them the suffering of five thousand years. . . . 48

Neff maintains that the poem "Calverly's" is based upon the men who made up the Clan. He cites these as close parallels : Lingard»-Betts

(the incurable idealist); Leffingwell-- Louis (the fall from aspiration to parasitism); and Clavering~»Robinson (the good listener who cherished 49 friends and failed).

47 49 Ibid,, p. 104. Neff, p. 155.

48 Ibid., p. 132. 29

In late 1898 Robinson, out of money, returned briefly to Gardiner 50 and then, with Hays Gardiner's aid, secured a position as President

Eliot's confidential clerk at Harvard College, where he stayed just six months, Reunion with Cambridge gave him a chance to re-experience the exhilarating atmosphere that he had enjoyed there in 1891-1393. He met new friends too, Daniel Gregory Mason, a writer and musician, was drawn to Robinson, and they became lifelong friends and correspondents,

Joseph Lewis French, a colorful, erratic, variously endowed individual, attached himself to Robinson, French talked incessantly, and many people, including most of Robinson's other friends, loathed him. Robin- son, however, according to Hagedorn, "discerned the mark of tragedy'?* in French and felt great sympathy for him. This sympathy was to be sorely strained in the years ahead.

Back in New York in 1899» Robinson resumed the friendships made the year before and met other people as well. Still the circle of intimates remained small. He lived once more with George Burnham, whom he had known at Harvard and with whom he had shared rooms on his initial move to New York in 1897, Burnham he had much respect for, and needed him, as Hagedorn points out, over all the friends of his 52 Harvard days. Burnham's faith in an Absolute was one strong factor

^Hagedorn, p. 146, "^Ibid., pp. 130-131.

51Ibid., p. 151, 30

in Robinson's valuing him so highly. In their friendship is exhibited a

keelstone of all friendships--understanding and trust. By 1902 Robin-

son was troubled with a personal problem that was potentially ruinous

to his writing; he drank too often and too much. He knew, as did his

friends, what alcohol was doing to his creativity. Many in fact were

seriously worried and warned Burnham that something had to be done

about Robinson, Although Burnham broached the question to Robinson,

he did not make it an issue, Hagedorn records a significant conversation

between the two:

. . . Robinson turned abruptly to his friend. "You'd never criticize me for taking a drink if you knew the difference it makes inside me, " "Did you ever hear me criticize you? " Burnham asked.

"No, but you might have a right to, "5>3

Burnham'a trust was well founded, for Robinson learned in time, espe-

cially during the Peterborough years, to forego drinking for writing,

Robinson met Clarence Stedman; and Ridgley Torrence, with whom he was to have a falling out effaced years later by both; and James

Earle Fraaer, the sculptor, Mowry Saben returned from travels. Friends came and went, Robiaeon had a new set of friends, too, those that he established alliances with by his pen. Women were the most notable additions to this form of friendship. Someone would read his poems, 54 like Josephine Peabody, who wrote to Robinson regularly from the

53 54 Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 151. 31 time she first read hie poetry, and would wish to tell him so or just to

become hi® friend. But in New York, as in Gardiner, Robinson, even

with friends present and available through letters, was largely an isolated man and was always alone, Hagedorn stresses Robinson's solitari- ness during these years:

But what fellowship he enjoyed was sporadic; generally he •was alone and, even on those rare occasions when three or four of his friends at one time spread themselves over hi®

bed and filled the room with cigarette smoke, he was alone

All his friends perceived the peculiar loneliness and aura of grief that seemed always with him. They remarked to each other about his habit of sitting before the door and watching it as though something awaited.

Everybody who became his friend seemed to feel a strange sense of responsibility in regard to Robinson. Hagedorn uses the phrase, a "kind 57 of maternal solicitude, " to describe this altruistic attitude that Robin- son's friends inevitably held, Kathryn White Ryan has pointed out

(apparently in conversation with Hagedorn) this maternal impulse:

"There was a quality of stunned white helplessness, a doe- like questioning in his big brown eyes, the manner of a child just off the normal that you had to protect. "58

55 lbid" P- !95. b7Ibid., p. 196. 56 gg Bid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 352. 32

It is interesting to note that Robinson felt the same impulse toward his friends< He wrote Smith (June 29, 1899) s "I have an almost morbid 59 feeling of responsibility toward my friend®. ..."

Friends did protect him too. From first to last they were acces- sible when he needed them. Nor did he have to ask either; Robinson, like a white and silent lamb, managed to exist; to eat; to write; to prove himself successful by any of the world's standards, including Gardiner's; to achieve glory and an honored demise* And friend® were essential.

The record of Robinson's life after 1902 is primarily a chronicle of the services that friends performed.

First of all, they proved invaluable in getting his poetry published.

It was Caroline Swan who enlisted William Henry Thome's interest in publishing Robinson's poems in the Globe. Robinson's first volume,

The Torrent and the Might Before, he paid for himself in 1897. But the second book, The Children of the Night, was financed by a friend from 60 Harvard days, William Edward Butler. The third volume. Captain

Craig, had originally caught the attention of Small, Maynard and Company at the insistence of Miss Peabody. As time dragged ©a with no reply from

Small, Maynard and Company, Robinson grew more and more uneasy. A friend formerly of Harvard, Joseph Ford, offered to see that the book 59 Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 301 60 Hagedorn, p. 112. 33 would be published in the event Robinson died before the New York firm 61 got around to doing anything about Captain Craig. Finally, however, it was the old combination of Hays Gardiner and Laura Richards who persuaded another company, Houghton Mifflin, to issue the poem upon their guaranty. Thus Captain Craig, in a very direct manner, owed its conception and publication to the influence of friends. Alfred H. Louis sparked Robinaon's creativity; Miss Peabody, Hays Gardiner, and Mrs.

Richards insured the result of that energy the respectability of print.

Moreover, all of Robinson's friends campaigned furiously to make the &2 book a success. That Captain Craig did not succeed financially was no fault of Robinson's friends, for they could scarcely have done more.

Tangible aid, things like contracts and money and beds, Robin- son's friends were able to provide. Of course the solace, the companionship, the moral support continued. But a hungry writer often needs more than an expression of faith, more than praise to keep him going. He need® money too--however much he may disdain it. Certainly Robinson required funds to live on. Rooms cost, so did drink and food.

In 1901, a® he was struggling to find a publisher for Captain Cralgf

Robins on changed living quarters. The change came about quite by accident. Jimmie Moore, whom Hagedorn calls the "incarnation of Dionysus, 61 63 Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 185.

62 Ibid., p. 189. 34 was pursuing a girl in Robinson's boarding house; lie asked Robinson lor his chair at dinner, which was next to the woman desired* When Moor® found out that Robinson had no money, he invited him to move to his own boarding house with the rent payable whenever he got the money. Such fortunate occurrences were not uncommon in Robinson's life, Moore kept his bargain too; months later when Robinson apologized to him for still not having paid him, Moore, as Hagedorn describes him, was lavishly generous:

"Robbie, " he roared, "you pay me that money when you get goddam good and ready! "64

Alter Captain Craig was published, Robinson endured probably the most despondent period of Ma life. At least before, in Gardiner, ha had had the advantage of youth and vigor in overcoming obstacles, in keeping Ms spirits up whenever tragedy occurred* Hagedorn entitles this chapter of his life (1902-1904) "The Valley of the Shadow" and comments rhetorically: "The love of life, flaming upward in colorful abandon in the story of the victorious vagabond, sank low and seemed thereafter 65 to burn darkly through smoke. " He was getting older, he considered himself a failure, he had no money. Once Clarence Stedman gave Robin- son some money, saying, "I happen to have a hundred dollars which I 66 don't seem to need. I wonder if you could make use of it? " Henry

64 66 Ibid., p. 200. Ibid.

65Ibid., p. 193. 35

A. Wise Wood, whom Robinson had met only recently, aided him now . . 67 and again.

In 1903 Bumham got Robinson a job as time-keeper with the con- struction crew of the first New York subway. Robinson's old friend,

Joseph French, saw Robinson's plight and wrote a now-famous article for the New York Sunday World called "A Poet in the Subway: Hailed as a genius by men of letters, Edwin Arlington Robinson has to earn his 68 living as a timekeeper,French's deed, motivated probably by a desire to help Robinson while helping himself too, nevertheless outraged

Robinson's intense pride and reserve. This is one notable incident in

Robinson's life where the flexibility of friendship was strained to the breaking point. In time, however, Robinson forgave French, who repaid him years later by launching a one-man campaign to win Robinson the

Nobel prize. The year before, another irascible friend, Alfred H.

Louis, had become so unbearable that Robinson had felt compelled to 69 throw him off. But such instances are rare in a life so impelled and shaped by friends as was Robinson's.

Early in 1905 Willie Butler, one of Robinson's Harvard friends, 70 gave him a low-paying job assembling material for advertising.

67 69 Ibid., p. 199- Ibid., p. 184.

63 70 Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 210. 36

Robinson's spirits could hardly have been lower when suddenly and quite

dramatically he received a letter from President Roosevelt, asking Mm if there was anything the President could do to help a struggling writer.

As a matter of fact, there was, Robinson replied. Within a short time a sinecure at the New York Custom House was granted to Robinson.

The chain of this extraordinary good luck began, almost predictably, with a Robinson acquaintance, a schoolmaster named Dick Richards of

Gardiner, Maine, who suggested to fourteen- year - old Kermit Roosevelt 71 a book of poems, The Children of the Night. Then, after Kermit told his father and his father expressed interest in aiding Robinson, William

Vaughn Moody, with whom Robinson never became intimate because both recognized the other as a rival, and Ridgley Torrence were instru-

mental in persuading Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century, to

suggest to Roosevelt the desirability of providing Robinson what Moody 72 termed a "lazy booth. "

In 1905, too, Robinson changed living quarters again. This tirae he left Jimmie Moore's place, now up for auction after a betrayal of

Moore by a business associate, and moved into a house on Washington

Square. Here he met several people who were to became close friends.

One was Louie Ledoux; another was May Sinclair. A dancer named

Isadora Duncan asked Robinson to marry her. Still he did not engage 71 72 JMd., p. 204. Ibid., p. 213. 3?

in any social life in the sense that Ms friends did. He told James

Bar stow the precis® nature of Ms continuing inhibition: "My only way

of establishing warm relationships with my fellowman is by way of

booze,

The job at the Custom House played out in 1909 with tho end of

Roosevelt's term in office. Now Robinson moved again, this time into

a studio a Mrs. Davidge had prepared for him, which proved that friends

were a till looking after their doe-like poet. For four years, now, Robin-

son had been writing plays, or trying to, for none was successful. Of

course he had as of yet made no money. A new friend, Hermann Hage-

dorn, later to become his biographer, in 1910 urged Robinson to go to

the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Robinson de-

clined, saying that he would have nothing to do with an artists' colony. 74

Meanwhile, he was living with still another friend, Truman H. Bartlett.^

By 1911 he was tired of Bartlett, who in some ways was as uncouth as

Alfred H. Louis, and Hagedorn was finally able to persuade him into going to the Colony. He went, and liked everything about it except the 76 teas« The atmosphere at Peterborough was conducive to work and enabled Robinson to carry out his intention to cease drinking. He made 73 7r. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 254.

74 76 JM1" P* 258» Ibid., p. 270. 38

new friends; to one of these, Parker Fillmore, Robinson revealed one

of the great truth® of his life: "No man has ever had kinder friends than 77 I have had, ,f Old friends continued to aid him, William Butler, Hays

Gardiner, and Louis JLedoux sent him checks occasionally to keep him

going. The summers he spent at the Colony; the rest of each year he

lived with several different families, the Louis Ledoux, the Lewis

Isaacs, the Hagedorns, the Taylors (Mrs, Davidge, who had given him 73 quarters in New York earlier, married an artist named Taylor).

While living with the Taylors, he made friends with a lighthouse keeper

named Moon. The man had had a foot twisted off by a machine. ^

Robinson's life now had a pattern, an order that was always lacking before. Hagedorn outlines the pattern thus : Peterborough for four months, a month in Boston, a few weeks in Cornwall with the Ledoux, a week-end or a week with other friends; the winter in New York; then, when April came, the same procession of visits, in reverse, until June brought Peterborough again, and a summer of work.80

He was still having trouble finding publishers; no one wanted to risk publishing his plays, Van Zorn and The Porcupine. Louis Ledoux, who knew George P. Brett of the MacMillan Company, persuaded him to take a chance on the plays in order to profit from the poetry to come. Thus,

P' 268« 80Ibid., p. 289. 78 81 Ibidt» P' Z80' Ibid., p. 290. 79 Ibid., p. 281. 39 as late as 1914, Robinson was still indebted to friends for the vital task of getting Ms works in print.

In the new order that his life had taken on, he added many to his ever-widening circle of friends. There were Esther Willard Bates,

Elizabeth Marsh, Mabel Daniels, LiUa Cabot Perry, Margaret V/idde- mer, Douglas Moore, Bashka Paeff, Arthur Nevin, Herbert Gorman, and others —the list is long. The point is that Peterborough, a* Hage- dorn notes, provided him the fellowship and relaxation that he had been 32 able to obtain in the past only through letter® and alcohol. Hagedorn © O says, in fact, that Robinson was literally "born anew. " Money, of course, remained a persistent problem. In 1914 Hays Gardiner had 84 left Robinson a aiaable legacy {Neff states the amount was $4, 000; 85 Hagedorn, that it was $2, 000), but old debts had eaten up that sum quickly. Then, in late 1916 friends performed another of those remarkable services that made Robinson's career possible. Lewis Isaacs, a

Peterborough friend, arranged for himself and eleven other friends to contribute to am annual fund for Robinson's maintenance. On Jan- uary 1, 1917, the New York Trust Company notified Robinson that he was to receive anonymously a gift of $100 a month for a year. This 82 Jbid., p. 309. "Hagedorn, p. 315. 33 3 A Ibid., p. 315. Ibid. 84Neff, p. 171. 40 allotment was renewed each year until 1922, when he no longer needed it. Robinson's friends seemed to strike with the swiftness and immedi- acy of beneficent gods*

From 1916 to 1921 the ordered and pleasant life continued, a®

Hagedorn notes : "Peterborough, and the round of visits; Hew York, the theaters, the operas, when he could afford them or friends were 8? hospitable; Boston, with Burnham; Peterborough again." In 1918 he moved in with an old friend, Seth Pope, one of the four members of the old Quadruped, Robinson's other friends did not understand why he bothered staying with Pope; Hagedorn explains the attachment adequately: "Pope was another failure, to be loved and cared for; the last link, too, with the only period of his life which had been realty happy-- 38 Ma high school years, "

Friends continued to work to build Robin*on*a reputation as a poet. In 1919 Percy MacKaye called upon a number of friend* and acquaintances to pay tribute to £• A. R. The result was a compendium of praise published in the New York Times Review of Books entitled 89 "Poets Celebrate E. A. Robinson's Birthday. " Friends never once neglected Robinson--man or poet, 8? 89 Ibid. „ p. 317. Ibid., p. 323. 88 Ibid., p. 322. 41

la 1921 the first edition of Me collected poems was published.

Honors at last ware accorded him, the moat important of which was the Pulitzer Prize, The money from the sale of the collected edition enabled him to become financially independent for the first time in his life. All the dear friends in Gardiner would have to admit that now Robin- son really had succeeded. The years from 1921 to 1935 were marked with public acclaim and glory and increasing income so that Robinson had no cause to worry about money again; but he did, up to the end. His life remained, except for the trip to England in 1923, a steady succession of work and friends and moving in that cyclic fashion begun years ago when he had first come to Peterborough. All the days were brightened with new and old friends. Harry Smith came to see him at Peterborough;

Joseph French came also, insanely jealous now of Robinson's success,, and borrowed money, Robinson, especially after the very substantial income the sale of Tristram brought him in 1927, gave away money freely.

He could remember the long drought of his own insolvency and was an easy target for any panhandler. He paid all Ms old debts and derived pleasure from this deed and from his independence,

The strife-torn years were past, now, and Robinson enjoyed the serenity and security that poetry--his life's vocation and avocation-- had earned him. Yet in the midst of glory he never forgot his friends or what they had done for him. Nobody knew better than he the immense 42- debt he owed them, and nobody was more gracious or civilized in ex- pressing Ms gratitude, his ackno wledgment of their succor. Over the year® the letters reveal numerous instances of Robinson's thankfulness for all the friends, of whom, as has been seen, there were many, despite what Robinson sometimes said about his want of friends in Gardiner,

The truth is that he never lacked for quality or quantity either (except during the Gardiner period) in the friends he made. Here he is in 1919 writing to Percy MacKaye (December 24) about his friends and with a tone of surprise;

My friends have always been a source of grateful wonder to me, but hereafter I shall lie awake o'nights trying to figure out what I have ever been or done, or been and gone and done, to deserve them. I see myself as the dullest duffer that ever lived. . . , 90

This letter to MacKaye was of course written in the years when Robin- son was receiving the $100 a month from the anonymous friends. Here is a much earlier letter, written in 1904 (September 15) to his staunch friend, John Hays Gardiner, which sums up accurately both Robinson's debt of gratitude and the sense of responsibility that he invariably felt when friends helped him. He wrote:

One of the things that gives me faith is the knowledge that I have had a few friends like you. I don't know that 1 have any right to assume that even these friends are going to believe in me much longer, but whatever they do they cannot take back what they have already given. 91

on 9i Robinson, Letters, p. 117. Ibid., p. 54, 43

As Robinson was aware, his friends had indeed given much; as for the future, time proved that he had nothing to fear either, fox the old friends remained loyal while he continued to make new ones. He worried a great deal about his duty, his obligation, to these friends who aided him. In

1908 (July 22) he wrote Daniel Gregory Mason, "My chief concern is a fear that I may turn out a diaappointment to my friends and to T. P.. . . . ^

It is easy to see how Robinson could appreciate the value of his friends during the years of ordeal, for then the need was real and the gift© were almost desperately received. After the fame* however, and the money,

Robinson did not change in the least. Still he remembered what his friends had done for him. A letter to Louis JLedoux in 1927 {September 28, after the financial success of Tristram) expresses as plainly as possible

Robinson's understanding of the role friends played in his life:

I owe everything to my friends already (and to a very few in particular) and so will take a debtor '« advantage of asking a little more in the way of enduring my ways. 93

Thus Robinson, while acknowledging the debt he owed, yet insisted upon pursuing his own path; friendship for him did not permit the compromising of one's aims and individuality. Of Robinson's lifetime concern for friends and his eternal gratitude for them, perhaps the clearest, most characteristic statement was made by Robins on himself. In a letter to Arthur Gledhill in 1890 (July 24), he gave this self-portrait;

IMS" P* Ibid,, p. 154. 44

He never had a great many friends, this fellow, but those he did have he hag never forgotten, and never will* He could forget a petty insult or injury very easily bat somehow or other he never could forget a favor, however small, 94

It is true that in 1890 ha did not have, as he said, "a great many friends"; but that was before Harvard and New York and Peterborough and all the years of his slow ascendance, That h© could forget an insult

or injury but never a favor explains more than any other single factor the quality of the elan vital that created and sustained the friendship in his life.

On April 6, 1935, Robinson died in New York Hospital. His last days, dominated by pain, were relieved somewhat by the visits of a host of friends. According to Hagedorn, they came in an "unending 95 procession, " One of the last was Joseph French, demanding money in his old familiar manner; and Robinson gave this most trying and sycophantic friend five dollars. Up to the last, friends paid tribute to this man who had spent a lifetime writing poetry and searching for people who possessed those elements that struck a "sympathetic chord" in hie 96 own "spiritual anatomy. " Hagedorn, speaking of the long lines of friends who came to see Robinson before his death, eloquently summarizes Robinson's affinity for friends :

94 96 IMd,t , p. 4, Robinson, Untriangulated Stars, p. 23. 95 Hagedorn, p. 375. 45

Friends, men and women, the harvest of a long sowing; the final fruitage of a life which had sought to give rather than g©t# a life which, in its essence, was all an imp&gaioned giving, 97

If his life was an impassioned giving, it was no less an humble receiving. Without those truly remarkable friends, Robins on*s life would perhaps havo been quite different, and America might conceivably have lost one of her most significant poets.

97 Hagedora, p, 379. CHAPTER III

THE THEME OF FRIENDSHIP

IN THE SHORTER POEMS

Robinson's passion for friends found its first artistic expression in the short poems that make up the bulk of his early work. In these poems the friendship theme has no coherent* organized pattern of development. Friendship appears in fragmented forms in a great number of the poem®. Haver is there evident any aim or intent on Robinson's part of presenting a unified treatment of this theme, as perhaps there is with the them® of the perception of the Light, in which on® can see in countless poems an unswerving emphasis upon the 'light behind the stars,1,1 But with the friendship theme, Robinson's camera eye moves willy-nilly. Verities emerge of course, for Robinson is almost always a serious poet writing with a moral intent. What is true about loyalty in friendship is always true, whether in "An Old Story'* or in the late

"Karma. " The post's approach, in retrospect, seems much like that of the motion picture camera; a shot, then the same shot from a

i E. A. Robinson, "Isaac and Archibald, " Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (Hew York, 1954), p. 177.

46 4? different angle, then a whole scene, a glimpse of spoiled friendship, a flash of lost happiness, a betrayal**all presented with no discernible aim except to record the truth of the experience.

In order to examine the phenomenon of friendship as it is treated

in the short poems, it is necessary to impose upon these works an order that is not at all indigenous to Robinson's composition of the poems. The friendship theme in the short poems is a maze of image® and scenes; any order, any pattern must therefor® be created by the reader, for certainly Robinson did not approach the theme in term® of method or planned development, He was simply the artist, the recording instrument; and friendship, a solid, undeniable fact of his life, quite naturally found its way into much of his poetry. The short poems fall into clusters; a number deal with one aspect of the friendship them®, a number with another aspect. These poems contain the essence of everything Robin - son was ever to say about friendship in the long narrative®.

The short poems provide pictures of friendship from nearly every conceivable position. Prosperous friends, unsuccessful friends, happy friends, dead friends, friendships forming, friendships dissolving-* thus the entire spectrum of friendship in the social world is presented.

Friendship begins with the self, Robinson maintains, and is not a priori an absolute good. There is always an essential danger present--the compromising of one's self. Robinson is deeply concerned with the extent of harm a friendship can do to one's individuality. The closing 48

lines of the sonnet "Dear Friends" indicate the problem of the individual life in relation to the demands and pressures created by friendships :

So, friends (dear friends), remember, if you will, The shame I win for singing is all mine,

The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours, 2

The young, struggling poet desires to go his own way, to achieve the difficult union of vocation and avocation that Frost was later to sing so memorably of, to break with the conformity advocated by his friends.

The sense of integrity and individual worth is difficult to establish in the face of the safety and security offered by the friends' more conven- tional ways. "Dear Friends" is a declaration of independence. Another sonnet that expresses this same necessity of individuality is "On the

Night of a Friend's Wedding. " Here the poet is again insisting upon going his solitary path. Friends are valuable; they "most ingenuously 3 prate" of the poet's songs, but the poet yearns for his own identity; he has reached a point beyond which only he can go; friends can go so far, no further, as in "The Man Against the Sky, " in which the protagonist meets his fate alone, before the glare and the roar of eternity. 4 Confronting the "orient Word" is a task for individual man; friends cannot assist in some matters. As Barnard says of Robinson's 2, 4 Robinson, Collected Poems, p. 84, Ibid. , p. 66.

