In November of 2023, I wrote an article advancing some general principles of conservative aesthetics, in which I argued that a healthy culture will “produce new works which are consistent with its cultural traditions—whether those new efforts are imitative, adaptive, or novel, and whether they are presented in a traditional mode or in an entirely new means of expression.” In other words, new works in a healthy culture will help to conserve the foundational works of that culture. The new works will not supplant or obliterate the existing tradition, but will instead sit alongside it in support, and will likewise be supported by it.
Richard Robinson’s recent poetry collection, Windows and Doors: A Book of Poetry, is a fine example of what such an effort might look like in practise. In this collection of 53 poems written across 2022-2024, references to the established tradition of poetry and literature abound, with mention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Paul Verlaine, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Carew, Arden of Faversham, and the King James Bible, inter alia. The verses of some of these established poets supply epigraphs, others are briefly referenced in the bodies of Robinson’s own poems, and still others find their way into his translations and the few footnotes dotted across the text. The resulting sense is of a collection intimately bound up with a tradition of poetry and thought stretching from antiquity to the present.
Natheless, despite its connexions to the canon of English poetry, Robinson’s poetry is not overtly formalist. There are a few sonnets throughout the collection—more or less, depending upon how strictly one interprets the form—but by and large the collection is made up of poems with internal structures that are not necessarily beholden to tradition. Consequently, the work seems to occupy a middle ground between 20th century free verse and the turn towards neo-formalism. For his own part, Robinson gives, on the rear cover, a colourful description of the verse as similar to “a book of sacred and profane verse cowritten by Robert Herrick and Ezra Pound while both are half-inebriated and imitating Arnaut Daniel and Paul Verlaine.” This rather baroque and slightly confusing description might overstate the effect somewhat, but such things are rather in the eye of the beholder. In my estimation, the poems reminded me not of other poetry so much as they reminded me of other music—the Etudes of Philip Glass, in particular (which, from this reviewer, should be understood as praise).
As to their content, the poems are indeed both sacred and profane, taking as their subject the full range of human experience: love and sexuality, anger and fear, regret and contemplation; there is the prayerful turn to God in His heaven, but there is sex and flatulence below. In-between, the robin and the cowbird flit through cities and fields. In musing upon these scenes and more, the poems are predominantly short: only six of the 53 poems run to a second page, and only one extends to a third. With the poems divided into three reverse chronological sections by year (beginning with 2024), this review presents a reading of one single-page poem from the first section alongside a reading of the longest and final poem in the collection, both of which are representative of the quality and form of the collection as a whole.
“In Even and Sorrow”
One of the best poems in the collection, and also one of the most recent (written this year), “In Even and Sorrow” is a rhymed fourteen-line poem organised into three quatrains and a couplet, which charts the parallel courses of the speaker’s emotional state and the transit of the sun across the heavens. What begins in morning joy descends, eventually, into even(ing) sorrow. An emotional-natural parallelism is present from the beginning, but so are the signs of a depressive inclination. “The sky was grey-pinking, the rain had stopped, / It was a beautifully melancholic morning,” read the opening lines, where the grey of the rain blends into the clear pink of morning alongside another intersection—this time emotional—between the beautiful and the melancholic. These seeming contrasts are presented as a false dichotomy, or perhaps even as necessary to each other. The third line, in which the speaker asserts that he was “deliciously alone … enjoying / The silence” only adds to this sense, in which the customary markers of despair become integral to the speaker’s understanding of contentment, and even joy.
That gaiety is present literally and formally in the first line of the second stanza, in which the speaker declares, “Gay was my heart, and fearless was my soul;” the line representing a decided turn away from any hint of melancholy, poetically mirrored by an almost sing-song rhythm that is occasioned by the substitution of a trochee at the beginning of the otherwise iambic line. Morning has given way to the high noon of the soul. But another possibility exists: perhaps a consuming personal industriousness prevents the potentially dolorous introspection. “Afternoon came and I worked in the yard / Picking up branches, many thick and hard,” the speaker recounts, before giving the stormy origins of the fallen wood. Work has focused his mind upon the task at hand, which involves redressing nature’s wintry excess.
As the job nears completion, doubt creeps back into the poem: “I did not feel so invincible now, did I ever?” the speaker asks, reflecting upon the difference between the morning’s joy and the arrival of “the hour / Of darkness.” There is an inevitability to this weight, which, for the speaker, rests “upon me” like a burden, and it escalates to existential levels, evoked in the question of the final two lines: “What man will rise elated to God on the morrow / Only to suffer in his soul in even and sorrow?” The return of the sorrow of the declining day obscures the hope and joy of the noontide sun at precisely the moment that sun has dipped below the horizon—but also at the very moment when the speaker equates the rise of the sun with elation to God. Once the symbol of the divine is out of sight, once its warmth fades even for an instant, work fails, and doubts overwhelm the speaker.
So, too, for our numberless humanity—we who each struggle, whether in success or failure, to maintain our faith in the face of adversities great and small. What the speaker forgets in the hour of darkness is what the reader can remember by reading again, summoning the sun and the morning once more by re-reading the poem—and commanding anew the gaiety and the bright light of the afternoon, which cannot be erased from the page by the speaker’s own midnight doubts.
