Certain kinds of work choice can make readers
feel that the author is talking about a level deeper
than their interpretation can reach, but it is easy
to cross a line. As with any spice, language that
comes on too strong ends up being more about
itself than the work it is intended to serve. Poets
can damage their poems by letting readers catch
the slightest sense that they are working hard or
showing off.
The structure of ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ shows the
controlling hand of a true artist who does the
difficult while making it look effortless. It does
not feel like Robinson wrote the poem by follow-
ing a formula or like the numbers of syllables in
each line of each stanza had to be tailored to fit a
pattern. It feels like a poem with line lengths that
ebb and flow in an inevitable manner. Even those
readers who are not aware of it know, at some
deeper level, that Edgar Arlington Robinson is in
command of his poetic faculties, and so they
accept words from him that a younger, less
powerful, poet might use in desperation.
Source:David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’
inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Nathan A. Cervo
In the following essay, Cervo gives a close analysis
of word choice in ‘‘Miniver Cheevy.’’
Between Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘‘The
Chambered Nautilus’’ (1858) and T. S. Eliot’s
‘‘pair of ragged claws’’ (‘‘The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock,’’ 1915) falls Edwin Arlington
Robinson’s ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ (1910), the name
of whose central figure may be explicated as a
thematic play on the words ‘‘foraminifer’’ and
‘‘chivy’’ (or ‘‘chivvy’’). Between the approvingly
expanding mollusk (a metaphor for Holmes’s
soul) and the psychophanous sidling crustacean
(a symbol of Prufrock’s desire to avoid respon-
sibility by being negatively transfigured into a
lower life form), the protozoan (Miniver) creeps
about gathering food (for ‘‘thought,’’ 27, 28) by
way of the slender, rootlike pseudopodia tempo-
rarily protruding through the foramens, or
minute holes, it bears in its calcareous shell.
(The calcareous, or chalk, motif appears later
in the filmMrs. Miniver, where the dramatic,
and apparently ironic, motion is from Dunkirk
toward the white cliffs of Dover.)
In Robinson’s poem, Miniver chivvies the
townspeople—that is, teases or annoys them by per-
sistent small attacks emanating from the tents, so
to speak, of Sir Thomas Malory (moral superiority
of Arthurian romance to the modern mill town),
Matthew Arnold (the philistine is the implacable
foe of the artist), Nietzsche (conventions manufac-
ture conduct; the Over-Man creates it), Oscar Wilde
(life imitates art, not the other way around), and
Freud (the daydreamer as omnipotent infant and
artist in the milieu of civilization and its discontents).
Fancifully arrayed in ‘‘iron clothing’’ (24)—
Robinson’s version of a foraminifer’s shell—
Miniver may be said, from the townspeople’s
point of view, to be all wet as he creeps about on
the false feet (pseudopodia) of literary and histor-
ical allusions, gathering sustenance for his virtual
self-image. When he daydreams about ‘‘Thebes
and Camelot, / And Priam’s neighbors’’ (11–12),
one, prompted by Miniver’s perceived lack of
character, may suppose that he dwells on Oedipus
(cf. ‘‘child of scorn,’’ 1), Sir Gawain, Paris, and
Helen. Justas Don Quixote, whenmad, construed
windmills to begiantsand attackedthem, Miniver
‘‘[g]rew leanwhileheassailedtheseasons’’ (2). One
consequence of Miniver’s grueling—‘‘[g]rew
lean’’—encounter with the feverish nothingness
of fantasy is somatic marasmus—bodily inanition
directly proportional to psychic inflammation.
Another is his eschewing the meatiness of present
reality in favor of a thin porridge, a gruel whose
chief and quite meager ingredient is whining.
As inert whiner, who ‘‘would have sinned
incessantly / Could he have been [a Medici]’’ (19–
20), Miniver actually is sinning ceaselessly by cadg-
ing for drinks instead of working, by dissolving
action in ‘‘thinking’’ (30) about ‘‘gold’’ (29), and by
spitefully and fatalistically committing his parodis-
tic actions to the ruination of his health (‘‘Miniver
coughed,’’ 31; the cough suggesting pulmonary
tuberculosis and/or the pneumonia to which alco-
holics are prey). In effect, he interchangeably tran-
substantiates ‘‘whine’’ into alcohol. The alcohol he
destructively imbibes is always his version of
sacramental wine; or, in Miniver’s case, whine.
The last word of the poem, ‘‘drinking’’ (32),
suggests that the metaphorical foraminifer Miniver,
his character shot with holes, has gone down the
drain and into the drink (a sizable body of water).
Morally speaking, he has returned by way of undis-
ciplined imagination to the amniotic fluid which he
ispleasedtoidentifyas‘‘Camelot’’ (11). To allude to
a later poem by Robinson: ‘‘Gawaine, aware again
of Lancelot / In the King’s garden, coughed and
followed him’’ (‘‘Lancelot’’ 1–2, 1920).
Source:Nathan A. Cervo, ‘‘Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy,’’
inExplicator, Vol. 62, No. 4, Summer 2004, pp. 213–15.Miniver Cheevy