3 Ibid., p. 95. 49

character®, "The great decisions are made, the great visions come, 5 when men and women are alone, "

This need for independence is seen also in the poem "Glass

Houses, " in which Robinson speaks of the right of all men to their

share of independence and freedom:

If he's a pleasure to you, let him b©-~ Being the same to him; and let your days Be tranquil, having each the other's praise,

And each his own opinion peaceably* 6

Friendship must never violate the rights of an individual. Although friendship may mean many things, it does not mean the debasing or the compromising of any person. Barnard sums up this aspect of Robinson's concept of friendship as "a scrupulous respect for the privacy even of one's friends, a rocklike support of the principle that every human 7 being has the right to live his own life. . . *« A superb example of individuality is found in Robinson's early masterpiece, "Ben Jons on En- tertains a Man from Stratford. " Ben Jonson talks of several sides of his friend Shakespeare's personality, but one dominant facet is Shake- speare's incorrigible non-conformity. Thus Ben says of hi® friend, 5™, " Ellsworth Barnard, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Study (New York, 1952). p. 234, * 6 7 Robinson, p, 889. Barnard, p. 247, 50

"Accordingly we have him as we have him--/ Go lag his way, the way 8 that he goes best, " And at the end Ben offers a farther tribute to the uniqueness of hi© friend: "By heaven, 'Twas never yet in Rhodes or Pergamon— In Thebes or Nineveh, a thing like this i "9

So in "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding, " the poet is about to move beyond his friends, beyond their limited vision of him:

But everything is all askew to-night, -» As if the time were come, or almost come, For their untenanted mirage of me To lose itself and crumble out of sight,

Always, Robinson says, one must be sincere and live one's own life.

He summarizes this true-to-thine-own-self idea in Stanza XJU of

"Octaves":

I grant you friendship is a royal thing. But none shall ever know that royalty For what it is till he has realized His best friend in himself. 11

Once a man has perceived the value and dignity of his own self, then he is all the more capable of forming true friendships, of participating in

Robinson, p. 23.

9lbid.. p. 31.

i0lbicL , p. 95. * *lbid., p. 104. 51

12 "the glory of eternal partnership. " A poem that illustrates well the necessity lor individual integrity and eternal partnership is "Two Gar- dene in Linndale, " Interestingly enough, the two characters, Gak.es and Oliver, are not just friends but brothers, who live in amity for years until finally Oakes dies. Barnard comments upon the poem1® sig- nificance : . , , Oliver is left alone, comforted by the thought that he and Oakes had never quarreled. Thus among the needs to which Christian charity in its fullness ministers is the need of every soul to preserve its own identity--a need perhaps less often recognized than many others, *3

In "Peace on Earth" Robinson, speaking through the persona of the mendicant prophet, preaches the truth of individual worth, from which all friendships arise:

Your world is in yourself, my friend, For your endurance to the end; And all the Peace there is on Earth Is faith in what your world is worth, 14

Friendship, then, must originate from a pure source, the unspoiled self. Friendship is for Robinson a form of love, and for friendship to flourish, to thrive, both individuals concerned must assume full

12 Ibid., "When We Can All So Excellently Give, " p. 96.

13 Barnard, p. 247.

14 Robinson, pp. 524-525, 52 responsibility for making it a reciprocal success. As in love, friendship carries with it no small burden of individual effort and integrity.

The moral norm upon which all friendships should be based is expressed in the sonnet "Cliff Klingenhagen. ,} The norm is self-sacrifice. Cliff Klingenhagen (a prime example of Robinson's sometimes preposterous names) invites a person, the narrator, in to dine and serves two drinks, on* of which is wormwood. Cliff takes the worra* wood for himself and gives the wine to his visitor* When asked why, he does not explain. The narrator concludes :

And though J know the fellow, I have spent Long time a»wondering when I shall be As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is. 15

Klingenhagen's act is a supremely Christian one; the inner happiness h© receives is a Christian reward. Cliff Klingenhagen has realized the ultimate worth of the self; he does good from an innate sense of goodness; he would, if put to the test, be completely capable of laying down his life for another's. A second poem, "An Old Story, " presents a direct antithesis of the morality espoused in "Cliff Klingenhagen. " The old story is as follows:

Strange that I did not know him then, That friend of mine! I did not even show him then One friendly sign;

15 Ibid., p. 87. Bat cursed him for the ways he had To make me see My ©sivy of the praise he had For praising me.

I would have rid the earth of him Once, ia my pride. , « I never knew the worth of him Until he died, 16

This, the warp®d friendship, th@ blind denial, is the deviation from the aorta. The narrator never makes the gesture, the Christian act of self-sacrifice, that Cliff Klingenhagen does; in fact he fails to make any gesture at all--that is his error. Instead of the humility of Cliff

Klingenhagen, the narrator displays pride, selfishness, and envy.

Robinson makes this jealousy the narrowest and evilest possible: the narrator envies the praise his friend received for praising him. Finally, too late, the narrator knows the worth of his friend, now dead. These two poems stand as the moral poles of Robinson's concept of friendship.

To suffer the wormwood is best; to betray one's fellow man is worst.

Robinson is generally more concerned with the distortions arising from friendship, the disloyalties and such, than he is with the blissful, idealistic portraits of contented friendship. Even the relationship in "Cliff Klingenhagen" is not exactly a joyous affair, but is indeed grim and sober. There is more drama, usually, in the ruined, the betrayed, the maimed friendship. One of Robinson's finest sonnets is in

*^Ibid., p. 76. 54

this vein, "Karma" present® a study of an apparently successful man 17 who, at Christmas time, sees a "slowly freezing Santa Claus, " which, helps bring to Ms mind a memory that actually scarce needs a

stimulus--the recollection of a ruined friend. The successful man re-

member®, "A friend of his would neither buy nor @@11, / Was he to an- 18 swer for the axe that fell?" The answer is an unqualified yes; all

men in the Robinsonian scheme of things, which is essentially a Chris-

tian scheme, are responsible for all other men. The bell toils for every

one. Cliff Klingenhagen, the narrator of "An Old Story, " and the suc-

cessful man in "Karma. " This last character responds to the tug of

univsrsal brotherhood in a most reprehensible manner;

He magnified a fancy that he wished The friend whom he had wrecked were here again; Not sure of that, he found a compromise; And from the fulness of his heart he fished A dime for Jesus who had died for men. *9

The irony is profound, A man cannot buy off his evil past, not with a

dime or a million dimes. All the Christian virtues plague this man's

days, Robinson abhors the gross hypocrisy and gross pettiness of this

man's attempt to placate his soul. A false friend never ©scape® from the guilt born of his deception. The evil, the friendship betrayed, must be redeemed.

i7Ibid , p. 871. 19Ibid. ia_._ Ibxd 55

"The Corridor" presents a situation similar to that in "Karma. "

Again the narrator cannot efface the memory of a lost friend from his mind. He struggles even to recall the friend's nam# or to remember whether he is alive or dead. The last stanza reveals the anguish the narrator feels, an anguish common to many of Robinson's heroes :

I knew it, and he knew it, I believe, But silence held us alien to the end; And 1 have now no magic to retrieve That year, to stop that hunger for a friend. 20

The cry lost, O lost rings through much of the poetry of Robinson.

"The Corridor" deals with the need and spiritual urgency of communication between man and points out what often happens when no contact is made. Another poem, "A Song at Shannon's, " touches even more significantly this problem of lack of communication and consequent loss.

Two men meet briefly at a tavern; their eyes meet, but the men do not speak, and soon they leave, never to see each other again, Barnard points out similarities between these two poems that are particularly indicative of this phase of the friendship theme. Both poems exhibit the need for communication, the uneasy guilt that results when communication fails, the feeling of something missing between human beings :

The Corridor and A Song at Shannon's, written twenty years apart, show how his mind reached out with eager sympathy to the imagined loneliness of a chance-met stranger; only to be foiled by the hesitancy of either to unlock his heart, and

20 Ibid., p. 221. to be haunted thereafter by the thought of having lost forever the opportunity to know and perhaps to help a fellow human being, 21

Still another poem, "Alma Mater, " reflects this intense awareness of possible loss or blindness oa* negligent betrayal. Here the narrator finds a man dying at Ms doorstep, and the sight causes him to ponder:

When had 1 known him? And what brought him here? Love, warning, malediction, hunger, fear ?

Surely X never thwarted ouch as he?--22

For the Robinson protagonist, it is a great blessing to possess the knowledge that he has never harmed or thwarted another; it is also a rare blessing. The protagonist can never forget a fellow member of the human race. Even Charles Carville (in "Charles Carville's Eyes"), who was never heeded by others in life, is recalled now by the narrator.

The eyes remain a symbol of humanity ill-treated, of a human being who was at beat tolerated and never loved: . . „ w© were out of touch With all his whims and all his theories Till he was dead, ®o those blank eyes of his Might ejseak them. Then w© heard them, every word, 23

Similarly, the narrator in "But for the Grace of God" recalls a friend, an acquaintance, whom the narrator is afraid he once treated badly. His guilt arises from neglect and indifference: "There was a word for ma

21Barnard, p. 26. 23Ibld., p. 83. 22 Robinson, p. 347. 57

24 to say/That I said not,And the narrator, as always, cannot erase the memory of the man he somehow harmed. His query is that of all who betray othersr however slight the betrayal: Why will he not be where he is And not with me ? The hour® that are my life are mine, not Ms—

Or used to be, ^5

The evil dealt with in these poems, whether violently obvious as in

"Karma" or vague and unknown as in "Alma Mater, " is nevertheless malevolent in all instance®. Once a man betrays the brotherhood of man, Ms soul is no longer his own. Friendship means loyalty, love, self»surrender, communication, kindness.

The glimpses in the short poems of serene friendships, of mellow coraaraderie, are few indeed, and most of these are tinged with a kind of gray wistfulness. The pastoral, "Isaac and Archibald," presents the quiet friendship of two old men and a boy and comes as close to ful- filling the blissful, idyllic portrait of friendship as anything Robinson ever created. Still, however, in the old men's love for each other ar© traces of growing senility on both sides. The words Isaac has for the boy cast overtones of melancholy across the beatific vision, words that predict fleeting friendships and lonely solitude:

24, 25 Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 343. 53

You do not know--you have no right to know; Til© twilight warning of experience,

The singular idea of loneliness, • . ^

In addition to the irony of Isaac and Archibald each confiding to the boy that the other is fading rapidly, there is in their words* Isaac's in particular, a basic truth about the ephemerality of life and friendship.

Isaac says:

And when the best friend of your life goes down, When first you know in him the slackening

That comes, and coming always tells the end. , .27

But the boy is young and immortal and does not understand the wisdom of the old man's words. Life, as he conceives it, is altogether joyful: Archibald And Isaac were good fellows in old clothes, And Agamemnon was a friend of mine. 28 At the end of the poem the moment of perfect friendship is humorously depicted:

--and that night There came to me a dream--a shining one, With two old angels in it. They had wings, And they were sitting where a silver light Suffused them, face to face. 29

"Isaac and Archibald" provides a fairly consistent level of sun-permeated happiness. Such a view of friendship is rare in the Robinson

26 28 Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 178.

27 29 , p. 172. Ibid., p. 181. 59 canon. More typical is the picture of spent joy evoked in "Calverly's.41

Here the narrator harks to the remembrance of vanished days of com*' paziionship, There are but two left of the merry group that once in- habited Calveriy's; the old friends are irretrievably separated!

"We go no more to Galverly's, For there the lights are few and low; And who are there to see by them. Or what they see, we do not know. Poor stranger of another tongue May now creep in from anywhere. And we, forgotten, be no more Than twilight on a ruin there. 30

The theme is ancient: sic transit gloria mundi. The instances of happiness and conviviality are transitory; the moment cannot long endure.

The early and quite derivative "Ballade by the Fire" has this rather vapid envoy that expresses the same idea of the evanescent quality of friendship, or joy in life :

Life is the game that must be played; This truth at least, good friends, we know; So live and laugh, nor be dismayed

As on© by one the phantoms go, 31

In only one other poem besides "Isaac and Archibald" does

Robinson succeed in portraying the wholly adequate friendship, the happy and enduring warmth between two men. The poem is "Ben Jons on

Entertains a Man from Stratford. " The narrator, Jons on, talks to a

30 31 Ibid., p. 330. Ibid.. p. 77. 60

visitor from Stratford, Shakespeare's home; Shakespeare is a friend of

both Jons on and the Stratford man, The love Jons on feels for Shake-

speare shines in almost every line, Jons on tells of how he once in*

advertently hart Shakespeare with some remark; these lines show the

depth of love their friendship is capable of:

for I had stung The king of raea, who had no sting for me, And I had hurt him in his memories; And I say now, as I shall say again, I love the man this side idolatry. 32

Charles Cestre has commented on the relationship of Jonson and Shake-

speare as revealed in the poem: "Thus the gigantic genius of Shakespeare overpowers Ben's mind and becomes doubly impressive through the glow 33 of his imaginative wonder and the warmth of his admiring friendship. "

One of the marks of Jonson's friendship is the respect h© accords

Shakespeare's art, which, unlike Jonson's, does not closely follow

Aristotle's rules. Yet Jonson realizes the validity of Shakespeare's method and notes penetratingly: "He might have given Aristotle creeps, / 34 But surely would have given him his katharsis. " Moreover, though

Jonson does not accept Shakespeare's pessimistic philosophy of life, he 32 Ibid., p. 30

33 Charles Cestre, An Introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1930), p. 134. ^

34 Robinson, p. 31. 61 nonetheless allow® Ms friend ©very right to view life amy way he chooses.

Shakespeare says darkly:

It's all Nothing. It's all a world where bags and emperor© Go singularly back to the same dust, » . ^5

Jons on, however, knows exactly what to do for his friend when his de- press ion sinks that lows

When he talks like that. There's nothing for a human man to do But lead him to some grateful nook like this Where we be now, and there to make him drink, 36

In their friendship there is a mutual respect between the men.

Either one may laugh at the other's folly, but not too loudly. Thus Jon- son, who perceives the irony of Shakespeare's aspiring for a House in

Stratford and at the same time knowing the vanity of all human aspiration, laughs gently at Shakespeare's pretensions. And Shakespeare responds to all his friends in this manner:

. . * a mischievous Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame For being won so easy, and at friends Who laugh at him for what he wants the most. 37

The friendship of Jons on and Shakespeare is extraordinary in that each man is extraordinary too; neither belongs to the "sad average.1,38 Thus

35 37 Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 24.

36 38 Ibid. Ibid., p. 20. 62

Ben tells the visitor from Stratford, who is an unusual man too:

. . » for I discern In you a kindling of the flam© that saves-- The nimble element, the true caloric, « , ^9

Shakespeare, above all, has no illusions about life, nor, sig-

nificantly, about friends either. Jonson remarks that his friend "knows

now at what height low enemies/'May reach his heart, and high friends 40

let him fall. " Thus both friends understand clearly the strengths

and limitations of any friendship, including the best, which theirs comes

close to being. The outstanding quality of their friendship is the individ-

uality of each friend* Jonson goes his own way; more importantly, he

allows Shakespeare the same privilege, as Shakespeare in turn allows him. Perhaps Sanson's highest tribute to Shakespeare is seen in these lines i He treads along through Time's old wilderness As if the tramp of all the centuries Had left no roads--and there are none, for him. . , 41

Their friendship is a successful on® because it is based upon love and freedom and respect and individual worth. Isaac and Archibald, Jonson and Shakespeare--these are two friendships in the short poems that are

39 41 . Ibid., pp. 22-23.

40 Ibid., p. 23. 63 happy and lasting. They are virtually the only ones; all the rest are marred in on® way or another,

Robinson provides several portraits of completely unsuccessful attempts at friendship. Some people are incapable of forming friendships; some are unworthy; some simply decline the gambit. All of these unhappy persons belong to Robinson's world. Aaron Stark, whose

©yes shine "like little dollar© in the dark, " ia a man totally dehumanized by greed and doomed by that same greed to go friendless 43 throughout life, "A loveless exile moving with a staff,11 The wastrel in "Doctor of Billiards" is unworthy of being the friend of 44 anyone, though still the narrator cries, "We call, but you remain. "

This man, who has given his life to the clicking balls, prompts the narrator to an acute criticism of wasted ability: "But when your false, unhallowed laugh occurs / We seem to think there may be something else. " A related poem that shows the inverse of "Doctor of Billiards' is "Shadrach O'Leary, " in which a poet who squanders his time and talent writing pretty lyrics changes to an artist of serious intent and becomes for the narrator "a man to know-- / A failure spared, a

4Z»i . i n/ 44 Ibld<' 86* Ibid., p. 345.

« 45 Ifcid. Ibid. 64

Shadrach of the Gleam,The poet, unlike the billiard player, now possesses something to build a friendship on - - individual worth,

And there are others, like the two men in "A Song afc Shannon's, " who decline the venture o£ becoming friends. They walk out of the tavern separately, having watched each other's faces while the song played, and go alone to their sad destinies. The closing lines of the poem reveal the coldest, the most pathetic lack of human warmth and communication evident anywhere in Robinson's poetry (with the possible exception of the scene of the marching rats in The Man Who Died Twice);

Neither met The other's eyes again or said a word* Each to his loneliness or to his kind, Went his own way, and with his own regret, Not knowing what the other may have heard, 47

The oddest instance of the peculiar chemistry involved in forming friendships is seen in "Fleming Helphenstina," in which a gusty man with a booming "Hollo" greets the narrator "and laughed and chaffed 48 like any friend of mine, " But there is something false and hollow about Helphenstine; the warmth of his personality suddenly expires, and for no apparent reason, he flees in muddled, confused embarrassment.

The narrator is puzzled by the backs lapping man's flight, but that is all

46 48 Ibid., p. 346. Ibid,, p. 90.

47 Ibid., p. 509. O'J the point the poem makes. Csstre say a of this character» "Fleming

Helphenstine is one of those men whose genial smile e««ms to announce a generous soul and a disposition to lavish their friendship on a#w» 49 corners: that friendship lasts no longer than a bonfire in summer. "

Fleming Helphenstine, like Aaron Stark and the Doctor of Billiards, is another creature incapable of intimacy, of sincerity, of honest friendship.

Still, in the almost endless variety of Robinson's portraits of the friendless ones, there are these: Eben Flood in "Mr, Flood's

Party" and the woman in "The Poor Relation. " Old, kindly, downtrodden, bereft of companionship, Eben drinks alone at night on the cold hillside. His only companion is the beloved jug; the song he sings is "Auid Lang Syne. " Barnard comments on the appropriateness of the song, "In his singing of Auld Lang Syne are echoes of a heart- p! A warming fellowship that once was his. " Eben has memories of the past, when he was young and honored among Tilbury Towners:

Below him, in the town among the trees, Where friends of other days had honored him, A phantom salutation of the dead Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim.

49 51 Cestre, p. 124. Robinson, p. 574.

50 Barnard, p. 185. 66

But now Eben has nothing left except the brief time till death* a time certain to be lonely and barren of friendship and conviviality:

There was not much that was ahead of him» And there was nothing ia the town below* » Where strangers would have shut the many doors That many friends had opened long ago, 52

The woman in "The Poor Relation" is perhaps even lonelier than

Eben Flood. Barnard epitomizes the causes of her permanent isolation thus; "the picture of a woman whose gay and innocent and triumphant youth has been prematurely banished by poverty, illness, and 3 obscurity. . . "" Unlike Eben, the woman still has visits from her old friends; only these visits are more intolerable and painful than absolute indifference could ever be : To those who come for what she was-- The few left who know where to find her-- She clings, for they are all she has. . . They stay a. while, and having done What penance or the past requires, They go, and leave her there alone. 54

All this wretchedly unhappy person has to wait for, to hope for, is

"The lonely changelessness of dying, --/ Unsought, unthought-of, and unheard.

P> 575• 54Robinson, pp. 45-46.

S3 59 Barnard, p. 136. Ibid., p. 47. 67

Numbered among the unsuccessful friendships are those that began in early life and died when the friend# were separated. In two poem®, "Reunion" and "The Long Race# H Robinson shows what happens when ex-friends meet ©.gain after the lapse of years, Both poem® present unhappy reunion®* In the first place* two former acquaintance® fail to recapture the companionship they once shared. They meet, by accident* and evasion results;

But the pale chance Of youth was lost. Time gave a glance At each of us, and there was no reprieve; And when there was at last a way to leave. Farewell was a foreseen extravagance* 56

The wheel of friendship has come full circle. In "Calverly V the two men want to go back, want to regain the lost Joy; in "Reunion," though the circumstances are somewhat different, the two no longer care to try; relinquishment of whatever friendship ever existed between them is preferred now. This repudiation of human contact and warmth is mournfully limned in the narrator's final observation: "The same old stars will soon be overhead, / But not so friendly and not quite so near.

Similarly, in "The Long Race" a friend returns to his friend's home place, after fifty year®, to see him and learn how he has spent those years;

S6 C"7 Ibid,, pp. 902-903, Ibid., p. 903, 68

To think how soon asunder would be flung The curtain half a century had hung Between the two ambitions they had slain, 58

But the encounter is hopeless; neither friend can rekindle the dead

fires of their long-extinguished friendship. Instead* this is all that go happens, "They dredged an hour for word®, and then ware done, "

Barnard finds in these two sonnets a dramatization of "the slow but

inevitable and irreparable destruction of human ties by time and 60

separation, n

Another constellation of short poems has as a main concern the problem of a friend's duties or services to another. Two poems,

"Tasker Norcroas" and "Sainte-Nitouche,show one of these ser» vices--that of rendering aid by listening. The method is essentially

confessional in nature: the worried, dejected, battered friend opens up his souIf and usually his past, to his friend the listener. A central attribute of the listener's obligation is his ability to remain close yet removed, to provide succor without criticism. In "Tasker Norcross" the confessional-healing device is clearly observable. Ferguson, the tormented soul, remarks that most of his friends are dead, The narrator, the observant listener, replies : 58 , 60 Ibid,, p. 581. Barnard, p. 135. 59 Ibid, 69

"Remember one that isn't. . , Honor him lor hi© ears; ,. Treasure Mm also for his understanding. "

Ferguson then unburdens his fears and memories to the narrator, who later reveals that he does not bear much love for Ferguson.

But the narrator refuses to criticize the speaker; he simply hears what Ferguson has to say. Similarly, in "Sainte-Nitouche" there is the identical method; a friend relates the past to a friend. Vander- burg, the night of his mistress's burial, tells all to the narrator,

Vaaderburg says, as he begins his story, "Dear man, you see where friendship means a few things yet that you don't know, . . " Friend- ship depends upon reciprocal participation, as Vanderburg would have his friend understand. The whole concept of the confessional-healing technique is most adequately expressed in one of the late narratives,

Talifer. In that poem Dr. Quick, Althea's friend, comes to visit her in the summer of her discontent, and she confides, 1 cannot be amazed That you are here, with all your knives, to cut Sick answers out of me to make me well, 63

A friend has great healing powers; by simply listening, he can often purge the soul of whatever it is that ails it; the afflicted friend is often able to talk, talk the evil out.

