A Cheery Fellow

"The difference between him and these others lay in his ever-present sense of a lost, glorious past." This is how the Norton anthology compares Edwin Arlington Robinson to Frost, Masters, and Anderson. I disagree. I don't think he found the past any more glorious than the present. He with other modernists draw characters that fail in the present because they dwell in a past which was a failure as well. Robinson has the attitude that I find perfectly acceptable for anyone who lives to know a world war.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

"Miniver Cheevy" was composed 4 years before the beginning of WWI, but the imagery is worth thinking on. Who were these warriors of old? Were they really so romantic? Maybe some of them were. Were there such warriors in the trenches of Europe?

"Mr. Flood's Party," was written a year after WWI ended. There is not so much direct war imagery. The poem alludes to a battle with the line about Roland's ghost winding his horn. (I beautiful morbid line, comparing a man alone in a road swigging whiskey to a dying man sounding a horn for help. See the footnote in the anthology.) The human race is talked about in general--its lack of stability, its lost-ness.

And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

And, the final few lines talk as much about the effect war has on relationships as much as Mr. Flood's unrevealed life choices have changed his place in the community.

And there was nothing in the town below--
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.