Carol Rumens's poem of the week

Poem of the week: Eros Turannos by Edwin Arlington Robinson

In his astute analysis of an unhappy marriage, Robinson turns away from 1890s sentimentality towards psychological veracity
The marriage is the third, most difficult 'character' in the poem. Photograph: Getty

Poet and critic Louise Bogan described Edwin Arlington Robinson's 1897 collection, The Children of the Night, as "one of the hinges upon which American poetry was able to turn from the sentimentality of the 90s toward modern veracity and psychological truth". The significance of that achievement, which Robinson shares with a near-contemporary, Edgar Lee Masters, can be too easily submerged by the more dramatic renovations of imagism. He was, paradoxically, an innovative poet who quietly fulfilled the old, elusive Romantic doctrine of humble attentiveness to Everyman. In this week's poem, Eros Turannos, he is at his most astute, his analysis of the bargaining tactics in a seemingly "co-dependent" marriage reminding us, perhaps, of Tolstoy's famous observation: "happy families are all the same; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Robinson is always interested in how individual characters behave at their defining moments (as in his poems Reuben Bright and Miniver Cheevy). Here, two antagonists are revealed in the long series of defining moments that have bound them in courtship and marriage. This marriage, in fact, is the third, most difficult "character" in the story, and I wonder if it's altogether fanciful to see the unusual use of triplicate rhymes in each stanza (three B rhymes, and three consecutive C rhymes) as denoting this.

The narrator moves novelistically between points of view. The wife's angle is the most explored, but we learn something of the way the husband feels. We brow-tap with the know-all neighbours and nod at the wise summing-up of their mouthpiece, the speaker himself: "Meanwhile, we do no harm …" If we began by thinking the husband a tyrant, we soon sense a power-shift towards his wife, and then vice versa. Finally, according to ancient poetic tradition, the finger points at Eros. Tongue-in-cheek the poet may be, and the husband and wife are plainly self-deceiving. Nevertheless, amor omnia vincit.

The use of polysyllabic rhyme in verse usually signals comedy but not here, or not quite. It certainly adds a lift to rhythms that might otherwise seem drearily iambic. In the opening stanzas it delicately underlines closure: choose him/ refuse him/ lose him // sound him/ found him/ around him. We feel for the husband, however deeply unpleasant he is, trapped in the delicate net of erotic fantasy and need. In stanza 4, the three-syllable abstract nouns are heavy and sticky, and express the ingrown quality of the wife's mental imprisonment: confusion, illusion, seclusion.

The poem's diction is interesting. Robinson's verbs are exceptionally active, his adjectives carefully planted. Offsetting the slight wordiness, most of the verses include some natural images, or suggest sensations of headlong movement. The marriage is blent with ordinary, natural processes of entropy and change.

We don't see the couple physically: in fact, I imagine them back-view or in profile, never full-face. But they are plainly located. The first bit of landscape we see is metaphorical: the "foamless weirs/ Of age" (a remarkably evocative metaphor). The wife's "payment" to the husband in return for his protection is evoked brilliantly in "a sense of ocean and old trees". This imagery seems both literal and metaphorical. We are also given a town and harbour-side. Why do the latter "vibrate" with the wife's seclusion? Suddenly we realise how closed and tradition-bound the neighbourhood must be if her absence is so widely noticed. Robinson has found a striking way of expressing the ordinary but menacing phenomenon of small-town gossip.

The couple's complex difficulty is left in the shadows – "as if the story of a house/ Were told, or ever could be …" A wise diagnostician who knows what he does not know, Robinson in his reticence calls to mind Chekhov's storytelling technique. This is a marriage in which, for all its faults, "passion lived and died". We learn enough to be moved, if ultimately to share the speaker's fatalism. Thus Robinson, with a melancholy smile, creates a new stylistic legacy, and American poetry is ready for the splendid, expansive genius of Robert Frost.

Eros Turannos

She fears him, and will always ask
      What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
      All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
      Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
      That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
      The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost –
He sees that he will not be lost
      And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
      Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
      Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days –
Till even prejudice delays
      And fades, and she secures him.

The failing leaf inaugurates
      The reign of her confusion:
The pounding wave reverberates
      The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbour side
      Vibrate with her seclusion.

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 had 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.

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Each week Carol Rumens picks a poem to discuss