61 63 Robinson, p. 500. Ibid., p, 1236. 62 Ibid, t p, 212. 70

Another element of a friend's duty is unfailing trust and acceptance, HO matter how trying the actions of the erring friend. Successes ar© easy to acknowledge; it is the shortcomings that truly test the faith upon which any friendship must be based, A phrase in "Bokardo, " 64 "the worn, patience of a friend, " epitomizes this necessary and durable aspect of friendship: the capacity to accept aad let pass a friend's flaws. Sometimes the trial of acceptance is exceedingly difficult, as in "Annandale Again, n in which the narrator makes this comment concerning the character of Annandale; "There was no liking such 65 a man;/ You loved him, or you let him go. " Trust in friendship is always fundamental. In "Nimmo" the narrator draws a perfectly honest portrait of his absent friend and admonishes all men: "Bring not sus- picion's candle to the glass / That mirrors a friend's face to mem* 66 ory. , . " At the end the narrator states the ideal trust that exists between himself and Nimmo, "Meanwhile I trust him; and X know his way/ 67 Of trusting me, as always, in his youth. " Perhaps the best example of trust among friends is found in "The Dark House. " In this symbolic 68 poem, the house represents alcoholic fixation; there are two friends: the narrator, who has escaped from this same bouse sometime in the

Ibid., p. 59. ^Ibid., p. 523.

"ibid. t p. 1200. ^Barnard, p. 38.

66Ibid., p. 521. 71 past, and Ms friend, who is now in the house; that is, he is enslaved by alcoholism. Throughout the poem there is the emphasis by the nar* rator upon the need of letting the friend flee the dark house by him*elf.

The narrator conceives of his friend's agony aa merely one of a large number of possible evil® the friend could have become ensnared ins

And the friend who knows him beat Sees him as he sees the rest Who are striving to be wise While a Demon's arms and eyes Hold them as a web would flies,

But the most important point the poem make# is that the alcoholic friend will someday emerge from the dark house by himself; he will find his own way out. The narrator is confident of hi® friend's re- covery :

After that from everywhere Singing life will find Mm there; Then the door will open wide. And my friend* again outside. Will be living, having died, 70

Trust is one of the foundations of friendship; without it, no friendship can ever really be created or long sustained,

One poem illustrates the final, ultimate service a friend may perform for another. In "How Annandale Went Out" the narrator, a doctor, is called upon to render aid to his mortally injured friend, who has been struck by aa automobile, as is revealed in a related

69 70 Robinson, p. 44, Ibid. „ p. 45. 72 poem, "Annandale Again. " The narrator views himself as "Liar, 71 physician# hypocrite, and friend, " His decision is death, a mercy killing* What more difficult decision might a friend have to make than this one! Assuming full responsibility for administering death to his friend, the doctor now begs ex post facto for the understanding and acceptance of what he has dons; "Do you see? / Like this, , , you 72 wouldn't hang me? I thought not, "

Out of this trust of friends and acceptance of their flaws comes an immense sympathy for failures. This sympathy is based upon what is for Robinson a great human truth—that anyone is vulnerable to failure, friends, anemias, or unknowns. This truth, implied by the title of one poem, "But for the Grace of God, " and explicitly stated in many poems about failur®#, receives perhaps its clearest expression in "Taaker

Norcross" t "Skin most of us of our mediocrity, / We should have nothing 73 then that we could scratch, " Robinson lament® almost all failures.

For instance, there is poor Bewick Finzer, an utter failure, who exists solely on loans, forever unpayable, from friends# Bewick looms:

"Familiar as an old mistake/ And futile as regret, Hit friends do 75 all they can; they serve him; they "give and then forget, " "Claveriag" 71 74 Ibid., p. 346, Ibid,, p. 56, 72 75 Ibid, Ibid. 73Ibld., p. 503, 73 is virtually a dirge for a dead friend, a failure, The narrator recall# all the virtues and defects of Clavering, that is, those that he can pin- point, for there are many aides to his friend that are unfathomable still. But this much is true, "He clung to phantoms and to friends/ 76 And never came to anything. " So Clavering failed. Yet the living friend has reverence for his memory, for the splendor of his failure. 77 He concludes, "I say no more for Clavering. " This poem is one of a series of poems dealing with failure. Two other®, Hl.#ffi»gwellM and

"JLingard and the Stars, M both make reference to a fourth poem,

"Calverly's"; and in "Calverly's" the circle is drawn complete:

There'll b© a page for L effing well. And one for Lingard, the Moon-calf;

And who knows what for Clavering, , ,

"Calverly's" expresses in two lines the basic theme of all these poems*** that friends who fail are nevertheless friends and that they should not be condemned too harshly. The speaker says, "We cannot have them here 79 with us / To say where their light lives are gone, . » " The point is that any man is subject to failure; what the man states in "Old Trails," an "I haven't failed; I've merely not achieved, " Is precisely what it is

76 79 Ibid., p. 334. Ibid., p. 331.

77 30 Ibid., p. 333. Ibid., p. 36.

78 Ibid., p. 330. 74 possible for any creature in Robinson's world to say. Cestre comments or this friend in "Old Trail" and on Robinson's overall concern for the defeated, the downcast, the unsuccessful: "He i® ©f the kind for which

Robinson feels a certain partiality: failures* according to the ordinary standards of judgment, who yet have something in them that makes 81 them likeable and interesting. H All men are potential failure#. And of course it must not be forgotten what Robinson means by success. He implies always that success is not materialistic in nature, but spiritual.

Thus in "Supremacy" the apparent failures in this life, or failures as the world judges, emerge triumphant in another realm and become the 32 "dead men singing in the sun. " In "Leffittgwell" the friend, the n&r* rater, is careful not to denounce the dead Leffingwell as a mere "para- 83 site and sycophant, " but stresses this observation, "I tell you, 84 Leffingwell was more than these* " A stanssa from the second part of "Leffingwell, " "The Quickstep, " sums up the manner in which a failing friend should b® treated: And we who leave him say we do not know How much is ended or how much begun. So men have said before of many a onej So men may say of us when Time shall throw

81 83 Cestre, p. 165. Ibid., p. 331,

82 84 Robinson, p. 97. Ibid. 75

Such earth a® may b® needful to bestow On you and me the covering hush we shun.85

There are other poems about friends who failed that need to be mentioned. One is "Exit, " which Hagedorn has called a requiem for oil Robins on*$ brother, Herman. This brother, the middle one between the poet and JDeaa, was a colossal failure; the second stanza of "Exit" warns all who should chastise the stricken failure that everyone is capable of not succeeding and that no one can ever know completely the causes of a man's success or failure: For envy that we may recall, And for our faith before the fall, May w© who are alive be slow To tell what we shall never know.87

A poem quite similar in theme to "Exit, " though much lighter in tone, is "Atherton's Gambit, " in which Atherton, a rather frivolous person who wastes his life in trivial pursuits, is portrayed by the narrator as one whom no friend should ever presume to gloat over or deride. The narrator asks pointedly, "Who of us, being what he is, / May scoff at §3 other's ecstasies?" At the poem's end, the narrator ©presses

85 Ibid., p. 332.

86Hermann Hagedorn, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Biography {New York, 1938), p. 249. 87 Robinson, p. 341, 88 Ibid., p, 354. 76 what is true of all friend® and their obligations: "Nor were it kind of 69 any one/ To slag the end of Atherton. " One poem reveals more clearly than toy other this stress upon not judging others unfairly or unfeelingly. In 'Inferential" the narrator i® looking at the face of a 90 dead man he "had honored among men/ The least, H when suddenly he realizes what all men should know^-that perhaps the dead man has been misjudged, that perhaps he did not receive enough consideration or sympathy s that perhaps no man is ever completely to blame for failing. The narrator experiences a moment of insight into the nature of mankind and of man's relations with hi® fellow man; For there was more of him than what I saw. And there was on me more than th# old awe That is th® common genius of the dead. I might a® well have heard him; "Never mind; If some of us were not so far behind. The rest of us were not so far ahead, "91 All men, then, are liable to defeat, and no man is very far above another. There is a common humanity, a brotherhood in fact, to which

Ml belong. Friendship is simply brotherhood on a reduced scale, The element® that should unite two friends are those that should unite all men--loyalty, self-surrender, kindness, trust, sympathy, acceptance,

89TWIJ 9! *?,*?• Ibid,, p. 512. 90 Ibid,, p. 511. 77 faith, responsibility, love. The perfect friendship, so rarely achieved, is a microcosm of the perfect world.

In the Robins onian world friendship l@ a profoundly serious concept. Every poem cited above has at its core am intense concern for human values and morality. Robinson himself took Ms role as poet seriously, as he says in Stanza I of "Octave®" {this sfcanssa is curiously missing in the standard edition of hie collected poems):

To get at the eternal strength of things, And fearlessly to make strong songs of it, la, to my mind, the mission of that man . The world would call a poet. 92

Robinson's treatment of friendship in the short poems illustrates his striving to get at this eternal strength, to explain what friendship really means in the world, to show why friendship is important. Three poems reveal unmistakably the broad ethical implications of Robinson's view of friendship and its function in society, "Glass Houses" depicts what happens when the brotherhood of man is violated:

Two others once did love each other well, Yet not so well but that a pungent word From each came stinging home to the wrong ear®. The rest would be an overflow to tell, Surely; and you may slowly have inferred That you may not be here a thousand years, 93

92 Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Early Poems and Letters, edited by Charles T. Davis (New York, 1961), p. 557

93 Robinson, Collected Poems, p. 889. 78

The sly jib® at man's mortality tells all who read the poem what they should do: they should love and forgive, for life is indeed short* One

Of the acts of goodness that the strange Flammonde performs id the settling of a dispute between two citizens* thus making them friends 94 and restoring the brotherhood,

la two poems Robinson paints a picture of the world as it should be, a world in which friendship* or brotherhood, is an integral part.

The sonnet "When We Can Ail So Excellently Give" describes with

Whitmanesque faith the union of ail mankind:

Oh, brother men, if you have ©yes at all, X.ook at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, Or anything God ever made that grows, »* Mor let the smallest vision of it slip, Till you may read, as on Belshassssar's wall. The glory of eternal partnership. 95

Very similar to this message of eternal partnership is the supreme faith expressed in Stanza VIII of "Octaves":

There is no loneliness: --no matter where We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends Forsake us the seeming, we are all At one with a complete companionship. . , 96 Robinson's vision of a brotherhood of man is, to borrow a phrase from

•'Isaac and Archibald, " "beautifully fused"^ in the last stanza of "Octaves1

94 96 Ibid,, p. 5, Ibid., pp. 102-103*

95 97 Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 179. 79

Here by the windy docks I stand alone, But y®t companioned. There the vessel goes, And there my friend goes with it; but the wake That melt» and ebbs between that friend and me Love's earnest is of Life's all-purpoeeful And all-triumphant sailing, when the ship® Of Wisdom loose their fretful chains and swing Forever from the crumbled wharves of Time. 98

The paradox is clear; each man, while essentially alone, is yet lor- ever united with all other men, Two great and compatible virtues to

Robinson's view of life are individual value and friendship. Without the first, the second cannot exist; and without friendship, the brotherhood of man could never come into being at ail.

go ? Ibid,, p. 107. CHAPTER IV

THE THEME OF FRIENDSHIP

IN THE LONGER POEMS

Between 1902 and 1935 Robinson published thirteen narrative

poems of varying lengths. With, the exception of Cavender's House in

1929, all ol these are to some degree involved with the problem of

friendship* As might be expected, the treatment of tho friendship

them® in the narratives is often deeper, more thorough, and more com-

plex than the treatment of similar motifs and situations in the short

poems, For instance, a poem of betrayal like "Karma" becomes in

a narrative euch as The Glory of the Nightingales something more than

simply a portrait of the outwardly successful betrayer. The length of

the longer poem allows for fuller exploration of the effects of betrayal

on the betrayer as well as for analyses of the betrayed person and two

other people affected by the deed also. In the longer work the poet has

more space for development of what in a sonnet must be confined to a

sketch or at best a sudden revelation of character. Length of course

does not guarantee quality or effectiveness; often Robinson is more

successful in dealing with friendship in the short poems than he is in the long ones. But his successes in presenting friendship in the long works fortunately overshadow miscarriages like Talifer.

80 81

Of the twelve poems that are to be studied, five present motifs

and patterns that occur repeatedly in the short poems* These five.

Captain Craig, The Man Who Died Twice, Amaranth, Avon's Harvest,

and King Jasper, range from the earliest of Robins on1® long works,

Captain Craig in 1902, to the last, King Jasper, in 1935, the year of

Mb death. The chronology is perhaps significant; for in the long poems,

as in the short ones, friendship is seen as a consistent and driving con-

cern present in all periods of Robinson's creativity. Again as with the

short poema, these five narratives reveal no discernible order or

method of development. Like the short poems, they show the persistent

and probably unconscious effort of Robinson to record in Ms art what

was to important factor in Ms life—friendship.

If no pattern exists among the short poems or the five narratives,

one does clearly exist, however, in seven of the narratives, beginning

with Merlin in 1917 ted running through Talifer in 1933* The pattern-- the triangle—is ancient. William Faulkner has been quoted by his

brother John as having once said that "the best conflict, the one people like to read about most, is two men trying to get in bed with the same woman.1,1 In Robinson's case the matter is always stated much more obliquely and delicately perhaps than in Faulkner's works, and Robin- son always adds the element of friends. Robinson, as will be seen

1 John Faulkner, My Brother Bill (New York. 1963), p. 212. 82 latex*, varies the triangular situation la several ways; one invariable constant is friendship. By presenting the triangular conflict in terms of friends vying for possession of a woman, Robinson intensifies the dramatic possibilities arising from the clash of iove and friendship.

This schism between love of a woman and loyalty to a friend lis one of the most important motifs of the friendship theme. While the triangular pattern is central to these seven, Merlin, Lancelot, Tristram, Talifer,

Roman Bartholpw, The Glory of the Nightingales, and Matthias at the

Doori these poems also contain many other elements of the friendship theme common to the short poems and the other narratives. For once, though, it seems that Robinson explored in successive works one basic motif. The only breaks in the chronological order are the shorter narratives, Avon's Harvest (1921) and The Man Who Died Twice (1924).

In his first narrative, Captain Craig, Robinson created a sustained picture of joy: all the other narratives are racked by fear, betrayal, guilt, and whatever bliss is portrayed in them, except in Talifer, is usually fleeting or has existed so far in the past that it is no longer anything but a memory, as in King Jasper. Captain Craig, however, is full of joy; the poem is closest in mood and tone to the sun-laden happiness of "Isaac and Archibald. n The old Captain glories in the sun as does no other character in the Robinson canon. 83

At the beginning of the poem the circle of friend® is introduced.

The narrator, in addition to Killigrew, Plunkett, Morgan, and others

unnamed, adopts the Captain, a colorful, learned, prophetic beggar;

or, to be more exact, he adopts them. They go often to hear the Cap-

tain apeak; the narrator is particularly drawn to the old man. The

Captain is undoubtedly modeled after Robinson's erratic friend in New

York, Alfred Louis. Killigrew, Plunkett, and Morgan, too, are prob-

ably portraits of other friends of Robinson's; possibly their real life

counterparts are, as Barnard thinks, Seth Ellis Pope, Arthur Blair,

and LinviUe Robbins, all of whom were members of the Quadruped.

But Barnard also makes this point--that as far as the poem is concerned,

it does not matter who the prototypes were or even if there were any. ^

His remark is applicable to the other narratives as well, The poem a

stand alone; the friendship theme, to be understood truly, needs no ex-

cessive biographical or critical support.

The friends of Captain Craig humor their mentor, but the narrator feels something stronger than condescending respect; he recognizes the

intrinsic worth of the old man. When the other friends leave, the nar-

rator stays to hear the Captain's philosophical discourse. One of the

2 Ellsworth Barnard, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Study (New York, 1952), p. 234.

3 Ibid., p. 280. 84 tenets of Craig's optimism is his under standing of the value of giving.

He tells the narrator o£ the aright kind of gratitude, 11, , , the larger 4 kind/ W© feel for what we give," To illustrate the value of altruism, the Captain cites an example* a- parable of friendship and brotherhoods a boy went away from home to commit suicide; he had reached the river when

He might have dived. Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow. There came along a man who looked at him With such an unexpected friendliness. And talked with him in such an uncommon way. That life grew marvelously different, . , 5

Thus sheer friendliness can be enormously beneficial to the wounded soul. The emphasis on giving recurs later in the poem. Count Pretzel von Wurzburger, the Obscene, understood completely the necessity for giving. He had told the Captain, who now tells the narrator: For though it look to you that I go begging. The truth is I go giving- - giving all My strength and ail my personality, My wisdom and experience—all myself. . . ^

Others of Robinson1© characters possess this rare gift; Cliff Klingen- hagen, who drinks the wormwood and gives the wine to his visitor, is

4 E.A, Robinson, Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (Now York, 1954), p, 115. *

5Ibid,, p. 117,

6 Ibid., p. 137. 85 one; Captain Craig is another. In Craig's will, which he reads just before his death, he gives the whole universe to his friends who remain behind.

The Captain's rippling optimism, his joie de vivre, enthralls the narrator, and so it is supposed to. Once the narrator went away for a short time; Craig wrote him of his love of life:

I cannot think of anything to-day That I would rather do than be myself,

Primevally alive ..."

Beneath this joyous optimism is a base of solid philosophical speculation.

The Captain is no mindless Pollyana spouting a puerile faith; he sin- cerely believes in the worth and dignity of every individual and in the necessity for men's helping one another as brothers, which in reality all men are, except that they refuse to act as such. The highest tribute Craig can give to the Count is to call him a "free creature with a © soul. " Later in his will (this is probahly the most important part of the poem) he talks at length about the essential kinship of all men and the worst sin on earth--selfishness. The following portion of the will might stand as a characterization of every Robinson protagonist who ever betrayed another man:

7Ibid., pp. 125-126.

8Ibid. , p. 135. 86

You do not rise above, nor do you fall But you drag others down to more or less Than your preferred abasement, 9

On the question of loneliness, Craig has apt words too;

, . . we, we frozen brother®, who have yet Profoundly and severely to find out That there is more of unpermitted love In most men's reticence than most men think. 10

The Captain is clearly advocating the virtue® of love tod tolerance m

conducive to man's general happiness and improvement, Craig is a

moralist, like hia creator. The essence of the Captain's philosophy

is caught in one passage; this essence embodies the concept of friend-

ship and something grander and more ® weeping--th® brotherhood of man, Gra'ig expounds:

What you take To be the cursedest mean thing that crawls On earth is nearer to you than you know; You may not ever crush him but you lose. You may not ever shield him but you gain-- As he, with all his crookedness, gains with you, ^

The sermon over, the Captain dies, his face radiant with love for his friend® and for all living things» A pauper, a materialistically destitute man, Craig is yet a mighty spiritual victor; he knows how to give and how to defeat selfishness; above all, he knows that all mm are,

Ibid., p. 153. 1 Jtbid., p. 158.

10 Ibid. , p. 155, 87 or should be, brothers. His bequeathal of the gift of giving, the joy of

life, is accepted and practised by the receivers, the circle of friends

who watch him die, That might the narrator, Killigrew, and the rest

go to their favorite tavern. Their companionship is depicted in one of

the happiest scenes to be found in Robinson's poetry t

That evening* at "The Chrysalis" again, We smoked and looked at on® another's eyes, And we were glad. The world had scattered way® For u> to take, we knew; but for the time That one snug room where big beech log* roared smooth Defiance to the rough rain outside Sufficed. There were no scattered ways for us That we could see just then, and we were glad. 12

Beneath the exterior of joy and pure delight in comaraderie, there is,

as always in Robinson, the awareness that this too will pass away, that

happiness is inherently transitory and not long enduring. But long years

later the friends of Captain Craig still have the memory of the Captain,

his philosophy, and that night. The narrator recalls wistfully:

So, now and then, That evening of the day the Captain died Returns to us; and there comes always with it The storm, the warm restraint, the fellowship, The friendship and the firelight and the fiddle. 13

Paradoxically, the moment of happiness does endure: it dies and is

reborn with remembering. Friendship too can live as long as one friend is alive to remember.

12 13 Ibid., p, 167. Ibid., pp. 168-169. 38

The Man Who Pied Twice, one of the shortest of the narratives, is included in this study for one primary reason--as an illustration of the narrator-listener device so common in both the short and long poems, The main concern of the poem is not friendship but a man's struggle to realise his full potential, to utilize his genius for music.

The man is Fernando Nash, a defeated musician now playing for the

Salvation Army band in New York. The narrator, who knew Fernando at the outset of his career, happens upon him at a street corner; they have not seen each other for twenty years. This pattern of a friend meeting another friend after a lapse of many years is quite familiar and occurs again and again in both the short and long poems, in

"Reunion, " "The Long Race,"Old Trails, " The Glory of the Night- ingales, and King Jasper, to name a few.

Fernando is a failure and much changed from the man he was.

Despite his appearance and condition, the narrator is yet sympathetic and kind; he does not commit the deadly sin of smugness or disdain.

Fernando recognizes a quality in the narrator that all the other friends of the past lacked:

But for a memory that survived in him That 1 had never yelped at him with others, Who feared him, and was not among the biters. Who, in the years when he was dangerous Had snapped at him until he disappeared. , , 14

14 Ibid., p. 922. 89

The narrator never threw stones at Fernando or criticized; such a man

is the best and truest friend possible* Fernando tell® of how the others treated him, "They knew I had it, and they hated me/ For knowing just 15 what they had, . , " Envy and carping criticism always are detri- mental to friendship.

The narrator sees Fernando fairly often after this first encounter; 16 always Fernando appears like "a dead friend out of hell. " Within a year Fernando comes to tell his whole story of wasted talent, of a frantic attempt at suicide, of a realization of what life means, of a brief burst of creative energy unequaled in his past life. Now Fernando lives with a knowledge of inner worth; now the meretricious waste is behind. The narrator in two lines sums up the fundamental aspect of the narrator-listener technique: "Fernando Nash revealed himself to 17 me / In passionate reminiscence a year later. " The phrase "passionate reminiscence" epitomizes the fervor of virtually every Robinson protagonist who plumbs the past for a meaning, sua explanation, while the quiet, priestlike friend listens and absolves; two memorable examples among many are Vanderburg in "Sainte-Nitouche" and Avon in Avon's

Harvest.

1 P' 923' 1 Jbid., p. 932.

i 6 Ibid., p. 931. 90

The narrator'® obligation is seen clearly in The Man Who Died

Twice. He must listen, understand, and not scorn. Thus the narrator says:

And it was 1, who had not bitten him (Achillea1 heel was never to be cured). Who might, if anyone might, believe him now. . .

After Fernando has told his story of rebirth, the narrator comments, 19 "To each Ms own credulity, I say, / And ask as much. " And now, years later, the narrator still believes him:

. . 1 believe him To-day as I believed him while he died,

And while I sank Ms ashes in the sea, 20

Every man has this right--to be valued as an individual. Fernando claims this privilege of his friend, and the friend responds. Fernando belongs to the long list of Robinsonian failures, Atherton, Clavering,

Bewick FInzer, Bokardo, many characters in Amaranth, and countless others. All, like Fernando, deserve sympathy, not criticism; the patient friend, the narrator-listener, has a profound service to perform. The

Robinsonian listener is always equal to this responsibility—he listens, understands as best he can, forgives, and relays the defeated man's worth to all mankind. The dead man's truth, revered by at least one

» P- 941. 2°Ibid., p. 957.

19 Ibid., p. 956. 91 living man, is delivered to others. The narrator-listener serves almost an evangelical role: the vain,® ol the individual and the sanctity of friendship are preserved by him and transpired to all who would hear.

