Making It New: 1900–1945 349In his later years, Robinson tended to concentrate on the more positive
implications of impulses like Miniver’s, the human capacity for dreaming dreams of
a better life. Something of this is suggested by the short poem “Mr. Flood’s Party,”
published eleven years after “Miniver Cheevy.” Like “Miniver Cheevy,” it describes a
pathetic figure who retreats from an intolerable present into dreams of the past; it,
too, mixes irony with sympathy. But, whereas in the earlier poem the sympathy is
relatively slight, peripheral, and qualified, in “Mr. Flood’s Party” it is central to our
understanding of the protagonist. When, for instance, about midway through the
poem Robinson compares Mr. Flood to “Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn,” the
comparison seems at once incongruous and just. In some ways, Mr. Flood is quite
unlike the bravest of Charlemagne’s officers who, after most of his friends had gone,
died blowing on his horn for help. Mr. Flood’s horn, after all, is not a horn at all but
a jug full of liquor, and he is not so much a bold young adventurer as a tired old
man. In other ways, though, the knight and the drunkard turn out to be very much
alike. Both, for example, present types of endurance, as men who recall the past
while preparing to meet their former companions in another world. Comic
Mr. Flood may be, but there is a touch of the hero to him as well: more than a touch,
perhaps, when, towards the end of the poem, Robinson describes him “amid the
silver loneliness / Of night” lifting up his voice and singing “Until the whole harmo-
nious landscape rang.” By now, the jug has assumed a symbolic status, belonging to
a world where “most things break,” it has nevertheless become the node around
which the scene is momentarily harmonized. More important, Mr. Flood’s inebri-
ated state now smacks of the divine drunkenness of the poet: the man who comes
close to liberating himself, and metamorphosing his environment with the help of
his vivid imagination.
It was in a series of longer poetic narratives, however, rather than in short pieces
like “Mr. Flood’s Party,” that the later Robinson moved toward affirmation: poems
such as the Arthurian trilogy Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram. “The Man Against the
Sky,” written at about the midpoint in Robinson’s career, indicates the change; in a
reflective poem over three hundred lines long, the poet sketches out the mature
philosophical attitude implicit in later and even longer works. The opening lines
establish the basic image, of a man making the upward climb over the hill of life to
death, in a way that suggests both the man’s diminutiveness and his possible
grandeur. This image then leads the poet to speculate on the various attitudes of
people as they face death. Representing different philosophies of life as well as death,
they describe a scale of increasing negation, from faith to doubt to denial, and seen,
too, roughly chronologically, moving from primitive religious belief to contemporary
materialism. Having pushed the argument this far, the poet then develops it a little
further. We no longer believe in the “two fond old enormities” of heaven and hell, he
acknowledges, but that is no reason for assuming that life is meaningless and death
an annihilation. Perhaps there is an order in the universe. Admittedly, we can never
know whether there is or not because we are limited by the confines of the self. But
it is surely better to believe that there is such an order, since life is otherwise reduced
to “a blind atomic pilgrimage,” a pointless trek; better, and more reasonable. For ourGGray_c04.indd 349ray_c 04 .indd 349 8 8/1/2011 7:53:49 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 49 AM