Today’s Poem: Mr. Flood’s Party

Edwin Arlington Robinson’s small-town tragedy

Eduard von Grützner, The Tipsy Forester, 1904 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Mr. Flood’s Party 

by Edwin Arlington Robinson 

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night 
Over the hill between the town below 
And the forsaken upland hermitage 
That held as much as he should ever know 
On earth again of home, paused warily. 
The road was his with not a native near; 
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud, 
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear: 

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon 
Again, and we may not have many more; 
The bird is on the wing, the poet says, 
And you and I have said it here before. 
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light 
The jug that he had gone so far to fill, 
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood, 
Since you propose it, I believe I will.” 

Alone, as if enduring to the end 
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn, 
He stood there in the middle of the road 
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn. 
Below him, in the town among the trees, 
Where friends of other days had honored him, 
A phantom salutation of the dead 
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim. 
 
Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child 
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake, 
He set the jug down slowly at his feet 
With trembling care, knowing that most things break; 
And only when assured that on firm earth 
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men 
Assuredly did not, he paced away, 
And with his hand extended paused again: 
 
“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this 
In a long time; and many a change has come 
To both of us, I fear, since last it was 
We had a drop together. Welcome home!” 
Convivially returning with himself, 
Again he raised the jug up to the light; 
And with an acquiescent quaver said: 
“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might. 
 
“Only a very little, Mr. Flood — 
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.” 
So, for the time, apparently it did, 
And Eben evidently thought so too; 
For soon amid the silver loneliness 
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang, 
Secure, with only two moons listening, 
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang — 
 
“For auld lang syne.” The weary throat gave out, 
The last word wavered; and the song being done, 
He raised again the jug regretfully 
And shook his head, and was again alone. 
There was not much that was ahead of him, 
And there was nothing in the town below — 
Where strangers would have shut the many doors 
That many friends had opened long ago. 
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Fame is fleeting, but even in his own lifetime Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) was something of an oddball. Despite the attention and aid of Theodore Roosevelt, who declared that while he wasn’t sure he understood “Luke Havergal,” he was “entirely sure” that he liked it — and who also secured the poet a make-work job in the New York Customs House — Robinson’s life was a frequently solitary, frequently stop-gap existence, marked by recurrent bouts of poverty and drinking. 

He won the first Pulitzer Prize for poetry, in 1921, for his Collected Poems (Sara Teasdale had won, in 1918, the first Columbia Poetry Prize, which became the Pulitzer). Yet our lingering impression of Robinson’s work is often limited to the relatively few anthology pieces arising from what’s now called the “Tilbury Town” cycle. These are the poems we know: “Luke Havergal,” “Miniver Cheevy,” “Reuben Bright,” and of course — thanks to Simon and Garfunkel, we know it almost too well — “Richard Cory,” that poem whose last line seems written expressly for the purpose of startling high-school students out of their first-period-English slumbers. 

The characters of these Tilbury Town poems constituted a recurring motif for Robinson. His first vanity-published collection, The Torrent and the Night Before, which appeared in 1896, introduces “Aaron Stark,”  “John Evereldown,” and the more famous Mr. Havergal, denizens of a town whose weather forecast is always darkness. Although this first book also included poems for other poets —  George Crabbe, Thomas Hood, Walt Whitman, Paul Verlaine — as well as serious exercises in such forms as the sonnet, the ballade, and the villanelle, and a sustained dramatic monologue in the closing poem, “The Night Before,” still  Tilbury endures as Robinson’s most-known world. 

Edwin Arlington Robinson (Wikimedia Commons)

That these poems overlap in time with Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 Spoon River Anthology (which includes “Lucinda Matlock,” Today’s Poem on August 13) may at least partially account for their particular prominence. As in Today’s Poem, “Mr. Flood’s Party,” which appeared in Robinson’s 1921 Collected Poems, there’s a similarly, and curiously, posthumous quality to these Tilbury characters, even when they’re not actually dead. Their stories read like epitaphs or obituaries. Eben Flood’s very name, with its juxtaposed tidal stages, signals a quality of death-in-life. His tide falls even as it continues, for the time being, to try to rise. 

That attempt to rise is fraught, of course, with pathos. Old Eben’s homecoming party is a party of one — two, if you count the enabling jug, three if you count the moon, or four if you consider the poor man’s double vision of the moon in the penultimate line of stanza 6. The sense of one-man bonhomie that “Mr. Flood’s Party” develops and summarily dismantles makes an interesting echo of this poem by Li Po (701–762), or Li Bai as we now know him, in a 1919 translation by the English sinologist Arthur Waley (1899–1966): 

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

Robinson might have read the poem in this translation. The timeline admits that possibility, although in fact his reading, characteristically, was circumscribed and — especially compared to such traveled, allusive Modernists as Pound and Eliot — relatively unadventurous.

At any rate, whether or not Robinson carried the Chinese poem in his mind, it makes an interesting companion for his own. Unlike the first-person speaker of the Chinese poem, who reflects on, but also finds resolution for, the tragic shift in his own life, Robinson’s Mr. Flood must depend on a compassionate witness to narrate his own tragedy of alienation and exile, which has no resolution. The movement of Robinson’s pentameter octets, rhyming only in their even-numbered lines, suggests a subtle tug-of-war between order and chaos and hints at the fragility of the solitary bon vivant, offering himself a drink in the “silver loneliness.” 

This poem, with its multiple layers of emotion, entices us to laugh at Eben Flood’s call-and-response toasts: “‘Drink to the bird.’ . . . ‘Well, Mr. Flood, / Since you propose it, I believe I will.’” But Mr. Flood is not, ultimately, a comic drunk. His party vanishes with the last drop in the jug, and like the psalmist, he might say, “Lover and friend has thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.” Flood’s own voice runs out with his liquor, and only the narrator-witness is left to tell: 

There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below —
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

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