“The Earnestness of an Afternoon”
As mentioned earlier, the poems in Robinson’s collection occupy a middle ground between free verse and neo-formalism. If “In Even and Sorrow” is a work which leans into formalism, then “The Earnestness of an Afternoon” takes the opposite tack. The repetition of verbiage may be evocative of the repeated lines of a triolet, even if the formal structure is not present: the manipulation of the repeated phrases add to the emotional effect, allowing the same language to shift in tone and meaning as the poem moves to its conclusion (or lack thereof). Alongside the repeated words are a repetition of sounds: for example, the poem begins with a recurrent rhyme on “afternoon” (June, monsoon) but then moves to a still more insistent rhyme on “rain” (disdain, pain, vein).
The two strain against one another across the length of the poem; or perhaps—meteorologically—they coexist: an afternoon rain which finds itself refracted, time and again, into varying, rhymed forms. There are times when the effect seems almost too insistent, and the reader wants for a more subtle poetic hand. But this is also true of the rain which overstays its welcome, which beats upon the window panes in the hour when the picnic and the cookout are scheduled—likewise the pain that does not abate and the disdain that cannot be forgotten. These recalcitrant rhymes defy the reader, too.
The poem begins with a tercet that establishes its scene or theme—“Of an afternoon, / Late, on a Thursday, in early June, / Before a faint monsoon”—without terminal punctuation, a choice later echoed in the final line. The approaching monsoon will be the occasion for the appearance of “rain” and its subsequent rhymes, but the poem first moves to “An old man,” in a stanza of four lines that displays the repetition and circularity which will come to dominate the poem:
An old man, whose passion is risible
An old man whose passion is as serious as a grebe
A lone grebe paddling frantically at the surface of a water
In concentric circles
The repeated usage of “An old man[,] whose passion is” binds the first two lines of these stanzas almost into lockstep—a process which continues less rigidly with the use of the single word “grebe” to link the second and third lines of the same stanza. When the poem moves on from this use of language, it shifts to abstract imagery: the “concentric circles” of the final line. Hence, the process that begins through an almost slavish parallelism shifts into a briefer echo, and then dissipates into a conceptual abstraction. A similar process takes place in the stanza which immediately follows:
And a young man whose seriousness is risible;
A young man’s seriousness risible as the rain
And the menace of meteorology laughing with disdain
It is risible like our separation
It is risible like the pain
Setting aside continued the internal repetition and connexion of words and concepts (e.g., “rain” and “meteorology”), the use of “risible” here connects this stanza to the one which precedes it, even as it sets up a putative contrast between the old man and the young man. At first sight, the proffered contrast seems to upend the attitudes expected of old age and youth, for it is the old man who is passionate, and the young man who is serious. But in fact the poem reinforces those attitudes even as it comments upon them: the old man is risible in his passion just as the young man is risible in his seriousness. They have adopted ill-fitting attitudes, like characters in a sitcom who have mistakenly swapped clothes to hilarious effect. Beneath the absurdity, however, are darker forces: the predictive aggrandisement of meteorology is a “menace,” and “our separation” suggests at least the possibility that the speaker is commenting upon his relationship to a specific person.
Note that in the quoted passage the final line is not enjambed in the next stanza; rather, it too lacks terminal punctuation, as do the final lines of all of the stanzas in the poem except one which ends interrogatively (“And is it not mirthful the rain”). In fact, the eschewing of expected—and even grammatically necessary—punctuation is one of the key features of the poem. The effect here seems to be to maintain both the linked and potentially cyclical sense of the structure, and its uninterrupted flow of one set of images into the next.
Further contrasts follow as the scene shifts first to the “low lying hills in East Oregon” and then to “the lush valleys of West Oregon / Where the verdure of old rain forests causes pain”—another kind of pain, perhaps, than that which is found in the preceding stanza, but still a kind of pain which is thematically and aurally linked to “rain.” After the next stanza begins with “A disturbed sky like an overturned field,” there truly is a sense of “A cathartic build up of the elements, and the muted pressure of rain” that duly arrives in the very next stanza, when at last, “Rain drops stipple.” But the poem does not turn to nature, as might be expected in the moment that nature precipitously bursts forth: it turns to human faces gazing out amidst human objects.
The human faces gaze out from a shop window, splattered with rain, and are echoed in a glass-cased photograph of people long dead. At first, the poem seems to suggest that nature cannot match their human gravity, and that it is powerless to dampen their sombre gaze: “The ash trees are … Not nearly as serious as the faces in shop windows.” But the power of droplets combines, like the grouped faces in the photograph, into something much greater: it becomes a river which cuts through the pain and the end of the poem withal. It “brings relief” and “absorbs the pain”—but it also “does not stop.” Insatiate in its swelling beneath the monsoon, “the river moves,” and in the final lines it even echoes itself, “like the rain in a monsoon / That moves away.”
In this final cataclysm, the river rushes away carrying with it rain and pain, nature and humanity, passion and seriousness all down together to the great confluence of waters that lies beyond the bounds of the poem itself, in the mind of the reader. There, the apparent contrasts might well evaporate away, only to be raised anew—returning like the monsoon itself—when the poem is inevitably read again.