Amaranth (1934) stands as Robinson's moat complete study of friends who failed. In relation to the short poem® Amaranth is analogous to such poems about failures as "Tasker Nor cross „ " "Exit,11 "Bewick

Finzer, " "Clavering, " and "But for the Grace of God. " The action of the poem is built around a dream, a nightmare, ol Fargo, the protagonist, who goes, or returns rather, to a shadowy hell populated by fallen creatures, both men and women, As the poem opens, Fargo

awakens from a dream-ridden sleep and hears

A voice like one of to undying friend Whom he had always known and never seen Had pierced and wounded him till he was warned Of only one ©scape; and he was free, 21

Years before the dream, when he was thirty-five, Fargo experienced 22 an "oily-fiery sacrifice" that demised his soul and set him free.

The flaw which he corrected was simply the proper mating of ambition

and ability; he repudiated his impossible hope of being a painter and be-

came instead a superb pump-maker. The people in the hell he return® to in the dream all failed to make the adjustment that Fargo did; they

21 22 Ibid.* P- i3il- Ibid., p. 1310. 92 ail aimed too high or toward impractical goals alien to their capabilities

and so fell through futile striving, This motif of a person being saved

occurs often in the narratives and is indeed one of the more important

aspects of the triangle complex. Amaranth, "the flower that never 23 fades* " is Fargo's guide, the voice that calls him and leads him through the lower regions. He is also a creature doomed to save; and

although he ha® the power to save others# he cannot save himself.

Fenn-Raven in Roman Bartholow and Nightingale in The Glory of the

Nightingales are two comparable characters who are able to save friends

but not themselves (though after great struggle Nightingale does move

towards redemption). Another motif in Amaranth that reappears in

other narratives is that of the protagonist carrying a load, ©r as Amaranth 24 says of Fargo, a "misfit burden, " which he must cast off. King

Jasper is the most vivid example from the other narratives of a man

carrying a burden.

The world that Fargo goes back to via his dream is a forlorn

realm; He had come back Once more to a lost world where all was gone But ghostly shapes that had no life in them, . . 25 23 25 Ibid., p. 1316. Ibid., p. 1312.

24Ibid., p. 1313. 93

There Fargo is introduced by Evensong, who is the first to speak to the newcomer and who is a failure also, to the other soul© who have failed:

Edward Figg, a man misled by a false vision; Dr. Styx, who chose the wrong occupation; Reverend Pascal Flax, who accepted religious doc- trine without thought and spiritual struggle; Pink, a mystifying poet; and Atlas, a painter given to drink. It is a very strange and enigmatic collection that Fargo meets. Evensong sums up their total condition and count® Fargo as one of them:

Don't pity us, lor you are one of us-«

We are the reconciled initiates, Who know that we are nothing in men's eyes

That we set out to be, , . 26

One who is not reconciled to failure is Pink the poet; he states in strong terms that he wants no advice whatsoever and then leaves to hang himself. Evensong notes cryptically the purpose of Fargo's visit: Let our new friend regard us, and see twice The end, before he says he is our brother; For we are here by ways not on the chart Of time that we read once as ours to follow, ^7

The whole poem is a reappraisal on Fargo1® part of what a man's role in life should be and how much he should rely on friends and on himself.

In the second part of the poem Fargo finds himself in a ghost town and is set upon by gravediggers who clutch at him as if to drag

26 2*1 Ibid., p. 1322, Ibid., p. 1328, 94

Mm into the grave. With Amaranth's help, he escapes, and Amaranth tells him:

Whether you see me as your friend or not. You will be happier not too far from me, And wiser for no ranging. To be lost In the wrong world is twice to be astray, For you are lost already* Come with me, My friend; for you are shaken and amazed, And are still fearful of the grave-diggers.

So come with me. You are not their8--not yet. 28

Together they again meet Evensong and his puzzling group. All enter a room where Pink hangs from the rafter. Pink talks, however, aad chastises Atlas for having chosen the wrong career. Throughout, this surrealistic atmosphere prevails; later a cat named Ampersand talks also. Everybody in the underworld wonders why Fargo is there, and

Amaranth inquires; My friend, you heard me, once, And dared escape from here. What have you done To fate since then that you are here once more ? 29

The next seen® presents another house and another room; this time a woman, Elaine Amelia Watchman, appears; she is Evensong's love. He tells her how everyone fears Amaranth aad his muttering® t

"So the best friend we have/ Shall have no thanks, or few. "30 The

28Ibid., p. 1331. 3°Ibld., p. 1339.

29 Ibid., p. 1337. 95 reason, no on© thanks Amaranth is plain; he ams through a person's character and perceives the causes of each's wrecked life. Amaranth tells the truth, which is often painful. The woman i® herself a failure, a frustrated writer; Doctor Styx explains to her the inadequacies of them all, while adding a caution to an/one who would seek to censor too harshly another*s failings:

If we knew too much, And the bright armor of our own esteem Were torn from us, w@ might all be embarrassed,

This stricture against throwing stones receives more emphasis later in the poem. A person should not judge lest he be judged. Then the woman opens a book, which turns to dust in her hands, and vanishes.

The nightmare scene shifts now to the graveyard where in each grave lies

. » , a foiled occupant whose triumph In a mischosen warfare against self And nature was release. 32

At the graveyard another specter arises, Ipswich, the inventor. He ponders unsuccessfully the question of why a man fails and then moves phantom-like aboard an ancient, rusty ship filled with old people delirious from drink. Bound for a new land and a new life, the people on board are drowned when the ship sinks. Fargo, watching from the shore, refuses to abandon the land and his own resources to follow the fatal

31 32 Ibid,, p. 1347. Ibid., p. 1349. % illusion of alcoholic escape. Pink commits one kind of suicide, Ipswich another, and Fargo relies upon Ms inner strength and a friend'® aid to live and find for himself the right path in life*

Again the scene changes; now the infernal group is seen arguing among itself, with Evensong tauntingly consoling Atlas, who wants no 33 part of Evensong* s "patronising oily pity, " Atlas thinks that he does not know Amaranth as he should, but Amaranth tells him pointedly that he does know himself: "You are a stranger still to meet yourself, / 34 Alone and unafraid. " Then Fargo attributes Atlas1 being where he is now to his doubt, his lack of conviction in himself, at which point

Atlas leaves angrily. Those remaining hear his body fall, and Amaranth warns Fargo, "... for 1 may not always / Be where you are when you 35 have lost your way. " Friends, as Amaranth is aware, are necessary, but their service must be of the right kind; mere pity, as with Atlas, is not enough; service with understanding and without pity or harsh criticism is the desirable goal of a good friend.

Now they are in another room, where Fargo paints and Evens ong discourses on why he cannot paint better than average pictures: "Your 36 heart is somewhere else, / And there your treasure is. It is not here. » 33 35 *bid-» P- 1365« Ibid., p. 1371.

34 36 Ibid., p. 1369. Ibid., p. 1364. 97

Fargo is worried about Ms future and whether he will wind up like

Ipswich or Atlas. Ampersand, the cat, places all the blame for the failures of men and women on their attempts "to make their wishes their belief. " But no one knows for sure why men do not succeed.

The lost ones go to Atlas1 funeral in search of an answer. All of them speculate upon Atlas, "one for whom ambition was a monster, and try to explain the causes of his disaster. Reverend Flax offers the soundest answer by providing none at all:

But the God That is within me tells me now that Atlas Lived in another house that was not mine, And that I am not told what might have happened If my house had been his. We are too brisk In our assumption of another's lightness Under a burden we have never felt . . .

This passage contains the familiar burden metaphor and one of the principal ideas in Robinson's concept of friendship--the stricture against judging others too harshly or even judging them at all. The same moral underscores such short poems as "Exit, " "Inferential, "

"Atherton's Gambit, " and "Glass Houses, " and occurs in many of the long poems, most obviously perhaps, in The Man Who Died Twice.

The point is clear--it is both unfair and hypocritical ever to judge and

37 Ibid. . P« 1378. 39Ibid. , pp. 1387-1388.

38Ibld. , p. 1381. 98

condemn another. The title of one of the short poems, "But for the

Grace of God, " captures in on© stroke this aspect of friendship.

Amaranth tells Fargo wisely, m if to reinforce Flax's opinion, "Never

be ©orry for the dead-- / Lament them as you may, or treasure 40

them. , .!s

Aa the poem nears its end, Fargo has learned what he came to

the dream-world to find out. Amaranth says aptly that Fargo came 41 "To see, and to be aure." Fargo, now freed forever, can go back

to his world of pump-making secure that he la doing the right thing.

His nightmare was but a brief visit to the world where he might have

dwelled always had he not saved himself and recognized his true role

in life. Evensong tells him good-bye in a significant manner: "Think

of me as a friend who is remote, / Yet real as islands that you cannot 42 see. " Thus the relationship of friends is placed in its proper per-

spective. A friend goes his own way alone, yet with the knowledge that

he does have a friend who is loyal and willing to help if the need arises.

The image of the island recalls the closing stansa of "Octaves*4 and

the shore-ship image there of a friend on shore and a friend at sea, the two at once united and apart. Amaranth's last words again point up 40 A9 IMd., p. 1390. Ibid.. p. 1391.

4IIbid., p. 1392. 99

Ms enigmatic character, which is never fully explained anywhere in the poem:

To a few 1 show myself, but only the resigned And reconciled will own me as a friend. ^

Amaranth is a friend to those who see life clearly and. see it whollyj he is a friend to the defeated, too, except that they never return this friendship. The poem ends with Fargo awakening to a joyful, bright, sunshiny world. He is content, a happy pump-maker now and forever.

The dream of failure was only that, a dream; and Fargo, through his own inner worth and the knowledge that friends are ready to help if needed, has no fear of ever going back. Wherever he goes, there are at least two friends, Amaranth, loyal and unfading, and Evensong, who exist somewhere; he can remember thess and derive benefit from the very fact that they are friends, though hidden and apart.

Avon's Harvest is Robinson's most searching study of the darkest side of the friendship concept--the total rejection of proffered friendship, the natural antipathy that one man may feel towards another.

Short poems such as "Aaron Stark, " "Doctor of Billiards, " and

"Fleming Helphenstina" touch upon the problem of the friendless people, thoss who lack the capacity for embracing others as friends, but none of these approaches the intensity and power generated in Avon's Harvest.

43Ibid. , p. 1392. 100 la this poem Robinson, amidst an atmosphere of horror, guilt, and perverted brotherhood, has avoided the length and diffusiveness that some* times weaken® much longer works like Roman Bartholow. Poe might well have praised Avon's Harvest.

The poem unfolds in a typical Robins onian manner with Avon relating ©vents of the past to his friend, the narrator, This familiar technique of the narrator-listener is used quite advantageously here as in many other Robinson poems, The narrator'® comments later in the poem serve to heighten the terror of Avon's story in a method similar to Marlow's in Conrad's Heart of Darkness; in each case the narrator is almost scorched by the intensity of evil he discovers in the story-teller's life. When the poem opens, the narrator*friend has come to Avon's house; he ponders whether he should urge Avon to talk (aa probably Avon's wife has suggested);

For saying nothing I might have with me always An injured and recriminating ghost Of a dead friend. 44

This factor is crucial--the living must not bear any guilt, however minor, for not treating a friend with utmost consideration; the narrator knows the necessity for serving. Before the long account begins, the narrator makes Avon certain that he wishes to listen. He says once:

44 Ibid., p. 544. 101

I'm at your servicej And though you say that I shall not be happy, I shall be if in some way I may serve,

Again he tells Avon, "I only know that I am at your service, / Al- 46 ways . . . " .Later, as Avon gets well into the "theme of his 47 aversion, " the narrator learns how difficult just listening is going to be; Now this was the language of a man Whom I had known as Avon, and I winced H@aring it . . .

Avon himself sums up the duties of his friend when he says,

But you can listen. And that's itself a large accomplishment Uncrowned; and may be* at a time lik« this,

A mighty charity, ^9

Avon's friend performs hia duty, but t© no avail. The fact that he listens, though, and that Avon has someone to confess to, is itself, as

Avon says, a mighty charity. In this instance all the friend can do is listen; unfortunately, he cannot save Avon, who, by rejecting friendship, has doomed himself beyond the point of salvation. But if Avon

45 48 Ibid., p. 546. Ibid., p„ 549.

4^ 49 Ibid,, pp. 553-554, 47 Ibid., p. 550, 102 cannot rest, the narrator can, knowing he has don© all a friend could hope to do.

The conflict in the poem is presented in stark terms s Avon, un- alterably repelled by another individual who desired his friendship* ha® had to bear the marks and scars of this revulsion all his life. The opening line® indicate the state to which guilt and fear have reduced

Avon:

Fear, like a living fire that only death Might one day cool, had now in Avon's eyes Been witness for s© long of an invasion That made of a gay friend whom we had known Almost a memory, wore no other name As yet for us than fear. 50

What Avon tells i® a tragic and utterly hopeless story of how his life has been discolored and spoiled by one irretrievable moment in his early years. A boy cam© to the school where Avon, just sixteen, went, and tried persistently and, to Avon's mind, obnoxiously, to make friends.

Avon characterises the boy thus;

This fellow had no friend, and, as for that. No sign of an apparent need of one, Save always and alone--myself. 51

Avon could never, and cannot now, understand why that boy came and why he attached himself to Avon for life, Avon muses upon the cause® of his ruin;

50 51 Ibid., p. 543. Ibid., p. 552. 103

To this day I'm adrift And in the dark, out of all reckoning, To find a reason why he ever was, Or what was ailing Fat® when he was bora ^ On this alleged God-ordered earth of ours,92

Once he saw the boy, he was never to know peace again. For the boy, £ <2 an "unspeakable new monster, "" Avon felt only revulsion and a

"fantastic and increasing bate," This hatred is the very antithesis of the friendship-brotherhood ethic. Men should of coarse love on© another, not h&te, as Avon tell® Ms listener: Beware of hat® That has no other boundary than the grave Made for it, or for ourselves, 55

Avon knows deeply the state of hatred in which he lives and has lived for years. He sees outside the window a man walking in the street sad laments, "I wiah to God that all men might walk always, / And so, being 56 busy, love one another more, "

No final answer is ever provided as to the specific reason® for this irreparable breach between two human beings. There are dark hints of perverted love, of homosexual attraction and repulsion; a

Freudian might even interpret Avon's problem as a pure instance of latent homosexuality, (Incidentally, this poem is the only one of

52 55 Ibid. , p. 548. Ibid., p. 550,

53 56 Ibid., p. 550, Ibid.

54 Ibid,, p. 549. 104

Robinson's work© that touches in even a minor way this phenomenon.)

Whatever the basis of Avon's extreme hatred, his restating of his an-

tipathy towards this fellow creature is still vivid and horrifying after a

long span of years. The story he tells is repugnant and loathe some

enough to make the narrator quake and search for "an uncomyanion- 57 able word/ To say just what was creeping in my hair, " The boy 58 plagued Avon; "He lavished his whole altered arrogance/ On me . , . "

The sole emotion besides hate that the boy could arouse in Avon was

pity, and that was no grounds to build a friendship on. Using a par-

ticularly startling image, Avon describe® the disgusting quality about the boy: Often I'd find him strewn along my couch Like an amorphous lizard with its clothes on,

Reading a book and waiting for its dinner. 59

The possibility of homosexuality as a motive for hatred is seen in pas-

sages like the following one in which Avon strikes at the foulness of the boy: Yet I should not have thought of him as clean-- Not even if he had washed himself to death Proving it. 60

In every way Avon's experience was a complete reversal of what should have been. Avon detested the boy so much that he would rather

57 59 Ibid., p. 551. Ibid., p. 553. 58 60 Ibid.» P. 552. Ibid. 105 have been hated by him than loved the smallest amount# In this poem hatred is as strong a® man's love for another in any of the other poems.

The saving motif is reversed here; Avon would rather have died than be

saved by the person he loathed, Avon tells the narrator unequivocally:

I am not sure that he would not have died For me, if 1 were drowning or oa fire. Or that I would not rather have let myself Die twice than owe the debt of my survival To him ... 61

This repudiation of the very thought of aid or kindness emphasizes the

total abhorrence Avon felt. The rejection of friendship is as wrong as

the failure to offer friendship. Eventually, as Avon relates, his hatred

found an outlet. One day the boy told Avon of a lie that stained one of

Avon's friends. Avon struck him, feeling only "a bursting flood/ Of 62 half a year's accumulated hate, " but the boy did not return the blow.

Instead he cried, and Avon says:

They made Me sick, those tears; for I knew, miserably, They were not there for any pain he felt. I do not think he felt the pain at all, 63

The next day the boy departed, leaving with Avon this terrifying in- 64 dictment, "If you are silent, /1 shall know where you are until you die. "

61 , , 63 Ibid., p. 556.

62 „ 64 Ibid., p. 555, Ibid., p. 557. 106

Thus the two of them remained "alive together / In. the same hemisphere 65 to hate each other, "

Avon'® doom was irrevocable; he had to bear about the earth forever this awful repudiation of another human being. His true sin was not being able to forgive, He could neither forgive the boy nor tell Mm the truth, that he did not like him and that they could never be friends.

Had Avon but told the truth all might have been different, as the nar-

rator realizes and says to him, "If only you had shaken hands with him/ 66 And a aid the truth, he would have gone his way . , . " But Avon's hatred was too great, too all-encompassing; "There was just hatred, hauled up out of hell/ For me to writhe in, and I writhed in it, " So the boy left, and every year thereafter sent on Avon's birthday a birthday card reminding him of his heinous deed that day, The years passed; they met once in Rome, once in London, and each time Avon saw only /LO the other's "offense of being. " After a long time and many birthday cards, the "friend" died on board the Titanic. Avon, inexpressibly glad, thought that at last he was free, but the unburied, unredeemed past continued to haunt him. Finally, a year before the present when he is telling his story, Avon went with Asher, a faithful friend who loved 65 67 Ibid., p. 559.

66 , 68 > P* ^58. Ibid., p. 562. 107 solitude, to the woods of northern Maine. {It should be noted her# that

Asher, the friend who dwells alone, is also a recurring type; Umfraville in Roman Bartholow is the best example of this type and will be discussed in more detail later, Asher is a friend about whom Avon can say, 69 , . you find him where you leave him, " ) Even there, isolated from the rest of humanity, Avon found no escape from his guilt and fright. Alone one night in Asher's cabin, Avon thought he saw the ghost of his incubus, believed he felt the living presence of his dreaded enemy.

At this point in the tale, the narrator interjects a revealing comment on the intensity of Avon's undiminished hatred:

I'm glad the venom that was his tongue May not go down on paper; and I'm glad No friend of mine alive, far as I know, Has a tale waiting for me with an end Like Avon's,70

Avon's story over, the narrator leaves. Later that night he is called back to Avon's house, and Avon is dead. The attending doctor muses ironically on the cause of death:

If I were not a child Of science, I should say it was the devil, I don't believe it was smother woman. And surely it was not another man. 71

The narrator, unlike the doctor, knows part of the reason; he knows

69» 71 Ibid,, p. 568. Ibid., p, 573, 70 Ibid,, p. 567, 108 that Avon, died of fright, of mortal terror; but perhaps even he does not perceive the ultimate depths of Avon's hatred* Avon's harvest is the harvest of fear and guilt that all of Robin#on's heroes who commit evil experience. Avon's trial is the most extreme, the most violent instance of mental suffering, probably, in the Robinson canon. His re- morse i® overwhelming and tragic as compared with the man's guilt in

"An Old Story" or the man's mere twinge and uncertainty In "Alma

Mater. " Avon, the archetype of the betrayex* who suffers incessantly for his act of betrayal, violates the brotherhood of man and freezes himself off from the rest of the human community. Within his soul there i® always the guilt, the knowledge of evil. King Jasper, Night- ingale, and Matthias are three other Robinsonian protagonists who under- go extreme torture for their betrayals, yet none endures more agony than Avon. The plight of Avon holds a moral, a lesson for mankind*

Avon himself sums up the truth his rejection of friendship has shown him:

Good will to men--oh, yes I That's easy; and it means no more than sap. Until we boil the water out of it Over the fire of sacrifice.72

Although Avon knows the necessity for sacrifice, for giving, he cannot bring himself to accept the friendship offered by the boy. Avon lacks the

?2Ibid., p. 555. 109

compassion and altruism of such, characters as Captain Craig, Count von Wursburger, and Cliff Klingenhagen, In Avon's case self-knowle dge

is not enough; action is needed too, and Avon cannot act, cannot forgive,

cannot sacrifice self. That is his tragedy.

King Jaaper, Robinson's last work, represents one of his most

penetrating studies of betrayed friendship. This subject of betrayal,

central to many of Robinson's poems, including "An Old Story, " "The

Corridor, " "Alma Mater, " "Karma,'» the Arthurian trilogy, Roman

Bartholow, and The Glory of the Nightingales, is developed in its purest

form in King Jasper. The middle section of the poem concentrates solely

upon Jasper's betrayal of Hebron and the effects rendered upon both by

his betrayal. King Jasper displays in stark terms the inevitable conse-

quences of betrayal on the two involved—the betrayer and the betrayed--

but these two are not all, for a whole world may fall too from one breach

of trust, one violation of the brotherhood of man.

The effects of betrayal are revealed gradually and symbolically

by the crumbling, ultimate collapse of Jasper's empire. King Jasper,

the betrayer, cannot escape the doom that his betrayal clinched; neither

can any other Robinson protagonist, not the man in "Karma" who sees

the Santa Glaus and remembers, and not Nightingale, who is never per-

mitted one moment's rest from the guilt of betrayal, Jasper's material

splendor, evident at the first of the poem, does not hide his inner torment 1X0

This action is set in a mythical kingdom ruled by the affluent, powerful, spiritually Mind King Jasper and his beautiful wife* Honoria. The Queen, far from blind, senses that something is amiss, that ail is not as well as the King would prefer to think, that the very castle i« threatened by unseen hands and presences. At first the King and Queen believe the un- easiness is brought on by their son, young Jasper, and his lovely Zo&» whom he has brought to the castle against their wishes,. But Zoe is not the basic cause of unrest; the cause lies deep in that past which Jasper goes back to in a dream that occupies the central part of the poem's structure.

In the dream Jasper climbs alone up a high hill in a desolate land.

He i® the solitary, isolated, friendless figure t

He was alone, and he wa® lost, There was to be no friend or guide or servant For one who in his life had climbed so high That he had been a king. 73

But there is a friend too, for the shade of Hebron appears, Hebron, the dead friend, the betrayed instrument of Jasper's rise to power. Hebron reproaches the King and recounts the lost glory of their friendship, of which there were golden moments like these:

Jasper, there was a time, and many a time. When you and I had more to tell each other Than a long night would hold; and I remember--

73 Ibid., p. 1420. Ill

Yes, Jasper, more than once--dawn coming in To find you still alert* assuring me

Of peace renewed, and health, and independence . , , 74

The days of trust and mellow companionship were shattered by Jasper.

The more Hebron talks, the bitterer h© grows. He considers the pos-

sibility of a second betrayal on Jasper's part: . , , you would not leave me here alone, Jasper, your heart would be a fiery coal Within you, should you leave me twice behind you, And let me die* I have died once for you,

And that should be enough. 75

Then Hebron expresses the great truth which all betrayers learn at one time or another--he warns Jasper, "Never believe, Jasper that when you bury us we are safe . , .!« This is the same truth that Avon learned and lived and died with; it is also what Nightingale finds out.

The evil that one friend doe® to another will live as long as the evildoer and even longer, as when Hebron's son is tainted by the sins of Jasper against his father and so comes seeking the vengeance death prevented his father from obtaining. The evil of betrayal cannot be whitewashed or covered up by years and time; it must be redeemed through repentance and expiation and service to mankind.

