Capturing the Eternal

From The Writer's Almanac: 

It's the birthday of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, (books by this author) born in Head Tide, Maine (1869). One of the most popular poets of his lifetime, he is remembered for a few short poems, which he said were "pickled in anthological brine," including "Richard Cory," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Mr. Flood's Party."

His father was an extremely practical business man who managed to retire when he was fifty-one years old. He encouraged each of his sons to follow a different career path: medicine, business, and science, but Edwin Arlington Robinson, who was the youngest boy in the family, said, "[As a young man] I realized...that I was doomed, or elected, or sentenced for life, to the writing of poetry."

Unlike many poets, who have to work all manner odd jobs in order to support themselves, Robinson rarely did anything in his life other than write poetry. Before he made a name for himself as a poet, he was known in his hometown as an idler and a failure. The only job he ever kept for more than a few months was a job at a customs house given to him by Theodore Roosevelt, who admired his poetry, and he wasn't required to do any work. Even after he began to support himself with his poetry, he didn't get married, he didn't travel, he didn't teach or give public readings.

Robinson said, "The man who fixes on something definite in life that he must do, at the expense of everything else...has got something that should be recognized as the Inner Fire. For him, that is the Gleam, the Vision and the Word! He'd better follow it. The greatest adventure he'll ever have on this side is following where it leads."

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I still have my copy of Robinson's Selected Poems from my days as an undergraduate at East Carolina University.  My favorite poem of Robinson's is "Isaac and Archibald," and I think of the poem often, saying to myself:  You really MUST read that poem again; it's such a great poem!    Seeing the write-up in the Almanac has finally made me do so.

The poem's speaker is a man looking back on his childhood experience of visiting with two old men named Isaac and Archibald.  The poem begins:

 

Isaac and Archibald were two old men.

I knew them, and I may have laughed at them

A little; but I must have honored them

For they were old, and they were good to me.

 

I do not think of either of them now,

Without remembering, infallibly,

A journey that I made one afternoon

With Isaac to find out what Archibald

Was doing with his oats.  It was high time

Those oats were cut, said Isaac; and he feared

That Archibald--well, he could never feel

Quite sure of Archibald.  Accordingly

The good old man invited me--that is,

Permitted me--to go along with him;

And I, with a small boy's adhesiveness

To competent old age, got up and went.

 

 Later in the poem, Isaac tries to teach the boy something about death and memory: 

 

                     "...Look at me, my boy

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after [Archibald], try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

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

Where we are sitting now, and think of me--

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald."

 

The most memorable section of the poem, the one I think about the most when my mind stretches out toward Robinson again, is the following one.  I now see I marked the section.  And I remember doing it.  I remember marking this section in class as the teacher lectured.  I marked it with an arrow and put the word "ominous" beside the arrow.  

The section includes a metaphorical allusion to death thatRobinson deftly weaves into the narrative poem.  The two old men andthe boy had gone down into Archibald's cellar to fetch a cup of cider:

 

Down we went,

Out of the fiery sunshine to the gloom,

Grateful and half sepulchral, where we found

the barrels, like eight potent sentinels,

Close ranged along the wall.  From one of them

A bright pine spile stuck out alluringly,

 ...

There was a fluted antique water-glass

Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest,

There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort

That feeds on darkness.  Isaac turned him out,

And touched him with his thumb to make him jump...

 

Since reading this poem, I have never looked at cellars or darkness or crickets  the same way. 

More than twenty years ago, as a younger student of life, I thought of this reference to death as "ominous."  However, looking at the poem now, I have a different impression.

 Now I see something strangely comforting in the way the old man touches the brown cricket to make it jump.  It is almost as though his touch is the touch of God, stimulating the insect back to life.   This section of the poem doesn't seem ominous to me now, but eternal.