Cory's Choral Story [by David Yezzi]

I like E. A. Robinson. I really do. No, I mean it. I really like his stuff much of the time. Especially the lyrics. The long poems, not so much (except maybe as sleep aids).  Well, anyway, I want to like him a lot, but sometimes I get put off by a certain tone of . . .  what? Fustiness? Creakiness?

More and more, I’m realizing, though, that it is not always Robinson’s voice I am hearing in the poems, or not just his voice. The more I think about his poems—such as “Reuben Bright” and “Richard Cory”—the more I begin to understand the dramatic nature of his work. (The dramatic element in lyric poetry is something I’ve been interested in for a while now, and you can read more about that here. I hope that this post might serve as an extension of some of the ideas put forward in that earlier essay.)

For my money, “Eros Turannos” is Robinson’s greatest poem. (This is just me talkin’ here.) I love that poem deeply and unequivocally, and I’ve always admired Yvor Winters’s take on it, as adopting the music of W. M. Praed’s vers de société for tragic ends. (In fact, more successfully than Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the poem uses the conventions of Greek tragedy to elevate its subject to devastating dramatic effect.)

The poem is a love story as Gothic horror tale. A woman’s fear of growing old alone is greater than her fear of a man she knows deep down she should refuse. The result is a loveless union, isolation, confusion, and despair. The poem ends with these two stanzas:

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a house

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been

   Or what they are, or would be.

 

Meanwhile, we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

The “we” is a choral voice (a dramatic voice!) that Robinson uses often and which lends his poetry its particular social cast. Here is how the poet and critic D. H. Tracy describes the effect, from an essay in Contemporary Poetry Review:

Robinson’s use of the choral presence is innovative and, in its particular form, remains strikingly rare. It came to him early but not always easily: the drafts of “Eros Turannos” show that the fifth stanza, where the “we” is introduced, went through the most revisions. The Robinsonian “we” is not simply a means of lending generality to discourse or speculation, or a casual way of implicating the reader. It is not the French on. It has an understanding of its point of view, as a point of view, and is capable of distinguishing itself from omniscience. It does not exist to characterize itself, as in certain dramatic monologues, but to characterize another. It would seem intuitive to a playwright, I think, but in poetry in English there is little of it or anything like it—perhaps in Stevie Smith, or James Weldon Johnson’s “Brothers—American Drama.” Robinson’s insight into the possibilities of choral pronouncement arises from a serious consideration of what our collective being is and how individual lives acquire and lose meaning in it. . . .”

Really brilliant, this. And a real key to Robinson’s poems. In fact, it was when I began thinking about the choral voice in Robinson that I came to better understand one of Robinson’s most burnished chestnuts, “Richard Cory,” a poem that I respected but never truly warmed to.

BAPsters will, of course, know the poem, but here it is for reference:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

What has always bothered me about this poem was how seemingly pat its theme was, i.e., Ah, life! How sad that even the man who has everything in the eyes of the world cannot be happy with his lot. It seemed not so much tragic as moralizing somehow, and this pat theme seemed to me to dampen its humanity. 

The poem has always been popular (Robinson, remember, was awarded three Pulitzers, only one fewer than Frost!), adapted as a folk song by Simon and Garfunkel:

 

 

 

But I, I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be

Richard Cory.

The S&G version actually gets at something vital about the poem (though it in no way rivals the beauty of Robinson’s verse-making—song lyrics are a different sort of thing). The chorus is sung from the point of view of a townsperson of Tillbury, the imagined village (based on Gardiner, Maine), where many of his poems are set. (The "I" takes on a choral quality, sung in harmony by S and G.)

 

 

 

 

(I am told that Robinson once lived in this bell tower overlooking Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.)

In fact, I see now the poem is far more tragic and horrible than I first imagined, and the way in to this new, darker understanding is through the choral voice in the poem. Look at the nasty stuff the townspeople say:

We people on the pavement looked at him

In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

Then consider the tone of: “And he was rich – yes, richer than a king.” Hear the bitter dig behind the repetition and that word king? Dang! If I was Richard Cory and everyone’s envious eyes (the eyes of the world!) were on me all the time, I might not make a good end either. Tracy’s observation about Robinson's poems implicating the reader is exactly right: we are the “We.” We drove Richard Cory to this. Just as we (the town, society) helped drive the blinded woman down the steps at the end of "Eros Turannos" (or so, I believe, it is suggested). 

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

Driven down by themselves? Perhaps. But we are the abettors. Robinson's poems are about us every bit as much as they are about these sorry denizens of the Vacation State. Robinson, it turns out, was a freaking genius of poetry's dramatic context, if only we tune our ears to hear it. I knew I liked him. But, now, like one of the Tillburyites who envied Richard Cory, I hate him, too.

Comments

[Surazeus Simon Seamount]

I love the poetry of E.A. Robinson, as well as Robert Lowell, because both of them, and me, are descended from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. I find so much similar in the narrative verses they all wrote that seem to reflect a common world view and sensibility, a sense that the world is full of sorrow and yet justice will ultimately prevail.

[Surazeus Simon Seamount]

Oh dear, I was rather wrong. Oliver Wendell Holmes and I are descended from Anne Bradstreet, while E.A. Robinson and Tennessee Williams are descended from her sister Mercy, and Robert Lowell is descended from her sister Patience.

We are all descended from their father, Governor Thomas Dudley.