Hebron continues reviling Jasper for leaving him to die poor, unexalted, deceived; and Jasper suffers much from the goading and the 7 W, p. 1423. V, p. 1424. 75 Ibid., pp. 1423-1424. 112

lash of Hebron's tongue, which speaks the truth that Zoe has already per-

ceived and Honor ia suspected, the truth which Jasper ha® sought to erase

and forget ever stince the sell-out, the enormous theft of Hebron's ideas.

As the climb grow® steeper, Hebron leaps on to Jasper's back, be-

coming now th« visible symbol of that awful weight of guilt Jasper must

bear. The burden metaphor seen in Amaranth is repeated in this pas-

sage from King Jasper:

He must go on. Upholding as he went, and with endurance More terrible to confess that death would be To greet and recognize* the crushing load Of malice that he carried, 77

Hebron's form changes to gold, making his shape heavier and the load

more difficult for the King* Finally, with the climb always getting

steeper, Hebron spurs on his betrayer with rowels of gold. The truth

of why Jasper duped his friend comes out in Jasper's own words:

If you had lived. Tour freaks of caution, and your hesitations, And your uncertainties - «if once you saw Before you what was only yourt to take, And hold, and say was yours--would have been clogs And obstacles that would have maddened m® . . , 78

Ambition was the main reason, then, for betrayal; ambition and gold.

For a kingdom of material glories, Jasper forsook a more important

and vital kingdom consisting of himself and a friend. How Jasper tricked Hebron is told later by young Hebron; his father was an inventor,

77 78 Ibid,. p. 1427. Ibid., p. 1429. 113 and Jasper used Ms friend's brains as a means of becoming ruler.

Hebron relentlessly tortures his adversary and former companion:

I am the gold that you said would be mlne-- Before you stole it, and became a king. Fear not, old friend; you cannot fail or die, Unless 1 strangle you with my gold lingers.

At the pinnacle of the climb, Jasper sees Ms son and Zoe across a wide chasm which he must leap in order to escape his demon. Before the King leaps and falls into consciousness by awakening from the nightmare, Hebron rends him with a last ironic condemnation:

If we go down together, I shall not die-- For you have killed me once, though I'm alive In spite of dying, and heavier than you dreamed The growing ghost of a dead friend could be. You did it slowly, but you did it well, And so that's over. One of life's awkward laws ^ Forbids my dying again for a friend's pleasure,

No relief awaits Jasper upon awaking. Although the shade is gone, a physical sickness, the symbol of moral deterioration, afflicts him now.

Besides the incessant memory of Hebron, Jasper must endure another manifestation of that guilt in the form of the cold, vengeful, dehumanized young Hebron, son of the ruined friend. The youth comes to torture

Jasper and destroy his empire. Taunts like the following do more to plague the King and remind him of his betrayal than Hebron's blowing up of factories could ever do:

^Ibld., p. 1430. ^Ibid., p. 1433, 114

Which of you two is the more fortunate: Whether it's you, King Jasper, having all this-- Or whether it's he, my father, having a few Dark feet of earth, forgotten and undisturbed. To call his house?81

Nevertheless, Jasper clings to the false and dying concept of materialism and never recovers from his blindness. He dies as his empire crumbles outside his windows, The falling empire serves as an objective correlative of Jasper's inner fall. Friendship demands loyalty; and Jasper, who broke that bond, that essential trust,, has to weather the penalty alone and without aid. Jasper never repents; neither does

Avon, whose deed was not so overtly treacherous as was Jasper's.

Others, Nightingale and Matthias, do gain some measure of expiation.

The effects of betrayal in King Jasper are shown as uniformly bad. Be- cause a friend was wronged, an empire and a civilization built on that wrong cannot prevail. The betrayer, the betrayed, and all connected with them, save one, Zoe, are reduced to ashes and dust by the evil of betrayal. Had the King been loyal he might have achieved less material success than he doe®, but he also would not have lost his soul, and atonement would not have been necessary, Without loyalty, friendship is doomed, as are the friends,

These five aspects of friendship which have been discussed above-* happiness in Captain Craig, the narrator-listener technique in The Man

8*Ibid., p, 1444, 115

Who Died Twice, friends as failures in Amaranth, the abortive friendship in Avon's Harvest, and the betrayed friendship in King Jasper-«to repeat, do not fall into any observable pattern of development. Again to repeat, seven of the narratives do, however, reveal a pattern, the recurring structural and thematic design of the triangle. The Arthurian poems, Roman Bartholow, The Glory of the Nightingales, Matthias at the Door, and Talifer all present in one form or another a basic situation involving a triangle of two men and a woman. This is not to say, of course, that other dominant motifs in Robinson1® handling of the friendship theme cease to appear; on the contrary, the betrayal theme may be found in each of these seven poems. In the discussion to follow, the triangle pattern will be treated sometimes at length, sometimes with brevity, depending upon its importance in the individual work, so that if other and more significant factors are present they may be examined

also.

The first poem of the Arthurian trilogy, Merlin, presents a triangular pattern that also shapes the succeeding work, Lancelot, In both poems the triangle of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere constitutes a basic conflict, with both men loving Guinevere and both tied by allegiance to .each other. Merlin, also has a secondary triangle consisting of

Arthur, Merlin, and Vivian, though in this case Arthur does not desire the woman and the conflict arises solely from Merlin's sense of duty to

Arthur and love for Vivian. The ever familiar problem of betrayal 116 occupies a prominent position in Merlin as well. Each, poem of the trilogy is loaded with philosophical and allegorical implications; these concerns will be mentioned only as they relate to the task at hand-*

Robinson's treatment of friendship.

Merlin, much like King Jasper, depicts a time of impending disaster, Arthur1® kingdom it about to fall; and his moat trusted ad- visor, Merlin, is away at Broceliande, where he has lived with Vivian for several years. The tangible reason why the empire is threatened lies in the rivalry of Lancelot and Arthur over Guinevere, In the fight to take her back after she has absconded with Lancelot, two of Gawaine's brothers are killed, Gawaine, one of the King's trusted knight®, is then bent on avenging his brothers1 deaths at all coat®. Out of this turmoil and clash of interest comes the dramatic power of the poem. Friend- ship, particularly the problem of loyalty and allegiance, is involved throughout, but is rarely the major focus of attention,

A large portion of the poem is told through a flashback method.

Merlin, once Arthur's visionary counselor, left Arthur for love of a woman, the charming, girlish Vivian, Before he left, he warned

Arthur of approaching trouble because of Lancelot and Guinevere.

Arthur, however, to prove Merlin incorrect, deliberately sent Lancelot to transport his future queen back to him. As predicted, the two fell in love. Now at the present, Merlin is called by Arthur to prophesy the 11? future again, but Merlin is reluctant to leave Vivian. Arthur comments on the attraction of the woman:

This Merlin is not mine. But Vivian's, My crown is less than hers# And I am lees than woman to this man. 82

When Merlin does come to Gamelot, he says thing® to Arthur thai no other friend could dare to. He tell® him with absolute frankness of the ruin facing his kingdom :

"You may learn soon that you are a King no more. But a slack, blasted, and sad-fronted man. Made sadder with a crown. "83

Arthur acknowledges Merlin's candidness and recapitulates the faith he has in Merlin;

There is no man who could a ay more to me Today, or say so much to me, and live

Where 1 have sinned and erred and heeded not Your counsel; and where you yourself--God save us S -- Have gone down smiling to the smaller life That you and your incongruous laughter called Your living grave,

Theirs is a valid friendship; Merlin, despite the King's rank, is unfailingly honest, for which the King is grateful. Another loyal friend of

Arthur's is Dagonet, called a fool by many, but no fool at all. Sur- 85 rounded by "dubious knaves, " Arthur needs men like Dagonet whom

32» Iil4 Ibid. 4 , p. 250. Ibid., pp. 250-251,

S3 85 Ibid. Ibid., p. 255. 118

86 he can trust, as he says, "with even my soul's last shred. " Others, like the passionate Gawaine, Arthur cannot be sure of.

After talking to Arthur, Merlin returns to Vivian. Seeing her, he remembers "the pain/ That fought in Arthur's eyes for losing 0T him ..." Merlin, in meditating upon Arthur's approaching fall, thinks of his own role in the King's rise:

... so founded by the will Of one wise counsellor who loved the king, And loved the world and therefore made him king To be a mirror for it . . .

The King sinned irremediably, however, by fathering a bastard son,

Modred, who is the real danger to the kingdom now, not Lancelot.

Another sin was Arthur's trying to take Guinevere for his own when he did not truly love her. Ten years have passed between Merlin's last visit with the King; now Dagonet comes for him again. Merlin leaves

Vivian, for he is old and a part of "Time" once more, but he does not go to Camelot, He knows that the end is inevitable. Civil war is already splitting the kingdom, and he can do nothing. Mark Van Doren has stated aptly the scope of Merlin's vision and refusal to return to 86Ibid. 88Ibid. , p. 289.

87Ibid. , p. 266. 119

Camelot, » » the end not only of a lew men's lives but of a civilization 89 turned inward now upon itself and weakened in its will. "

The betrayal theme is developed in two separate instances. Lance- lot, by abducting Guinevere, violated the trust, or more specifically, the allegiance he owed to Arthur, This betrayal is muted and overshadowed by other concerns, such as Merlin's vision and his attachment to Vivian. But a second betrayal is given considerable attention, especially near the end of the poem. Lancelot betrayed Gawaine's friendship by killing Gareth and Gaheris, Gawaine's beloved brothers.

Although Lancelot slew them by accident, Gawaine is uncontrollably angry and wants bloody revenge. His cry is that of every man fired by the lust for vengeance: 'Burn Lancelot By inches till he give you back the Queen; Then hang him*-drown him-*or do anything To rid the world of him. * He killed my brothers, And he was once my friend. Now damn the soul Of him who killed my brothers! 90

Bedivere, another knight of Arthur's, tries to persuade Gawaine to re* lent; he tells him that the fate of a whole world depends upon his actions; he urges forgiveness or at least a sacrifice of personal grievance to the larger concern of the state:

89 Mark Van Doren, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1927), p. TO. 1 90 Robinson, Collected Poems, p. 300. 120

Is the kingdom of the world. Now rocking, to go down in sound and Wood And ashes and sick ruin, and for the sake Of three men and a woman? 91

Hatred reign® throughout the kingdom; all war for something,

Lancelot for love, Gawaine for revenge, Arthur for madness because of love and hate, Modred for hate and ambition, Dagonet and Merlin, two who do not war, cannot possibly curb hatred like Gawaine'b.

Gawaine, the betrayed friend, actually holds the key to everything. He could, if he but would, forgive Lancelot and reunite Lancelot and

Arthur, thereby preserving the world they all live in. Dagonet ex- asperatedly tells Gawaine of the ultimate folly he is about to allow to happen:

Go your way, and drag the world Along down with you. What's a word or so To you if you can hide an ell of iron Somewhere in Lancelot ... 92

And Gawaine does not give in. At the poem's end Dagonet and Merlin 93 are alone, and there is "darkness over Cam@lot.'f For a friend who was betrayed, or thought he was, a world was destroyed. Accord- ing to Merlin's vision, forces were coming to disrupt Arthur's kingdom;

Merlin indicated that Modred was to be the main agent of destruction,

91 93 Ibid., p. 301. Ibid., p. 314.

92Ibid,, p. 303. 121 and so Modred proved to be; Ms plotting undermined the kingdom, and his murder of Tor and Lamorak precipitated evil war. But Gawaine's hatred is also a main force. At the end his enmity towards Lancelot is the final factor in bringing about the downfall of Arthur's civilization.

Friendship, or rather broken friendship, helps to cause a world to die.

It is to be remembered that Jasper's world fell too because of a betrayed friendship. Robinson could scarcely have given friendship a more pronounced role among the fundamental elements of life than he did in King Jasper and in Merlin.

The second work in the trilogy, Lancelot, presents a continuation of two friendship motifs in Merlin? the triangular relationship of Arthur,

Lancelot, and Guinevere, and the breaking-up of the friendship of

Gawaine and Lancelot. The relationship of Gawaine and Lancelot stands as one of Robinson's most lucid and effective presentations of betrayal, revenge, and reconciliation.

The civil war (carried over from Merlin) is brought on by a number of factors*-Modred's ambition and conniving, Gawaine's hatred of Lancelot, and his refusal to relinquish this hatred until the war has already begun and dragged on for years. However, the motivating force, the initial irritant, is the desire of Lancelot and Arthur to possess the same woman, Guinevere. A® in Merlin, the King sends Lancelot to bring Guinevere to Camelot for marriage. Of course Lancelot fails in 122

love with her, and she with Mm, so that in effect he has betrayed his

King, (The character of Merlin is not present in Lancelot, but hi® pre-

dictions are alluded to and come true in the second poem as in the first,)

Lancelot speaks of his betrayal, which is a betrayal of both friendship

and allegiance to the state;

For in my heart I knew that I would fail My King, who trusted me too far beyond The mortal outpost of experience. 94 95 Again, Lancelot thinks to himself of the "cankered honor" with which he has served the King. Arthur pretends to go on a hunting trip in order to throw Lancelot and Guinevere together so that he can trap them, and his plan succeeds. The lovers, however, manage to escape; it is in their flight and ensuing struggle that Gawaine's brothers are killed inadvertently by Lancelot's sword. This is Arthur's grim vision of the imminently chaotic world that Merlin had warned him of:

. . . Gawaine with his hate, Or Modred with his anger for his birth And the black malady of his ambition-- Will make of my Round Table, where was drawn The circle of a world, a thing of wreck And yesterday--a furniture forgotten . . . 96 Than, after the war has raged for a long time and everybody is weary of fighting, with Arthur plagued by Modred's schemes, with

94Ibid., p. 376. 96Ibid., p. 401.

95 Ibid., p. 383. 123

Lancelot away in France and Gawaine's army at his 'heels* the war slowly stops, Gawaine repudiates his old enmity, as do©# the King, and

Gawaine tells Lancelot of how much was broken when he left Arthur and how much Arthur needs him:

, . » and of all Who loved him once he needs you now the most-- Though he would not so much as whisper this To me or to my shadow. 97

Merlin and Lancelot both reveal the triangle pattern in its purest form; two men desire one woman; one takes her, and the friendship is broken.

In neither poem, however, are the ramifications of the triangular struggle so completely explored as in narratives such as Roman Bartholow and

The Glory of the Nightingales. Merlin ends without solving any problems involving the triangle; Arthur and Lancelot are at war* Lancelot, on the other hand, traces the implications somewhat further; as the poem ends, Arthur has forgiven Lancelot and desires reuniting with him, while Lancelot is also repentant, though dedicated to his own ideals rather than to serving exclusively a friend or King.

The triangle motif, as has been mentioned, is overshadowed in

Lancelot by another familiar motif--that of betrayal. Indeed, the betrayed friendship is important in no less than eight of the narratives, as well as in several short poems* Of the narratives that deal most completely with betrayal, Lancelot, Roman Bartholow, and The Glory

9?lbid., p. 431. 124 of the Nightingales are on ome side of the ledger, and Avon'® Harvest,

King Jasper, and Merlin are on the other. The first three poem® pre- »""»!•111*«WWW* sent both revenge and atonement; the second three present only revenge.

In Lancelot, for instance, the betrayed friend either achieves forgiveness or moves in that direction; whereas in King Jasper, to cite another example, the betrayed friend constantly seeks revenge and never desire® atonement. Lancelot, because it does show both revenge and reconciliation, seems to be a more satisfying and more comprehensive presentation than, say, the sheer, blind lust for revenge maintained throughout a poem like Merlin. At any rate Lancelot shows the full spectrum of friendship; Gawaine and Lancelot move from secure friendship to betrayal to deadly fighting to grateful reconciliation. This transition is worth examining in detail.

In the beginning Gawaine and Lancelot are shown a® the best of friends. Gawaine, jokingly as usual, suggests to his friend a truth that proves ironic before the poem is done: "Why frown upon a friend? Few 98 live that have too many . . . " Then Gawaine swears eternal loyalty to his friend Lancelot:

If I be not the friend of Lancelot, May I be nailed alive along the ground And emmets eat me dead.

98 , 99 Ibid., p. 36b. Ibid. 125

This oath of loyalty is also ironic when viewed in the light of what happens to this friendship. Even now as they talk, there are rifts visible in their bond to each other, Gawaine perceives that the search for the

Grail has changed Lancelot a great deal:

No man has known you for the man you were Before you saw whatever it was you saw, To make so little of kings and queens and friends Thereafter. *00

Thus Lancelot emerges like the solitary man in "The Man Against The

Sky" or the wedding guest in "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding. " In the quest for the truth, for a higher level of existence, Lancelot will cast off ail old attachments or friends or loves like Guinevere; he too 101 is a man who has found the "orient Word" and must go alone to meet his destiny. Lancelot himself expresses this necessity for independent action: "There is no place for me save where the Light / May 102 lead me . . . " Before their conversation is over, Lancelot, who fears an alliance between Gawaine's brother Agravaine and cunning

Modred, tells Gawaine expressly that h© hopes nothing will spoil their friendship. In the next scene, when Lancelot and Guinevere are together, they talk among other things of Gawaine's friendship. Guinevere knows

1^°Ibid., p. 367.

101 Ibid., "The Man Against The Sky, " p. 66.

102 Ibid., p. 369. 126 well the mercurial intensity of Lancelot's friend, "Who, if the stars 103 went out, would only laugh, " And Lancelot, in a bit of Robinsonian foreshadowing, note® perceptively the quality of hi® friend and future adversary: So far as it is hi® to be the friend Of any man, so far is he my friend-- Till I have crossed him in aom@ enterprise Unlikely and unborn* 104

The crossing, the betrayal, is not long in coming. When Lancelot and Guinevere flee the King, an army is sent to stop them. In the fighting

Lancelot accidentally kills Gareth and Gaheris, Gawaine's two favorite brothers, (All this of course is found in Merlin too.) When Gawaine learn© of what has befallen hi® brothers, he is insanely vexed and ex- claims bitterly;

An hour ago and I was all but eager To mourn with Bedivere for grief I had That I did not say something to this villain--

To this true, gracious, murderous friend of mine » . .

This last phrase i® emblematic of the disgust and hatred virtually every betrayed friend among Robinson's portraits always feels at first, certainly Malory in The Glory of the Nightingales experiences such violent passion. It is what the friend feels long years afterward that counts the

103 105 Ibid,, p. 372, Ibid. , p. 399.

104 . , Ibid. 12? most, however. Gawaine, fierce Gawaine, declares revenge instan-

| QL taneoualy, "The world that has him will not have him long*" There- 10? after, Gawaine'si "tireless hate" is the driving fore© of the poem, the spark that ignites the civil war between Arthur's army and Lance- lots followers# Without Gawaine's mad ineietence, the King probably would not have done anything about Lancelot's stealing his bride:

There was no peace, Nor could there be, so Gawaine told the King, And «o the King in anguish told himself* Until there was an end of one of thera*- Of Gawaine or the King, or Lancelot . , .108 But Gawaine keep® spurring on the King, and war divides the once mighty empire. A few rational minds itill exiet, such as Sir Bore

(serving the same purpose here a« Dagonet doee in Merlin), who trie* to persuade Lancelot to call off the war, as if Lancelot could turn back

Gawaine** hatred with mere words. Sir Bore asks somewhat desperately :

Why longer, then. Are you and Gawaine to anoint with war. That even in hell would be superfluous, A reign already dying, and ripe to die? 109 Guinevere, overestimating her hold on Lancelot, urges him to wage an offensive war against hie opponents. Lancelot, who did not

196 108 Ibid. Ibid., p. 401,

107 109 Ibid., p. 402, Ibid., p, 403. 123 intentionally begin the war and who loved Oareth besides, silences her j

Even you, in your quick fever of dispatch, Might hesitate before you drew the blood Of Mm what was their brother, and my friend. Yes, he was mora than my friend, was 1 to know, Than I had said or guessed . » ,118

Now the King tends word to Lancelot that ho wishes him to return the

Queen with no fear of recrimination on Arthur*® fart, Lancelot, fear- 111 f«l still of Oawaine'® "obscure wound that would not heal or kill, " agrees to Arthur's terms* In a conversation with Guinevere he reduces the war and the deaths of all the men involved to the war's irreducible cause; They died because Gawaine went mad with hate For loss of his two brothers and set the King On fire with fear . , ,112 Told she has to return to Arthur* Quinevere cannot understand why.

All of Lancelot's reasons are far above her grasp; she fails to see the purpose of his resolve to go alone, to search further for the orient

Word, the Light, Thinking to himself, Lancelot ponders his inability to perceive the Light which he is certain exists : "And I shall not see it, , * . so long as 1 kill men for Gawaine, If I kill him, I may as well kill myself. And I have killed his brothers, "113

110_ .A_ 1U j£2£«* P' 407 ibid., p. 416.

Ill 113 Ibid., p. 420, Ibid., p. 42?. 129

Lancelot takes Guinevere "back to Camelot, but the war goes on. as be-

fore, Gawaine again is responsible; he implore* the King to punish

Lancelot for good* Arthur leads the attack upon Lancelot,, but has to

return to Camelot to ward off further trouble from Modred.

For reconciliation between Gawaine and Lancelot ever to take place, Gawaine has to initiate the move towards understanding. This

he does on hi® deathbed; his act is on© of pur® redemption and forgive*

neas, an admission of personal error. Mortally wounded, Gawaine

call® Lancelot to his bedside and confesses that if he had had the opportunity he would have killed Lancelot, In a recent clash Lancelot had this very chance, but did not act upon it. This saving deed by Lancelot is apparently on® of the main factors to influencing Gawaine'® change of heart, a case of goodnees fostering goodness, Lancelot expresses hit abiding grief over the deaths of Gawaine

~~Your brother# are my debt That I shall owe to sorrow and to God, For whatever payment there may be. 114~~

Gawaine, realising that "There was a madness feeding on us all, holds no venom now for Lancelot. All the hatred and desire for venge** ance have passed away, leaving only the old love for Lancelot, the old ties of friendship. In these words Gawaine announces a complete reconciliation :

~~"W. * «0. 130~~

~~. . » but we are not strangers now. Though I have only one spoiled «y« that sees, • I see in yours we aire not strangers now, 116~~

~~Gawaine's dying words are a fitting summary of the evil bred of be-~~

~~trayal and the retribution that followed:~~

And for ourselves. And all who died for us# or now are dying Like rats around u§ of their numerous wound# And ills and evils, only this do X know** And this you know; The world has paid enough For Camelot, The world of Gawame and Lancelot indeed has paid enough for broken

~~friendship too. Thus Lancelot offer s a redemptive answer that Merlin~~

~~does not. Gawaine, by seeking forgiveness and repudiating hatred,~~

restores the warmth and trust and goodness that originally connected hira and Lancelot. This poena is quite definitely a triumph of love over hatred, forgiveness over revenge* friendship over enmity# And at the poem's end Lancelot ia alone, free to pursue his solitary destiny# He has the memory of a dead friend to sustain him, but he also has his own inner resources with which to follow the Light. This portrait of the solitary man~«the protagonist moving alone into the flux of time-* becomes, as will be noted later, one of the very significant aspects of

~~Robinson's philosophy of friendship.~~

~~The third and last poem of the trilogy, Tristram, has much less to do with friendship than either Merlin or Lancelot. In fact Tristram~~

116 117 Ibid., p. 432. Ibid,, p. 433, 131 is closest to Cavender's House, probably, a® far as lack of development of the friendship theme is concerned. The poem is included here to illustrate the continuity of the triangle pattern and to point out those relevant aspects of th® friendship theme that do appear in th© work.

