Some thirty-odd years ago an obseure young man, with the not un-Jeommon name of Robinson, published a book of verse entitled "The Children of the Night." It was as its title indicates, a singularly som-her first volume, and the fact that some of the most melancholy pieces in it were written in the-old French forms generally considered appropriate to light verse gave it an added savour. In addition to these gloomy] ballads, villanelles and triolets, included "some vigorous sonnets, tributes to Zola, Verlaine, George! Crabbe and Thomas Hood, sharp! etchings of village characters, a couple of translations and a group of unruned "octaves" whereof the! eighteenth gives fairly enough the Darden of the poet's thought:
"Like a white wall whereon forever breaks Matthew Arnold, when he listened to ''the breath of the night wind down the vast edges drear and asked shingles of the world." And also he seems to have stood shoulder shoulder with Robert Browning, that contented delver in men's souls, thinking, perhaps, to find there the "unconjectured godliness" that was to defeat the world. The night that frightened Arnoldis still about hi the light that Browning struggled to show his fellows is still before him, and whether'one reads his first poems or his most recent, one finds implicit in them the " desperate courage that was the shield and the salvation of thoughtful men in the late lamented nineteenth century.
Robinson's debt to Browning obvious enough. Even his finely wrought embroideries on the Grail legend are psychological poetry, and how much more so are the several Unsatisfied the tumult of green seas Man's unconjectured godliness re-
With its imperial silence the lost waves Of insufficient grief. This mortal] surge That beats against us now is noth-_ ing else Than plangent ignorance.
Truth neithers shakes Nor wavers; but the world shakes, and we shriek."
Now there appears a volume of over a thousand pages comprising the collected works of this distinguished and tireless artist. For some reason the publishers have noc chosen to observe chronological order in assembling the material in this inclusive volume. They have placed first the contents of the book with which Edwin Arlington Robinson originally won his laurels and which remains, I think, his fines work: "The Man Against the Sky.
Technique and Philosophy Opening the collection at that, one might fancy the various volumes to be printed here in order of merit, but a second glance suffices to make one believe that nothing more deliberate than chance has dictated, the arrangement. Hence one must skip back and forth with the gay agility of a young goat if one would try to follow the road of the poet's progress. But when the reader has fairly tired himself out with this feat he comes to the conclusion that long poetic narratives concerned with the perplexities of contemporary men and women, Then, too, Robinson likes to employ the unwieldy polysyllabie vocabulary of the great Victorians, Robinson's Kinship to Arnold is not so clear, and_ yet his whole performance might: almost be considered a series of fugues, sonatas and symphonies based on the themes of Dover Beach and Self-Dependence. He despises the *vorld "with all its d and wounds and bristles on" deeply as any man can, He has little hope of its redemption, but he knows that it can come only by taking thought, and that those who give themselves to this lonely labor are rare, Repeatedly he declares his stubborn doctrine'
There is no servitude so fraudulent As of a sun-shut mind: for tis the mind That makes you craven or invite Diseased or puissant. The mind will pay.
Ton thousand fold and be the richer then To grant new service; but the world pays hard.
And again, less emphatically but less clearly:
Blown far from harbors once in sight, May we not, going fair go right—
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.