~~The triangular situation is almost identical with that in Merlin and Lancelot. Tristram, seat by King Mark to bring back the future~~

Queen, Isolt ©f Ireland, falls in love with her, thereby breaking the oath of loyalty to the King as well as sundering their friendship. From that breach of loyalty, th® tragedy of Tristram's death inevitably succeeds.

The background of the relationship of Mark and Tristram has a bearing on how each is affected when Isolt divides them, Gouvernail, a very loyal friend to Tristram, tells him of the King's lofty sense of obligation for what Tristram has done:

~~The King knows well what you have done for him, And owns a debt of gratitude beyond th® gift Of utterance for the service of your word, 118~~

On Mark's wedding night brooding Tristram lurks beneath the castle towers. Isolt somehow manages to com© to him; and Mark, with Andred's sneaking aid, catches them together, Mark's words to Tristram em- phasize the bonds broken, the allegiance defiled:

~~"Why have you come between me and my Queen, Stealing her love as you might steal my gold!~~

~~118 Ibid., p, 606. 132~~

~~Honor! Good God in heaven! Is this honor »«• And after all that I have done for you? "119~~

~~Mark's cry could stand as that of Arthur's; both kings lose their women~~

~~to supposedly loyal follower®. In Tristram, however, the desire for~~

~~revenge comes from the King; Mark wants swift and everlasting punish-~~

~~ment for Tristram, as he tells him before banishing Mm forever:~~

~~I'll have your life. Instead—since you are sure your life means only One woman--and will keep it far from you; So far that you shall hunger for it always. 120~~

~~In each poem of the trilogy a woman is responsible for breaking~~

~~up a friendship. Allegiance, mutual service, and trust do not withstand~~

~~the pressure created by woman. In Merlin Guinevere so eafiames~~

~~Lancelot that they fly the King to keep their love intact, as they do also~~

~~in Lancelot, Moreover, as has been noted before, there is in Merlin~~

~~a secondary triangle involving the King, Merlin, and Vivian; and again the woman is strong and tears Merlin away from Arthur for many years.~~

~~So in Tristram Isolt of Ireland is the cause of Tristram's repudiation of loyalty. The point seems to be clear; friendship, at least in the trilogy,~~

cannot withstand the tug of love. When a woman's love is involved, dissolution is irrevocable. The dubious role of love in the strife-torn, chaotic, friendship-riven world of Tristram is seen clearly in this passage:

~~119 120 P- 632« Ibid., p. 634, 133~~

~~, , , the Round Table**» So long the symbol of a world in order Soon to be overthrown by love and fat® And loyalty forsworn, 1^1~~

~~Another aspect of the friendship them© in Tristram that should be mentioned is the part played by certain minor characters such as~~

Gouvernail and Andre d. Gouvernail is a type familiar in Robinson's narratives; he is roughly equivalent to Asher in Avon1® Harvest, Dagonet in Merlin, and Unfraville in Roman Bartholow. All of these characters are extremely loyal and useful friend®, Gouvernail, for instance, saves

Tristram from death by exposure when Tristram, banished, wanders thoughtlessly in the storm. Trustworthy Gouvernail takes hi® grief- stricken friend to Queen Morgan's, where Tristram recover®. He gratefully acknowledges Gouvemail's help:

~~You are the last of men, And so the last of friends now, Gouvernail, For me to cleave to in extremities Beyond the malefactions of this world* 122~~

Through every turn of events, every misfortune, Gouvernail is unfailingly loyal, After Mark has escaped from prison and stolen Isolt back from Tristram, Gouvernail persist® in staying with his master, hoping to aid him, until finally Tristram commands him to go:

~~121 . 122 IWd,, p, 662. Ibid., pp. 642-643. 134~~

~~"This is not good for you, Gouvernail. You are not my friend for this. Go back to Brittany and forget all this, "123~~

But Gouvernail does not leave and vows instead to remain with Tristram until one or the other dies. Gouvernail is on® of the most consistent portraits of inexhaustible, dog-like loyalty in the Robinson canon. His evil counterpart, the embodiment of perverse, despicable loyalty, is seen in the figure of Andred, lackey of King Mark. Less intelligent than his kindred type, Modred, in Merlin and Lancelot, Andred i® yet more venomous. He informs Mark of the love of Tristram and Isolt for each other, and later he kills Tristram from ambush. Gouvernail and Andred are at opposite poles: one representing good, faithful friendship, the other representing perversity and self-interest. Another portrait of a friend in Tristram that ought to be cited is that of Gawaine.

~~He is the same Gawaine of Merlin and Lancelot, except that in Tristram he has no cause for revenge and is viewed solely as a charming, witty,~~

~~Mercutio-like friend. The betrayal theme involving Gawaine that gen- erates so much force in Merlin and Lancelot is lacking in Tristram.~~

~~Roman Bartholow, often called a novel in verse,124 is one of~~

~~Robinson's longest works and one which offers an intricate, recondite,~~

~~123 Ibid., p. 704.~~

124 Yvor Winters, Edwin Arlington Robinson (Norfolk, Conn,, 1946), p. 103. 135 and vital treatment of the friendship them®. In addition to the triangle pattern three essential aspects of the theme--the necessity of going one's own way* the friend as savior, and the friend as betrayer—are all present as are many other elements of the friendship complex, If one poem alone were to be singled out for study of the friendship theme,

~~Roman Bartholow would be a feasible choice.~~

~~The poem opens with Roman Bartholow exuberant and willing to build an altar to Penn-Raven, the friend who has saved him:~~

, . , and one more to the friend Who, coming strangely out of the unknown To find him here in hi® ancestral prison, Had brought with him release. *25 126 Penn-Raven, the "resident saviour, " has lived with Bartholow for a year, and in that period he has effected some kind of spiritual trans* formation in Bartholow, (The specific nature of this change, this soul- curing, is never divulged by Robinson; all that seems to matter is that 127 Bartholow's "assured renascence" does exist,) At the moment,

Pena-Raven stands, for Bartholow at least, as the epitome of every virtue a friend could possess. Another friend, however, comes, bringing trout for Bartholow's breakfast. Umfraville, the solitary, lonely friend (in the mold of As her and Gouvemail) has come for a deeper 125 127 Robinson, Collected Poems, p. 733 Ibid.

~~126 Ibid., p. 735. 136~~

~~reason than fish, however*, he wants to see how his reborn friend looks.~~

~~Then perceiving that Bartholow has possibly not really found his soul~~

~~as he believes, Umfraville offers significant words of advice and~~

~~caution:~~

~~We cannot harvest evidence unseen As we do carrots, and w® cannot buy it; Nor may we take it from the open hand Of love or friendship, merely wishing it, 128~~

~~What Umfraville is saying is that a perception of the truth (like Lance-~~

~~lot's discovery of the Light) must be achieved alone, that friends axe~~

~~limited and cannot do everything for a man, that the orient Word must~~

~~be found by a man alone, a man, as it were, against the sky. This em-~~

~~phasis on going one's way alone recurs later in the poem and deserves~~

~~more attention then.~~

~~Bartholow, however, does not heed Urafraville's advice or see~~

~~any need for it. He explains thus his incalculable debt to Penn-Raven:~~

~~There was a friend who came to make it so, And one that if I gave him all I own Would leave me rich in wealth unpayable.~~

~~Before leaving, Umfraville literally swears fealty to Bartholow:~~

~~... he Qjmfraville]] found in you Alone a friend, and would, were it feasible, Pay with an arm to prove his loyalty . . . *3®~~

~~128... , ^ _«ffl 130 J£ii" P- 738- Ibid., p. 740. 129 Ibid., p. 739. 137~~

~~Umfraville's pledge of trust is to counterpoint Penn-Raven's deceit soon to appear. Nothing that UmfraviUe has said or suggested can ruffle~~

such love as Bartholow feels, who loves Penn-Raven "almost a# a 131 novice/ Loves God. " His true friend leaves, and Bartholow eat® breakfast with his wife Gabrielle. There is something wrong with their marriage and has been for a long time. The initial cause was

~~simply that Bartholow married the wrong woman. She did not love~~

~~him, and indifference became the dominant tenor of their life together.~~

~~Now, however, Bartholow, through the aid of Penn-Raven, has shaken~~

~~off his soul's torpor and longs for a new, more vigorous, and more purposeful life. What has in fact happened, as Gabrielle understands~~

~~and says, is that Peaa-Raven has usurped what should have been her~~

~~role in providing Bartholow love and a sense of worth; Would any children take the place of him? Would you exchange for them the miracle Of your release, rebirth, or what-you»call-it? 132~~

~~A few months pass, and Bartholow continues to luxuriate in his~~

~~new-found freedom. He cries aloud, "God, what it is to be alive 133 again!" Already Bartholow is beginning to realize what UmfraviUe had spoken of, the need for independent action and self-reliance.~~

~~131 133 Ibid., p. 735. Ibid., p. 768,~~

~~132 Ibid., p. 756. 138~~

~~Thinking of going away for a while, Bartholow knows what Penn-Raven will say of him:~~

« . , 'There goes one so glad to be himself That he deserts the friend who made him so.1 And that will tell you all; or if not all, More than enough. There comes along an hour When we find even our saviours in the way, And we are best alone. *34

The irony lies in the specific manner in which the savior Penn-Raven gets in the way, Penn-Raven is ready to leave too and believes that he has worn out his stay, "For even a friend may ride his beat friend's patience / Until it founders like a worn out horse, H

The modern triangle in Roman Bartholow,, essentially no different from the medieval one in the trilogy, hag the same basic ingredients: two friends are in love with the same woman and are driven apart by their conflicting desires. Roman Bartholow, however, presents much more directly than either the trilogy or the other narrative® the very act of betrayal. Robinson draws a sharp, sensuous picture of the deed:

~~Then he went calmly into his friend's house And laid his thick lips closely upon those Of hi® friend's wife » . « ^6~~

~~Thus Penn-Raven, trusted friend and well-beloved savior, tries to seduce Bartholow's wife. That the attempt is repulsed doe® not alter~~

~~134B>id,, p. 769. 136Ibid., p. 772.~~

135 Ibid., p. 770. 139 the treachery involved, This is the most blatant betrayal in Robinson's works, and the most surprising. Perns*Raven is the embodiment of the messianic friend, a figure common in the poems dealing with friendship.

The doctor in "How Annandale Went Out" who saves by killing. Night- ingale in The Glory of the Nightingales who saves a friend's life by conferring upon him a lifelong obligation to serve mankind, Matthias in Matthias at the Door who saves a friend's life also and receives the woman they both love as payment, Dr. Quick in Talifer who saves a friend by influencing him to marry the right woman and then boast® of his aid--all of these savior-friends perform crucial services for their friends. By having Penn-Raven first save Bartholow, then betray him,

~~Robinson has successfully combined two familiar motifs and given both new dramatic value and intensity.~~

Of all the betrayers portrayed by Robinson, Penn-Raven is perhaps the most difficult to fathom. He instantly perceives what he has lost; whereas a similar recognition by King Jasper takes a lifetime to envisage, and even then Jasper does not see all. Pena-Raven says to

~~Gabrielle after she has declined his advances.~~

~~When I go, I shall have brought one man to life again, And in so doing shall have lost all else . , .137~~

~~137_ Ibid.» p. 774. 140~~

While capable of saving others, Penn-Raven has no power to save himself. An underlying irony in. Penn»Raven*s betrayal is the discrepancy between bis appearance, his scrupulous good looks and graceful manner, and the trickery, the shallowness of his character; Umfraville, on the other hand, though ugly and socially inharmonious (and viewed by Gab- rielle as especially unpleasant)* i® in reality the truest and best of friends. Throughout, there is this contrast of appearance and integrity, with the two having no corresponding relation to one another.

Penn-Raven and Gabriel!© discuss their situation together, and much of the unhappiness of Gabrielle's marriage, her "unintelligible 138 waste, u is brought to light. Penn-Raven pleads in vain for the great love he has for her, then leaves the room. Bartholow, returned now from a walk, see® Gabrielle and know® immediately that something has happened between her and Penn-Raven. With extreme subtlety

~~Bartholow intuits That she knew more than he of what was gone, And so had known before there was a friend To save him and to filch her from his arras. *^9~~

Both realize that their marriage is irretrievably shattered; and after futile groping# on both sides, Gabrielle leaves with a sad good-bye, noting how Bartholow trembles: "Yet sure enough that it was less for

~~138 . 139 fitSi- P- 78»- JWd., P. 794. 141~~

140 her/ Than for the saviour-friend who had betrayed him . . .11 Two linos fix their conditions and point up the prominent motif of the solitary man working out: his destiny alone: "She with her world behind her was 141 alone, / And he with his before him was alone « » » M With Gabrielle fled to the river now, Bartholow, frozen by the knowledge of Ferrn-

Raven's deceit, stands , . » sick with a cold loathing For a salvation bought with ignominy. And for a saviour whose invidious fe© Was hospitality that he had steeped And poisoned with unconscionable insult Before it was flung back, 142

~~The head-on clash between Bartholow and Penn-Raven is one of the highlights of the poem. Just as in King Jasper and The Glory of the~~

~~Nightingales, the direct confrontation of the betrayed and the betrayer provides dramatic sparks, Penn»Raven*s abrupt change, at least~~

Bartholow's abrupt awareness of this other side of Penn-Raven's characters intensifies the struggle even more. When they meet, Penn-Raven lies, but of course to no avail, Bartholow remarks cuttingly on the superfluity of having friends at all:

~~If we must have them, or believe we must, I'd recommend the putting out at once Of all our eye®. Then we should have a world~~

~~140 142 3Ebid'» P- 803- Ibid., pp. 806-807. 141 Ibid., p. 805. 142~~

~~Only a little darker than it is Tonight, and one less hazardous--may be.~~

His passion mounting, Bartholow attacks Penn-Raven, knocking him to the floor; but Penn-Raven, the stronger, quickly overpowers him. His feather# unruffled, Penn-Raven analyzes th® break-up of Bartholow'3

~~marriage and announces that he is leaving the next day, Bartholow,~~

still violently angry, caustically attacks Penn-Raven'# affront®ry and 144 derides the "shrunken soul" ©£ his former benefactor. Still Penxi*

Raven has advice to offer and urges Bartholow not to give up life just because his lov® has been wasted and lost forever. He telle him his larger obligation is to live, whether the woman does or not. Even after th© betrayal, Penn-Raven's advice is no legs valid than before. As

~~Umfraville comments later, "Strange bottles hold God's wine. "145~~

Penn-Raven's understanding of all that has occurred is clearer and more ordered than Bartholow's» whose emotions still cloud his reason. Be- side®, it was Penn-Raven who cured Bartholow to begin with. He remains a most unusual betrayer, the most fascinating and puzsling savior-friend- deceiver Robinson created.

~~One comment of Penn-Raven's is particularly relevant to the triangle motif. He says of Gabrielle, "And she . . . she is not either~~

~~143 145 Bid., pp. 809-810. Ibid., p. 836. 144 Ibid., p, 819. 143~~

~~146 yours or mine# " The fate of the heroine in the triangle pattern is singularly unfortunate. In this poem Gabrielle commits suicide. In~~

Merlin and Lancelot Guinevere's happiness is short-lived; she cannot stay with her true lover but must return to a token husband, In Tristram fate metes out for Isolt of Ireland the same reward as it does to Guinevere in Lancelot, except that Isolt's lover is killed, and her life with Mark is probably bitterer than Guinevere's is with Arthur. And in both The

~~Glory of the Nightingales and Matthias at the Door the severed triangle leads to the heroines' deaths. Only in the comedy Talifer do the heroines survive.~~

Finally, and with apparent sincerity, Penn-Raven concludes that he failed with Gabrielle as surely as did Bartholow. The latter, still distraught, gives Penn-Raven a check for hie services and bids him leave. Not surprisingly, Penn-Raven accepts the money and departs wearing a look of childish innocence. Two nights later Bartholow travels to Umfraville's house somewhere deep in the woods. He admits freely the mistake he mad® in valuing the false Penn-Raven's friendship more than Umfraville's:

~~Forgive me, For I have learned that you of all my friends, Who are not half so many as they would s©em» Are the securest and the best worth having, 147~~

~~146 147 Jbid., p. 825. Ibid., p. 832. 144~~

~~Umfraville instinctively gucssca what has happen, d; earlier, of coarse, 148 he had 8i' .»n through Punn-Raven, "that bland ant) sainted scalawag. "~~

~~He tells Bartholow , to Bartholow *s evident relief, "You know that you 14a havo cmnt: to the right place/ At the tight time. '' Bartholow has~~

come both to relisv-j him b elf of a burden of grief (lor Gabtielk had walked not only to the rivar but into it and had drowned herself) and to discuas the import of Penn-Ravsn's actions. Umfraville does not disavow

~~Poxrn-Raven's parting advico; on th* contrary, fee states that Bartholow must accept all the good, including of course the rebirth, the cur~~

Penn-Raven gave hiru. Bartholow agrees and i® glad to *<4cognise again th ? untarnished loyalty of Umfraville: »I thank you, for I know you ar . I &A my friend.'* Umfraville analyzes further the relationship of

Bartholow and Penn-Raven and point* out the gratitude Bartholow r».ust feel for Pcnn- Raven*8 having gone: In your heart You arc not sorry that your sybarites, Your Ishmaulite, your oniphalopsychii?, Or what the devil «?l8

~~At first, h'- tell a Umfraville, his attitude toward® hie savior- be t ray c r was one of ambival;-*ne2:~~

~~148Ibid. , p. MX lSOrbicL , p. 837.~~

~~l4W *IMd., p. 840. 145~~

~~I could have given him all but life For recompense. Also, I could have killed him, Indifferently, while be was on the floor,~~

~~And 1 was at hi® throat, 152~~

Now, however, he undergoes a significant change; he no longer wants revenge. Bartholow makes the same step towards redemption as G&waine does in Lancelot and Malory in The Glory of the Nightingales* He repudiates the hatred betrayal has created in him; he forgives. Bartholow says, thereby preserving his souls

~~But | would not kill him now* Nor would I wish him ill. We must all pay, Somehow! and X believe that he has paid. If he has not, he must. 153~~

The necessity for paying is central to the ethic of loyalty and betrayal*

~~Every betrayer in the Robinson canon must pay, as Bartholow thinks~~

~~Penn-Raven must, in one way or another. The man in "Karma" still pays with a gnawing guilt after many years of trying to forget; King~~

~~Jasper pays with his whole kingdom and anguished soul; the world of~~

Gawaine and .Lancelot pays for Camelot with bloodshed and death; Night* ingale pays with true repentance by donating his material wealth to the benefit of mankind. An inflexible law is this--the betrayer suffers until expiation relieves him of that suffering. Penn-Raven, as Bartholow knows, must endure either the long way back by expiation or the even longer way which leads to nothing by trying to cover up or obliterate the sin of betrayal.

*^Ibid., p. 842. *^Ibid., pp. 842-843. 146

~~Three months pass, and Bartholow come® to Umfraville's lor the~~

~~last time. He Is going &lone into the wide world and wishes to thank~~

~~Umfraville once more for his friendship:~~

~~I shall remember always Your counsel, and should always value it, Being yours, whether or not I followed it, 154~~

~~The two friends derive strength from their friendship and from their~~

~~individual selves too. Umfraville expresses one of the cardinal truths~~

~~of friendship when he says :~~

~~There is a best place in the world For me; and that's as far as possible From your activities. 155~~

~~Thus each friend, going his own way, working out his own destiny, can~~

~~yet gain succor from the bare knowledge that the other does exist and~~

~~man-against-the-sky figure. The two friends have separate paths to~~

~~follow, but they remain united. Bartholow leaves, with Umfraville telling him, "You are the only friend/ That I have left , . . But~~

~~one, apparently, is enough. Bartholow must now serve the world as his two friends have served him (excepting of course Penn-Raven's de-~~

~~ceit--the antithesis of friendship and service). The complicated~~

~~154 156 Ibid., p. 852, Jfeifii. P. 855,~~

155 Ibid., p. 854. 14? relationship of all three is summed up in this passage near the poem*® end: Yet be [Umfravillej had been For Bartholow the man who knew him beet, And laved him best, - -acknowledging always one That had betrayed and saved him, *57

~~Bartholow belongs to the world now, and his friends are on the shore while he is on the sea. Like Fargo, Lancelot, Malory, and Matthias,~~

~~Bartholow commits himself to his own resources, knowing and remembering o£ course that friends helped him achieve that independence and are waiting somewhere to help him again,~~

~~Roman Bartholow, to summarize briefly, stands as a particularly comprehensive work in Robinson's varied handling of the friendship theme.~~

The reasons are numerous and plainly obvious: the triangle pattern, so important in many of the narratives, is fully developed in this poem; three of the key motifs of the friendship theme--the role of the individual in realizing his destiny, the friend as savior, and the friend as betrayer--are also fully developed; and four recurring types of friends-- the solitary, faithful Umfraville, the dual conception of Penn-Raven as both savior and betrayer, and Bartholow, the man who has lost his soul and regained it—are portrayed in depth.

~~157 Ibid. 148~~

The Glory of the Nightingales explores about a® many concepts of the friendship ethic as Roman Bartholow, but it explores them more con- cisely and therefore more effectively. If there is a masterpiece among the narratives dealing with the friendship theme, this poem probably deserves the title more than any other. Shorter than Roman Bartholow and not flawed by the cloudy symbolism of Matthias at the Door (ex- cessive length and hazy allegorizing being two of Robinson's most annoying defects), The Glory of the Nightingales emerges as a rather striking study of loyalty, betrayal, and salvation.

The basis of conflict in the poem again revolves around the triangular situation: one man has prospered while another, his friend, though possessing the woman desired by both, has all but perished because of the successful man's betrayal of their friendship. The poem opens with Malory, the wronged friend, bent on slaying Nightingale, the materially rich man who has in the past cheated Malory. The avenger's passion, intense and overpowering, is akin to, or perhaps even more violent than, that of every Robins onian avenger including Hebron and

~~Gawaine. Malory is dedicated to one end, the destruction of his betrayer:~~

~~All his wealth was in a purpose and a weapon, All his purpose a removal of one being Whose inception and existence was an error„ By fate repudiated, and presented 149~~

~~To Malory lor extinction. Nightingale~~

~~Had robbed him long ago of all the rest , « ,158~~

But Malory is wrong too, in wanting to judge and convict a fellow human being* What man, says Robinson time and again, is free enough of error to chastise others for their failings; and he says her© once more that no man is without fault; We should not all sleep well, If night revealed to us our ignorance Of others whoa# intents and evidences. Errors and excellencies, we have assayed And tabulated, 159

This stricture, analogous to the message of "Glass Houses, H is but one of the many moral pronouncements voiced throughout The Glory of the Nightingales, a poem which seem* more consciously and intentionally instructive than any of the other narratives dealing with friendship, though certainly every narrative is apt t© contain much didacticism, Robinson, if he was anything, was a moral poet, and he treats friendship with a moralist's concern.

~~The first part of the poem consists of Malory's walk through~~

Sharon, the town where the friends once lived, a graveyard, and finally along the sea to Nightingale's splendid house, During the walk much of the history of Malory's ruin is alluded to, usually indirectly or incom- pletely, and in this gradual manner the details of the broken friendship

~~158 150 JMi*» 1012 Ibid., p. 1015. 150 and Malory's reasons for revenge are unearthed. Nightingale's material success, Ms surface glory, is dispelled by revelations like the following:~~

~~Now he had sea and mansion, And having them had nothing. He had lost, Like many in winning, more than he had won; And h© was lonelier than one man left On a well-furnished island, 160~~

Nightingale is thus quite similar to men like King Jasper and Matthias, both of whom in terms of worldly goods possess everything, but in terms of spiritual euphoria posses® nothing. One of the reasons, besides the obvious truism that material wealth does not buy happiness, is that they are all betrayers of friends; and betrayal never yields good but only bitterness and unrest* The following passage describing Malory's hatred of Nightingale illustrates the disgust that betrayal always en- genders :

~~Omnipotence Had erred enough already in fashioning His best friend as the devil, and would surely Grant him a word with one the devil had slain As venomously as any snake in darkness* *61~~

At the graveyard, as Malory muses upon his wife Agatha's stone, he realises what is one of the great truths in Robinson's concept of man, what is perhaps the very greatest truth of the friendship theme. His words tell of the absolute need for friends:

~~160 161 Ibid. Ibid., p. 1017. 151~~

Losing Ms faith in God ia a disaster By doubt still clouded and by nature mad© Supportable. But to lose faith in man And in himself, and all that's left to die for, Is to feel a knife in his back before he knows What's there, and then to know it was slimed first With fiery poison to consume the friend

~~Who had no friend* *62~~

It ia better, says Robinson, to lose faith in God than to lose faith in man, N© statement in Ms poetry places stronger emphasis on the role of man's relationship with man, the role of friendship. No statement could. For this moment, this time on earth, man's ability to love his fellow man and live with him is all-important. Malory is afraid that he has lost that saving faith. The broken friendship and the prematurely dead wife have bequeathed only sorrow and hatred and the burning for revenge. Malory's seeking revenge represents the nadir of man's relationship with man, just as every Robinsonian avenger represents this nadir.

~~Some, like Gawaine, Bartholow, and Malory, are able to return to humanity, to repudiate the idea of revenge; others, like Avon's tormentor and Hebron, are doomed forever by their profane desire.~~

~~Malory spends the night in Sharon and starts the next morning for~~

~~Nightingale's place. As Malory walks toward Nightingale's mansion, he recognizes it, the massive, isolated structure, as a symbol of its owner's condition:~~

~~162 Ibid., p. 1022. 152~~

~~•The whole place Told of an empty wealth of loneliness More than of hospitality and friends* i&3~~

~~Once inside, Malory waits, pistol in pocket, for his enemy to come:~~

He was a king, whose word Wag life or death, until another door Was opened and the voice of a lost friend-» The voice of a dead friend, he must remember-- Called him as if a boy that he had known And loved at school were calling him in pain, For which there was no cure. *64

~~When Nightingale doe® appear, Malory witnesses a far worse sign of~~

~~Nightingale's degradation than the lonely house; he sees Nightingale him* 165 self, a "wan wreck, " pathetic, old, wheel-chair encased, withering,~~

dying. He views the ruin and remembers what has been lost; The face he saw Staring at his and waiting for some word, Was that of one whom he had honored once With love and trust, and with a grateful envy That would have yielded all but life itself To pay for such a friend, *^6

~~Malory realizes instantly that he will not kill Nightingale; time has al-~~

~~ready all but destroyed the rich betrayer. Filled with disgust, Malory~~

~~is ready to leave; but Nightingale persuades him to stay on® day more,~~

~~a day that is to become a dawning.~~

~~Nightingale begins to talk of the past; he wants Malory to stay to hear, as it were, his confession. By talking, by admitting to his ex~friend~~

163 165 Ibid., p. 1031. ° Ibid., p. 1033. 164 166 Ibid, 153 all his crimes and guilt, Nightingale is making a necessary atep toward® the expiation he needs desperately to achieve. During the talk, which ceases that night and resumes the next day, all the facts of the betrayal are revealed, and the means of penance are discovered and set in motion.

~~Nightingale speaks first of another friend whom he destroyed, Absalom~~

Spinner, over whose grave Malory had paused the day before. Night- ingale stole Spinner's wife, just as Malory had tried to steal Agatha earlier* Absalom also came to Nightingale's to kill him, but did not because Nightingale bought him off, gave him money to live on, which

Spinner spent until he died suddenly. And this guilt Nightingale has had to bear too, Two betrayals, like two murders, are worse than one. Be- fore continuing, it is well to note here that the familiar burden metaphor found in Amaranth and King Jasper recurs once again. Malory also has had a weight to carry, that of hatred and revenge s

~~He had not known how tired A weight that has at last been lifted leaves him Who carries it too far. 16?~~

The next day the long talk goes on, with Nightingale and Malory sifting the old hurts, the old griefs, and reclaiming from the evil of the past much good for the future. There is a great deal of hope in The

~~Glory of the Nightingales. Nightingale explains in a manner not unlike~~

~~Penn-Raven's unasked*-for advice the virtue of forgiveness, of turning~~

~~167 Ibid., p. 1040. 154 the other cheek:~~

No matter what I've been, what's left of me Is human; and if you have Christian faith. Or Christian curiosity ... You may lay treasure® up*-if not in heaven, Then here on earth, which is another matter— Treasures not for yourself, 168

~~This passage also sounds very much like Captain Craig's exposition of the necessity of giving, A bit later, Nightingale comments on the uae- lessnesg and futility of revenge anyway; he says.~~

~~If you had shot me, You would have seen a finite retribution That would have done ao good. It's not like that. You might aa well have shot the flying earth To kill a system » . . 1&9~~

This moral is at the core of the betrayal theme: the betrayed person, no matter how bitter the betrayal, should seek forgiveness and not revenge, reconciliation and not hatred. Gawaine and Bartholow both learn this truth; so does Malory, with, ironically, his betrayer's help. The most grievous crime Nightingale committed and the one for which Malory came to kill him was his driving Agatha, Malory's wife, and her child to early deaths. Malory laments:

~~They would be here today If you had been-«-yourself, I can say that, A® well as you, for I was not myself, And am not yet. 170~~

~~163 17U Mi- p- ««• aii- p-1046. 169 Ibid,, p, 1045, 155~~

Then Nightingale recounts how their friendship used to be, how felicitous and perfect their association once was* The following passage, similar to Hebron's evocation of his and King Jasper's friendship, describe® the essence of pure,, unselfish friendship and brotherly love; Nightingale remembers:

There was nothing then of mine that was not your®; And you, if I had asked it, would have given More than you had to give. You would have found Outside your own profession what you lacked, If possible, and you would have called it mine. I should have done n© less . . •17*

The qualities of trust, loyalty, love, altruism, and understanding are shown here as elsewhere in Robinson as indicative of the best bases for true friendship. Nightingale's first sin was selfishness, however much he valued Malory as a friend. He says of himself, "I was not so bads / 172 So long as I was having my own way. " He sketches for Malory a brief portrait of himself as he was years and years ago, before Agatha came to town:

1 had robbed no man then, And no man had robbed me, I was untried In my submissions and humilities; I was unquestioned of my qualities. I was a friend to many who would have had No eyes to see me had their place been mine. 173

~~171 173 Ibid., p. 1047. Ibid., p. 1051.~~

~~172Ibid. „ p. 1050. 156~~

But Agatha changed everything, as in Robinson's works women have a way of doing. The triangle pattern which, to repeat, runs through seven of the narratives is seen in its clearest perspective in this poem.

The woman as destructive wedge, the resulting rivalry between friends, the ultimate disintegration of the friendship, the bitterness, grief* and hatred engendered by the splits-all this is shown in The Glory of the

Nightingales as quite irrevocable and passionate drama, Robinson here, as in Roman Bartholow and Matthias at the Door, focuses his camera directly on the three people involved; the result is an objective, almost analytical dissection of a friendship going to pieces, all because of a woman, Robinson's Eve, whether called Guinevere, Vivian, Isolt,

~~Gabrielle, Agatha, Natalie, or Karen, is deadly where friendship is concerned.~~

~~So Agatha came to Sharon, and Nightingale learned, as he tells~~

~~Malory now, "The one thing I had not/ Was everything, and she was 174~~

Agatha, " He wooed her tod almost won her, or so he thought, until one day he introduced her to his closest friend, Malory; Kismet, or Ananke, Or melancholy chance, was following me When I brought you as a friend brings a friend Into his treasure-house, to Agatha, You were my king of friends , , ,175

~~174 175 Ibid., p. 1053, Ibid. 157~~

Malory interrupts briefly to point out what Nightingale ol cows© knew but feared and could do nothing about* that Agatha did not love him, that, a® Malory says, "Love was not there. " Losing her, his great love.

~~Nightingale lost his decency too, his humanity, his capacity to love anything or anybody else except his own self. He describes his anguish, his sense ol being betrayed:~~

All that I almost had was gone before I knew who had it; and when at last I knew, I was atone with my meredulousness, I saw myself as one left robbed and stabbed By friends who had betrayed him in the dark,

~~The simile expresses vividly the essential feeling of every Robinson hero betrayed by a friend: the outrage and the shame and the loneliness of being abandoned and sold out by those dearest to him.~~

~~When Malory took Agatha away from him. Nightingale fled to~~

Europe. Desiring revenge, he found a way of getting it. Malory received a large legacy and on Nightingale's advice invested it, apparently in mining stock, in the same company in which Nightingale had invested.

~~But Nightingale discovered the investment was doomed and reinvested his own money without telling Malory about the approaching disaster.~~

~~He explains his deception thus;~~

~~176 177 Jbid., p. 1054. Ibid., p. 1056. 158~~

~~To show you the same seasonable way Out of that golden hole* 178~~

~~Frail Agatha, who had been strong enough to split the friends, was not strong enough to endure poverty and so died before her time. Nightingale, remembering her death, confesses to Malory:~~

~~Tell yourself. And let there be no doubt, that 1 destroyed her While I believed I was destroying you, *79~~

~~This is the great guilt that Nightingale ha® had to bear and has been worn down from bearing.~~

The confession over, Malory walks by the sea alone and thinks of hi# private and solitary destiny. The hatred gone, the idea of revenge vanquished, Malory assumes the familiar role of the Robinson hero moving into time and responsibility by himself, with friend® and old tie® behind him; Malory becomes, in short, another man-against-the- sky.

~~Like Roman Bartholow, he goes his own way: "He was to be alone for ISO a long time, / And with no friends in sight. " Malory returns, and~~

~~Nightingale persuades him to stay one more day. Nightingale, foreseeing a mean® of atonement, also perceives accurately the nature of his spiritual sickness:~~

~~180 Jbid,, p. 1039. Ibid., p. 1062.~~

~~179 Ibid. 159~~

Twice in my life , I have been Mind; and that was a bad matter; Once when I sank my judgment and your money Into that most unhappy hoi© in the ground; Once when I kicked my decency and honor In after them, *81

~~The atonement lies in service to mankind, in giving* in altruism. Night-~~

~~You and the world are in a partnership Too large and too impersonal to include A presence of flick hat®. 182~~

~~The similarity of this passage and a phrase from the sonnet "When We~~

~~Can All So Excellently Give" is worth noting; the sonnet's last line, 183 "The glory of eternal partnership, n states precisely the same~~

~~me#sage Nightingale wishes to impress upon Malory.~~

Malory and a lawyer Nightingale ha® called go for a drive. When they return, they find Nightingale dead by his own hand. But he has not died in vain, as h# has lived, for he leaves a will behind, a will that, not unlike Captain Craig1®, advocates the absolute necessity of service and self-sacrifice. Dedicated wholly to the good of mankind, the will proclaims that Nightingale's house and wealth are to be used for the building of a hospital and that Malory, a doctor by profession, will

~~181 i«3 IMd,, p. 1067. Ibid., p. 96.~~

~~182 Ibid., p. 1069. 160 serve to that hospital, finding in service his expiation and reward. He will experience what Nightingale ha® never known;~~

~~, , , the lonely joy of being alive la a good servitude, and of not being Obscurely and unintelligibly wasted, 184~~

Malory's rebirth will be attained through helping the "unhappy mil- 185 lions. " Nightingale thus becomes the betrayer turned savior now; his will is a purely redemptive act, nightingale's action® Illustrate a curious reversal of Penn*Raven's, whose movement of course it exactly the opposite, from savior to betrayer. This example shows once again how varied is Robinson's handling of basic motift in the friendship theme.

~~Nightingale has placed a great charge, a moral responsibility, upon Malory, who realises the meaning and extent of hit obligation in these terms:~~

~~You have bound me hand and foot, body and brain, To service, I owe to Agatha, and to you. Ail that 1 ©we mankind, 186~~

The spirit of the reunion of Malory and Nightingale through the mutual wish to do good is the essential spirit of universal brotherhood, And universal brotherhood is but the enlargement and extension of the concept of friendship. Their sundered friendship is restored, and at the end one friend remains to do good for mankind. The hidden friend, dead 184 , 186 Ibid., p. 1069. Ibid., pp. 1071-1072. 185Ibid., p. 1068. 161 in this case, makes it possible for good to live after him. As in

"Octaves, " Amaranth, Lancelot, Roman Bartholow» and Matthias at the Door, the aloneness of all men is juxtaposed by the oneness, the kinship, of all men. The image in "Octaves" of the friend on shore and the friend at sea mirrors this paradoxical relationship of friends evident in the poems cited above. Amaranth and Fargo, Gawaine and Lancelot,

Umfraville and B&rtholow, Timberlake and Matthias, and Nightingale and Malory alt illustrate this fundamental balance so delicate to achieve, so permanent and useful if achieved. Each friend who endures does so because of individual strength and spiritual strength provided by friendship; each is Lazarus-like almost, returned from the fires of Hell, come to tell it all.

~~Matthias at the Door, similar in aim and scope to both Roman~~

Bartholow and The Glory of the Nightingales» also provides a comprehensive treatment of the friendship theme. Friendship, though not the center of interest in this poem as in The Glory of the Nightingales, yet figures importantly in the main concern of the poem - »Matthias1 s dis* covery of himself and his ultimate purpose in life. Friends affect

Matthias*8 search for truth now just as in the past they affected, even precipitated, the origins of his present complacency and spiritual malaise that make the search imperative. The aext-to-the-last work in which the triangle appears, Matthias at the Door shows probably 162

~~better than any other narrative the interrelationship of friends. But~~

~~always the personage of Matthias looms foremost; his quest, his search~~

for purpose, is dominant; friends remain in the background. The para*

~~dox of the man-against-the-sky and the hidden friend, or friends, re-~~

~~ceives its fullest expression in this poem.~~

~~Depicted as the epitome of material success, Matthias is the~~

~~most imposing picture Robinson drew of the outwardly successful man,~~

~~the smugly affluent type like King Jasper and Nightingale, Here is 181 Matthias, living in "the rich web erf his complacency":~~

~~He had some enemies, and no fear of them; He had few friends, and had the need of fewer. There was nowhere a more agreeable bondage Than his was to himself; and where he was,~~

~~He was not anywhere else.~~

~~That web dissolves as surely as King Jasper's castle falls and Night-~~

~~ingale's body decays. In each instance the material splendor, with its~~

~~tinsel and glittering, amounts to nothing when the; owner confronts the~~

~~truth that all he has accumulated is infinitely less important than what he has lost--hie own soul. Matthias's web is first shaken by the re-~~

~~appearance of an old friend, Garth, a failure, a person somehow harmed~~

by Matthias's rise, embittered by Matthias's vast indifference. Garth is a familiar type among Robinson's gallery of defeated friends. He bears resemblance to both Hebron in King Jasper {though Garth's

*87Ibid. , p. 1106. 188Ibid. , p. 1081 163 antagonism is less violent) and to characters life® Dr, Styx and Reverend

Flax in Amaranth, He is the ruined friend com© back to haunt the successful and treacherous friend. On© other point that might be mentioned about Garth i® that in describing him Robinson relied once more on the burden image. Garth appears

~~. . . bent As only one of those who have carried The weight of more than time. 189~~

This metaphor, occurring in Amaranth, King Jasper, and The Glory of the Nightingales also, is cited not for its originality (it has none) nor for its meaning, which is tritely obvious, but rather as simply one more instance of how Robinson repeated in numerous works elements, however minor, pertaining to friends and friendship. The motif of betrayal is of course a really important example of this same kind of iterative method.

Garth and Matthias talk for a while, with Garth constantly pricking the surface of Matthias's pride. He tells him flatly: "You 190 are as much in the dark, / Matthias, as I am. " Matthias, "wrapped 19J in rectitude,#i is stung most by one of Garth's questions. Garth asks:

~~189 191 Ibid., p. 1079. Ibid., p. 1084.~~

~~190 Ibid., p. 1082. 164~~

~~Why do you wear that scar on your right hand. Where you were burned whan you saved Timber lake? Are you sorry that you saved him? *92~~

This matter of Timberlake, a friend whom Matthias rescued from a burning house, emerges later in the poem as one of the key incidents in shaping three lives--Matthias'a, Timberlake'a, and Natalie's. Garth continues to impress upon Matthias the fact that they are both lost; he enjoys dragging Matthias down and tries to drag him to the nadir--death* by inviting him to the rocks, to the door through which he say a his smug friend must pass. But Matthias rejects the dark invitation. Garth ( leaves and ia found down at the rocks the next day, dead.

Then another old friend and a failure also, the handsome Timber- lake, comes. He, Matthias, and Matthias's wife Natalie discuss with, divergent reverence Garth's death. At first Matthias finds no responsibility within himself for Garth's suicide. He says firmly that he was not hi® brother's keeper; I should have said, indeed, that in his envy There was, till yesterday, a friendliness That was almost affection. I was friendly, But I was not hi® guardian, or torch*bearer. 193

But^ Matthias still misses the point--he should have been Garth'® keeper; he should have performed the duties of a friend and helped Garth. Al- truism based,on friendship is one of the primary truths that Matthias

192 193 Ibid. , p. 1086. Ibid. , p. 1093. 165 has to learn. Although Matthias thinks Garth was a fool, both Timber- lake and Natalie defend him. Natalie acidly warns her husband of judging others less fortunate than himself;

~~, » . but there's nothing alive So funny a® men when they are telling others How to put fate in a cage--as they have don©, 194~~

~~Later, when Timberlake is alone with Natalie, he pinpoints th® error that Matthias commits, Matthias thinks himself perfect, and he is not.~~

~~If Matthias judges Garth so harshly, Timberlake realizes, he would also, and undoubtedly does, judge Timberlake and Natalie too:~~

~~So many of us are waiting To wear the mark of some such name as that, That he may throw it where he will, almost, Assured that it will stick, 195~~

Garth's death has a steadily increasing effect upon Matthias's thinking until, one® Matthias has suffered enough and worked his way through to an accurate perception of what his role in life should be, _ he remembers

~~Matthias hears no bell tolling, feels no universal responsibility, hold® no compassion for a fool who killed himself.~~

~~Door as it does in Roman Bartholow and The Glory of the Nightingales,~~

~~Matthias, however, there is still another variation to the pattern.~~

~~194 195 P* 1Q98. ' ibid., p. 1103. 166~~

Natalie could have married either Garth or Timberiake instead of the man she did, Matthias, the wrong man, who put her in a cage, who did not love her, Natalie goes to the rocks, where first Garth went, and finds Timberiake there. They talk, and in their conversation and actions the familiar triangle is again disclosed. Timberiake had once been in love with Natalie, and still is. He did not marry her because of two factors: Matthias was his friend and Matthias saved his life, He gave

Natalie as willful payment for the life given him and In seeking to repay that unpayable debt actually destroyed the life he had been spared. More- over, Natalie was never happy, and Matthias's euphoria was rooted in the lie of Natalie'® spurious love. Timberiake, though exercising some of the verities of friendship--loyalty, generosity, love, a elf-sacrifice— ironically ruined three lives. Natalie touches upon the immense complexity of the whole affair when she says, "Our fates and ways are so 196 malignantly/ Mixed up * * • n There is no better example &ny where of Robinson's ingenuity in combining the triangle and the theme of friendship. Timberiake's explanation of what happened and his reasons for giving up the woman he loved are revealed in his own words to Natalie: X knew Matthias Was like an apparition stalking always Between him and your love. Yes, you are right: I made myself more worthless than I was-.

~~196 Ibid., p. 1107. 16?~~

For his sake, and, as I saw then, for your®. I don't know what it is that I see now. If you were not the world and heaven together For him and his complacent faith in you. There might be some escape, or compromise With fire-born obligation even like mine, 19?

Still the friendship and Timberlake's loyalty keep him from possessing the woman he loves. This is the only poem involving the triangle in which the friendship is preserved, in which restraint overcomes reck- less passion, in which the woman is not seised at all costs, Timberlake and Natalie kiss, dreaming of the Great Love that has not been.

That night Matthias confront® hi® wife aad mentions casually that he saw her and Timberlake that morning loving by the rocks, Natalie denies anything more than what he saw and says, summing up the futility and the friendship commingled inextricably:

There is no more; there'll never be anything more. There was a man I would have married oace, And likely to my sorrow, but you saved him Out of the fire--and only saved yourself By mercy of a miracle. You were brave, Matthias; and because he was your friend, That man gave me to you, first having given Himself to folly, and to waste worse than crime, 198

She tells him, too, why she married him--because she liked him, and he was available, and there was really nothing better to do. Suffering greatly now, Matthias, with Timberlake gone, feel® himself, "Alone

~~197 198 Ibid., p. 1108. Ibid., p. 1111. 168~~

199 as he supposed no other man/ Was ever alone before, " That awful loneliness continues unrelieved for three years, Matthias and Natalie keep up appearances before the town, and no on© suspects the depth of 200 each's agony. The "inviolate fire" keeps Timber lake away the whole time; he persists in not breaking his friendship with Matthias even though it means the continued logs of his beloved Natalie. Thea one night Natalie ends her share of grief; she goes to the rocks* wh@r«

~~Matthias finds her dead the next morning, Lonelier now than ever before,~~

Matthias is stripped of every blessing he thought he had possessed all these years of his marriage, while in truth any happiness he did have was simply a facade behind which flourished Natalie1® love for Timber- lake* Matthias has deceived himself all the years, and now he discovers His world, which once had been so properly And admirably filled with his ambitions, With Natalie, with his faith, and with himself, Was only an incredible loneliness, The lonelier for defeat and recognition, 201

Suddenly Timberlake returns, Matthias learns something then about the importance of friends; he begins to experience some of the des- peration Garth undoubtedly felt when Matthias ignored him. He confides to Timberlake:

~~199 201 Jbid., p. 1114, Ibid., p. 1126, 200 Ibid,, p. 1121. 169~~

~~You are the only friend that I have left; And if you die, I shall be here alone. Here in this world--alone, 202~~

~~Matthias goes for a drive and remembers :~~

~~He had one friend-- A frail one, but a friend--a sure possession A treasure threatened only with a fear That having found and sheltered it so late, He might not have it long. 203~~

The education of Matthias includes a proper appreciation of the fact that man's life is short, that he must cultivate friendship early, that a friend is a treasure that should be held as long as possible. Although Matthias has a friend and is eternally grateful for that friend*® existence, he yet realizes that he cannot truly know this friend, for no man can know another completely. It is enough, thinks Matthias, to know that a friend does exist. It is also useless to attempt to judge and condemn another as

~~Matthias convicted Garth. So he is cured of that flaw too. Upon~~

Matthias's return, he and Timberlake speculate further upon their wrecked lives and the causes thereof. Timberlake, speaking of Matthias's saving of him from fire, stresses the necessity for paying for whatever happens to one, whether ill or good:

~~There was a price for that, which I have paid As well as 1 was able. Natalie paid, And you are paying still. 204~~

~~202 204 Ibid., p. 1131. Ibid., p. 1137. 203 Ibid., p. 1133. no~~

~~Fenn-Raven, that everyone, must pay lor what he does or does not do.~~

~~In the rest of his speech Timberlake cites the essential unity of all men, especially how one man's destiny is shaped and influenced by another's actions. He says,~~

~~We are like stairs For one another's climbing and are never Quite told which way it is that we are going . . . 205~~

~~This interlocking relationship of man with man is shown even more clearly near the poem's end.~~

~~Timberlake grows worse, his cough increase®, and he dies. Now~~

~~Matthias's loneliness reaches its highest point of intensity. He remains a solitary figure in the big house devoid of wife, friends, mankind:~~

~~Matthias was alone, And there was only loneliness before him~~

~~Because he was Matthias, and had failed, 206~~

Then he is called, as Garth, Natalie, and Timberlake all were, to the rocks. The voice may be Garth's or Timberlake's. At any rate it urges him to accept one of the profound truths about man's relationship with his fellow man*-the paradox of being alone and being united with men,.

~~The voice says,~~

~~205 206 Ibid- Ibid,, p. 1145. 171~~

~~We shall go on unconsciously together. And consciously apart, to the same end. 207~~

~~Here again Is the delicate balance, the reciprocal polarity, of the friend alone and the friend apart, the friend on shore wad the friend at sea,~~

~~Th® voice adds the fundamental requirement that Matthias must rely on his inner resource® first: "You have not yet begun to seek what's 208 hidden/ In you for you to recognise and use. "~~

In narrative after narrative Robinson hammered away at this truth; a man must work out Ms own destiny drawing upon his own strengths, yet always with the knowledge that he is part of a larger scheme, part of mankind# and that a friend somewhere exists who i® willing to help if the need arise®. Matthias, in the process of rebuilding his faith, gains the courage to be alone without fear, to work for the good of mankind without th© prop of friendship always holding him up. The paradox of Matthias being both independent and yet sustained by friend® is seen in this passage: . . . and he who had always So promptly served, and was to be a servant, Must now be of some use in a new world That Timberlake and Garth and Natalie Had strangely lived and died to find for him. He had no friends, and his not having them now Might be as well for him and his new tower»209

~~207 209 Ib^. > P. H48. Ibid., p. 1154.~~

~~208 Ibid., p. 1150. 172~~

~~Five of the narratives. Amaranth, JLauacelot , Roman Bartholow, The~~

Glory of the Nightingales, and Matthias at the Door end in precisely the same manner. The man who has re die covered his soul and his purpose in life moves alone but with the aid of friends into the future, "A little

11,210 farther into time and pain. Farg«p Lancelot, Bartholow, Malory, and Matthias are all men- against-the eky whose endurance and divination and carrying out of their individual dest Ines are due to two causes : inner strength and strength provided by frien dship,

The last work to be considered, Talifer, is the slightest achievement among the narratives and is sure .y the worst single poem Robin- son ever wrote. The only comedy, or attempt at comedy, among the long piece®, it is the kind of failure thai• t would have assigned Pink the poet one of the deepest regions of obscu:rit y in the nightmare world of

~~Amaranth. Yvor V/inter a has said abouit Tallfer : "It is extremely long, not very complex, and unbelievably dull 211 " ' Despite the poem's obvious lack of merit, there are some fa~~

~~The role of friendship is not the chief concern of the poem; Talifer's search for Peace (with a capital P) is. The story ha® a Red Book,~~

~~210 Ibid., "The Man Against the Sky, " p. 66.~~

~~211 Winters, p. 119* ITS~~

True Romance quality about it that shines through however one approaches it. The triangle motif does not function as well in Tat if err as in any of the other narratives in which it appears. Supervised and manipulated by the agile, loquacious Dr. Quick, the triangle, in another Robinsonian variation, involves not two men and a woman but two women and a man, with Quick being an outsider eager to pick off either loser in the battle over Talifer. The two women, Karen and Althea, are friends, but they both love Talifer; Althea is the more agreeable of the two and with

~~Quick's assistance is willing to wait while Talifer, a kind of ersatz~~

Creek god, drifts into marrying Karen. Quick, a friend of everybody, is apparently in love with both women simultaneously, and in fact pro- poses to Karen, whose heart unfortunately already belongs to Talifer,

Talifer is a close friend of Quick's too, or at least considers himself as such, for he remarks to Quick just before the wedding, "You are my 212 friend, and will forgive me/ And wish us all the joy that will be ours. "

A year passes, a year of loneliness for Althea, a year of nuptial joy for Talifer and Karen, when one day Talifer, spurred by Quick's comments, walks to Althea's house, sees "where he had buried her/ 213 Alive, " and returns home to stare at Karen and inadvertently frighten her into thinking she sees death in his eyes. Quick comes quickly and

~~212 213 Robinson, Collected Poems, p. 1254, Ibid., p. 1273. 174~~

~~who has been fatuous enough to marry Karen and go away with her, re-~~

~~turns to find Talifer and Althea indescribably happy and possessed of a~~

~~child. Quick claims all the credit for this successful, joyful horn®. He~~

~~tells th« child about the Lilith who stole his father Talifar's youthful~~

~~passion and praises Talifer's return to the right way, to the sanctified~~

~~and long-patient Althea, Quick babbles :~~

~~But if Doctor Quick Had been elsewhere than here, or naturally Had been less prompt and loyal in his habit, I am not saying, Samuel, or surmising, What might have fallen. 214~~

~~A few more words of Quick's are relevant to the friendship theme and~~

~~are more in accordance with the typical Robinsonian friend, though the~~

~~typical on® is never as garrulous and as eager to receive praise as is~~

~~Quick:~~

~~I am not ambidextrous in my friendship; When I have gifts in one hand for my friend, I have not in the other a sharp knife For my friend's back. 215~~

~~In. this light, jocular manner, Quick reaches the heart of the ethical principle upon which a friendship is based--trust and loyalty. A friend-~~

~~ship without this basis is no friendship at all. Quick, though completely~~

~~different in temperament from characters like Cliff Klingenhagen,~~

~~214 215 Jbid., p. 1304. Ibid., p. 1301. 175~~

~~Annandale's doctor, and Fernando Nash's friend, yet possesses the same, necessary faith in loyalty and service to one's friend. The poem closes with everybody happy and Talifer content with his Peace.~~

To summarize the major points of the friendship them© as developed in the twelve narratives is to see at once the diversity and thoroughness with which Robinson dealt with the problem of friendship.

Five of the poem® are mostly detailed, extensive presentations of situations common among the short poems. Captain Craig provides a portrait of that rarest phenomenon in Robinson's poetry--happiness among friends, th© glowing circle of friendship--and didactically expounds upon the virtues of giving and self-sacrifice. The Man Who Pied

Twice shows to the fullest extent in Robinson1® works the technique of the narrator-list®ner--the friend performing a beneficent service by merely listening without passing judgment. Amaranth, Robinson's most complete study of friends as failures, has a twofold moral? the necessity for independence and self-reliance and the stricture against condemning other people for their failures, Avon's Harvest is Robin- son's most provocative portrayal of the lowest depths of the friendship complex—the abortive friendship, the utter denial of proffered fellowship, and the fear bred by that denial. Finally, King Jasper offers an incisive picture of betrayal and shows the harmful effects that betrayal inevitably brings forth. 176

~~In addition to these five, there are seven narratives which revolve~~

~~around a central unifying pattern--the triangle--and which explore familiar~~

~~subjects of the friendship them® such as betrayal and self-reliance. The~~

~~first two poems of the Arthurian trilogy, Merlin and Lancelot, present~~

~~the medieval triangle made up of two men, one a king* and a woman and~~

~~the clash of loyalties inherent in the struggle to posses® the woman..~~

~~These poems also depict, in an almost serial fashion, Gawaine's lust~~

~~for revenge and his ultimate repudiation of hatred. The third poem,~~

~~Tristram, presents a triangle too, which likewise involves a king, a~~

~~loyal knight, and a woman loved by both men. One of the lesser works~~

~~in regard to the friendship theme, Tristram, contains a type of loyal,~~

~~faithful, solitary friend common in Robinson's narratives. The modern triangle, essentially the same basic situation of two men fighting to win~~

a beautiful womaa, is memorably explored in the three most comprehensive works dealing with friendship: Roman Bartholow, The Glory of the Nightingales, and Matthias at the Poor, The first of these incor- porates key aspects of the friendship theme: the responsibility of the individual for shaping his life; the friend as savior; the friend as betrayer; and portraits of recurring types of friends--the solitary, faithful friend; the friend as savior and betrayer |thes@ two important types being uniquely combined in the characterization of Penn-Raven); and the friend who has lost his soul and regained it. The Glory of the 177

Nightingales presents in vivid terms some crucial problems of the friendship theme--loyalty, betrayal, and salvation. The idea of expiation-- that the betrayer must somehow atone for his deed or else suffer eternally--is the single most important concept in this poem and is in fact one of the overriding truths of the friendship them®. The last of the three, Matthias at the Door, carries the motif of the man-against- the-sky to its fullest expression in the narratives, A friend must go his way alone yet buoyed fey the knowledge that somewhere friend® exist.

This poem also presents the immense complexity of the interrelationship of friends and upholds the pronouncement against judging others narrowly or even judging them at all. The last of the twelve narratives dealing with friendship, Talifer, can be dismissed as an unsuccessful attempt at portraying the comic triangle. CHAPTEE V

~~CONCLUSION~~

Til© purpose of this study has been to show the primary role friendship played in shaping the life of Edwin Arlington Robinson and to discuss in depth the thematic implications of friendship in the large amount of poetry that Robinson wrote. Little attempt has been made to correlate incidents in the life with recurring motifs and specific incidents in the poetry. Such speculation in Robinson*® case is generally fruitless* Biographical material concerning Robinson and many of his closest friends i® limited. The letters Laura Richards destroyed, for instance, if preserved, might have shed a great deal of light on his relationship with women. Moreover, biographers have not probed as deeply a® perhaps is possible certain aspects of the poetry in connection with the life; the betrayal motif, for example, so evident in the poetry, has* so far as Is known, no precedent in Robinson's life; his biographers mention no betrayal,, To guess that Robinson learned about betrayal from his brother1® experience in Western real estate is simply to guess and nothing more* Still another unexplored problem is that of the marriage shattered by friendship. Robinson knew many married couples and visited them for months at a time* Did he encounter in these visits

~~178 179 situations like those in Roman Bartholow and Matthias at the Door?~~

These are matters that for the moment are unanswerable; and as far as understanding the poetry is concerned, they are largely irrelevant, It is interesting enough to say that a character like Bartholow has to learn what Robinson himself learned in Gardiner, Maine--the necessity for independence and the integrity of the individual--or that the man in

~~"Calverly's" who longs for the old times, the departed days of happiness, could well be Robinson as a youth longing for those same days in~~

1888 and 1889 after everybody he valued had left Gardiner High. But by drawing either of these comparisons, whatever their probability, on® does not gain very much; the poetry is not illuminated in any significant manner. The aim of Chapter II has been simply to show the extraordinary influence friendship had in Robinson's life. The aim of

~~Chapters III and IV has been* in the tradition of New Criticism, to show the friendship theme in its entirety, divorced from Robinson's life, vacuum-like and self-contained.~~

Friendship permeated every phase of Robinson's career. High school friends helped to relieve the loneliness Robinson endured as the last-born of a family that did not need any more children; at Harvard new friends gave Robinson increasing faith in his own ability and opened up untapped areas of learning and experience for Mm; back in Gardiner, other friends, older ones, provided an outlet from the pressures of his 180 disintegrating family; in New York Bohemian friends showed Mm mart realities of life, drank with Mm, and gave him needed help in simply staying alive; friends at Peterborough made us e£ul companions and spread his name as a poet of merit; and a vast assortment of other friends, met at different places, Harvard, New York, Boston, and elsewhere, and in various ways, by letter and by personal contact, helped him too and shared their time, money, and houses with Robinson. The services that friends performed for Robinson were -quite astonishing.

Captain Craig owed its conception and printed entity to friends; old and new friends were always giving money to Robinson, and at the unlike- liest, most dramatic times, as when the allotment was granted to him in 1917 by a group of friends, as it were, out of the blue; nothing* how* ever, could be trior# astonishing than that remarkable chain of events set in motion by a friend which led in 1905 to President Roosevelt's recognition and the appointment to the Custom House.

The relationship of Robinson and his innumerable friends was not one-sided, He gave about as much as he received. What Robinson brought to a friendship was not to be measured in terms of material goods, for in fact during most of his life he had nothing of material worth to give. He always had something better than money--loyalty and trust and kindness and sympathy and altruism. Robinson's capacity for making and keeping absolutely devoted friends represents an ethical 181 norm of friendship in itself. The fundamentals of his relationship with friends include many of those ethical precepts which one finds repeated endlessly in his poetry. Robinson was a good friend for many reasons :

{1) he recognized hi® own inner worth, believed in his individual destiny, and would not compromise his own integrity for the sake of others; (2) he sought friends who had individual worth too and, though democratic in his tastes, did not embrace the sweating mob; {3} he wa® unfailingly loyal in his friendships; (4) he was lavishly grateful for any service whatsoever that a friend performed* yet he did not solicit aid; (5) he never forgot one kind deed or one happy moment with a friend; (6) he did not condemn friends for their failure but felt only immense sympathy and kinship with their defeats; (7) he possessed an endearing humility that made friends want to help him; and (8) he was able to forgive friends when they abused his friendship. One can credit Robinson with these admirable qualities without going so far as to make of him an alabaster saint of friendship.

In looking at the overall achievement of the short poems concerned with friendship, one is struck by both the multiplicity of poems and the diversity of subjects treated. There are forty-five short poems discussed or alluded to in Chapter HI; they fall into eleven classes, with some classes containing many poems and others only one. Any classification is of course an arbitrary one; for these poems, which reach 132 from the earliest productions like "Dear Friends*' to the latest ones

~~Ilk© "Anaaadale Again, " exhibit no organised or coherent pattern of development, They were begun, probably, as the subjects occurred to~~

Robinson and were finished without any ostensible aim to suggest a continuity or sequence beyond that natural line dictated by time. These forty-live poem® are sprinkled indiscriminately among the 1, 488 pages

~~of the edition of collected poems; any order that can be found must be imposed from the outside.~~

~~The classification that follows is based upon an evaluation of the subject matter treated in the short poems. Sine© of course there~~

are several poems which are concerned with more than one aspect of friendship, there will be some duplication. The classes, with the poems under each class, are: (1) the sense of individual purpose and individual

~~worth--"Dear Friends, " "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding, " "The~~

~~Man Against the Sky, " "Glass Houses, " "Ben Jons on Entertains a Man from Stratford, " "Octaves, " When We Can All So Excellently Give, "~~

~~"Peace on Earth, " and "Two Gardens in JLinndale"; (2) the moral norm of self- sacrifice-- "Cliff Klingenhagen'1; (3) the antithesis of the~~

~~moral norm--selfishness--"An Old Story"; (4) distorted friendships~~

~~arising from disloyalty, betrayal, indifference, and so on- - "Karma, "~~

~~"The Corridor, " "A Song at Shannon's, " "Alma Mater, " "Charles~~

~~Carville's Eyes, " and "But for the Grace of God"; (S) serene, happy 183 friendships--"Isaac and Archibald, " "Calverly's, " "Ballade by the~~

~~Fire, " and "Ben Jonson Entertains a Mail from Stratford"; (6) unsuccessful attempts at friendship and portraits of friendless people--~~

~~"Aaron Stark, " "Doctor of Billiards, " "Shadrach O'Leary, " "A Song~~

~~at Shannon18, " "Fleming Helphenstine, " "Mr. Flood's Party, " "The~~

~~Poor Relation, " "Reunion, " and "The Long Race"; (7) the duty of a~~

~~friend as listener--"Taaker Norcross' and "Sainte-Nitouche"; (8) the~~

~~necessity for trust and acceptance--"Bokardo, " "Annandale Again, "~~

~~"Nimmo, " and "The Dark House"; (9) the ultimate service--"How~~

~~Annandale Went Out"; (10) sympathy for failures--"But for the Grace~~

~~of God, " "Tasker Norcross, " "Bewick Finzer, " "Clavering, "~~

~~"Leffingwell, " "Lingard and the Stars, " "Calverly's, " "Old Trails, "~~

~~"Supremacy, " "Exit, " "Atherton's Gambit, " and "Inferential"; and~~

~~(11) the ethical nature of friendship-- "Octaves, " "Glass Houses, "~~

~~"Flammonde, " "When We Can All So Excellently Give, " and almost~~

~~every poem concerning friendship that Robinson wrote.~~

~~The twelve narratives discussed in Chapter IV provide the fullest~~

~~treatment of the friendship theme in Robinson's poetry. With the longer~~

~~form Robinson was able to explore in greater depth aspects that had to~~

~~be dealt with briefly in the short poems, such as betrayal, or aspects~~

~~that could not be dealt with at all in the short poems, such as the am-~~

biguous role of the savior-betrayer Penn-Raven. A subject like that 184 of friends as failures, which is touched upon by a large number of short poems, becomes in a narrative like Amaranth the main concern and, because of Amaranth's length, is more adequately developed in that work than in the short poems. A comparison of the frequency of treatment of the friendship theme among the narratives and short poems is also indicative of the singular importance the narratives hold in Robin- son's handling of the theme. Twelve of thirteen of the narratives, or roughly 92 per cent, are directly concerned with the problem of friendship; whereas only forty-five of one hundred and ninety-four, or roughly

A means of classification similar to that used for the short poems can be applied to the narratives. One primary factor to remember is that while the narratives are classified according to their principal concerns, each of them may actually, and usually does, con* tain many scattered comments upon a great variety of matters pertaining to friendship. The following classification, however, will include only th® most important subjects and motifs. The classes, with the poems under each class, are: (1) happiness among friends -- Captain

~~Craig and Talifer; (2) the narrator-listener device--The Man Who Died~~

~~Twice and Avon's Harvest; (3) sympathy for failures--Amaranth, The~~

~~Man Who Died Twice, Captain Craig, The Glory of the Nightingales, 185~~

~~and, Matthias at the Door; (4) the abortive, rejected friendship**Avon'8~~

~~Harvest; (5) the betrayal motif*-Avon's Harvest, King Jasper, Merlin,~~

Lancelot, Tristram, Roman Bartholow, and The Glory ol the Night*

~~ingales; (6) the triangle pattern--Merlin, Lancelot, Tristram, Roman~~

~~Bartholow, The Glory of the Nightingales, Matthias at the Poor, and~~

~~Talifer; (7) the man-against-the-sky motif: the necessity for independ-~~

~~ence and self*reliance*-Amaranth, Lancelot, Roman Bartholow, The~~

~~Glory of the Nightingales, and Matthias at the Door; (8) the friend as~~

~~savior- * Amaranth, Tristram, Roman Bartholow, The Glory of ths~~

~~Nightingai s, and Matthias at the Door, and Talifer; (9) the portrait~~

~~of the loyal, solitary friend-- Amaranth, Avon's Harvest, Merlin,~~

~~Tristram, and Roman Bartholow; and (10) the expiation of revenge--~~

~~Lancelot, Roman Bartholow, The Glory of the Nightingales, and~~

~~Matthias at the Door.~~

~~In both the short and long poems Robinson presents an intensely moral concept of friendship, A list of the virtues fundamental to the~~

right creation and just endurance of a friendship would include all of these: independence, self-reliance, loyalty, self-sacrifice, kindness, altruism, trust, acceptance, patience, humility, forgiveness, responsibility, and love. Poem after poem displays either the presence or want and need of these traits. Friendship, Robinson inferentially declares, is one of the pillars which support mankind. 186

~~Robinson's handling of friendship is memorable when it is concrete and specific, forgettable when it is vague and diffuse. What~~

~~Robert Frost says about love in his poem "Build Soil--A Political~~

~~Pastoral" is quite applicable to not only what Robinson says about friendship but to how he says it too. Frost places value on love only if that love is definite and concrete:~~

~~There is no love. There's only love of men and women, love Of children, love of friends, of men, of God, Divine love, human love, parental love,~~

~~Roughly discriminated for the rough. 1~~

Robinson, who wrote about other love® too, but particularly about the love of friends, achieves in his best poems the clarity and concrete- ness that Frost advocates. When Robinson depicts friendship in crystal - hard terms, when he writes plainly of tangible, credible problems of eternal partnership or the mystical power of rocks calling people to their deaths, then h© is placing real value, enduring value, upon friendship and its place in the world.

Of the friendship theme in Robinson's poetry, one remembers scenes and moments like these: the rich man's fright in "Karma" when he sees the "slowly freezing Santa Claus" and recalls his betrayal of a friend; old Eben Flood's alcohol-leavened loneliness and his singing

~~1 Robert Frost, Selected Poems of Robert Frost (New York, 1962), p. 211. 187~~

"Auld Lang Syne" to all his long-departed friends; Cliff Klingenhagen's drinking the bitter wormwood; Charles Carville's eyes; the sun-bathed afternoon of Isaac and Archibald and the boy in the apple orchard;

Shakespeare's ''tramping along through Time's old wilderness"; Annan- dale's death at the hands of his doctor-friend; Captain Craig's ebullient will granting the whole universe to his friends; Fernando Nash's sympathetic friend listening to Nash unburden his past; Fargo'g discovery that he is kin to all men and especially to failures; Avon's maniacal fear born of hi® natural, instinctive loathing of the boy, the "amorphous lizard"; Gawaine's white-hot changes from loyalty to hatred to reconciliation; Penn-Raven's puzzling duplicity as both savior and betrayer;

~~Nightingale's affirmative will binding Malory to a life of service; and~~

Matthias's realization of his past, his destiny, and the reason for having friends. One remembers all these scenes and more, while Talifer and the tautological flaws of Roman Bartholow and Matthias at the Door fade into well-deserved obscurity. BIBLIOGRAPHY

~~Books~~

~~Barnard, Ellsworth, Edwin Arlington Robinson; A Critical Study, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1952,~~

~~Bates, Esther Willard, Edwin Arlington Robinson and his Manuscripts, Waterville, Maine, Colby College Library, 1944,~~

~~Brown, Walter Rollo, Next Door to a Poet, New York, D. Applet on- Century Co,, 1937.~~

~~Cestre, Charles, An Introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1930,~~

~~Faulkner, John, My Brother Bill, New York, Trident Press, 1963,~~

~~Frost, Robert, Selected Poems of Robert Frost, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1962,~~

~~Hagedorn, Hermann, Edwin Arlington Robinson; A Biography, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1938,~~

~~Kaplan, Estelle, Philosophy in the Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, Columbia University Press, 1940.~~

~~Morris, Lloyd, The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, George H, Dor an Company, 1923.~~

~~Neff, Emery, Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, William Sloane Associates, 1948.~~

~~Redman, Ben Ray, Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, Robert M. McBride and Company, 1926.~~

~~Richards, Laura E. , E. A. R., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936.~~

~~Robinson, Edwin Arlington, Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1940.~~

~~188 189~~

~~, Selected Early Poems and Letters, edited by Charles T. Davis, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.~~

~~» Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1940.~~

~~> Untriangulated Stars : Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith, 1890' 1905, edited by Denham Sutcliffe, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1947,~~

~~Van Doren, Mark, Edwin Arlington Robinson, New York, The Literary Guild of America, 1927,~~

~~Winters, Yvor, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Norfolk, Conn. , New Directions Books, 1946.~~