Eros Turannos

While Edwin Arlington Robinson delves into the emotional anxieties and long-simmering frustrations of this lonely New England woman, the poem offers more than a case study of a claustrophobic life. There are three interlocking perspectives here: the bleak reality of the woman as she contemplates settling for a life without passion or emotional reward (Stanzas 1-4), the narrow-mindedness of judgmental neighbors who dismiss her as stand-offish (Stanza 5), and the broad sympathy of the speaker-poet who warns of the darkest implications of the woman’s plight (Stanza 6). 

Robinson inserts no markers—roman numerals, or typographical tells such as italics or quotation marks—to indicate these dramatic perspective shifts. Instead, Robinson leaves readers to reject the first perspectives as misleading and dangerously limited. Although the poem suggests that the woman cannot be helped or understood entirely, Robinson urges readers to see her dark isolation through sympathy and compassion. 

The opening four stanzas reveal the woman’s debate over why she became involved in an unrewarding relationship, what “fated her to choose” (Line 2) a man incapable of emotional honesty who hides behind an “engaging mask” (Line 3). “She fears him,” she admits in the opening line but doesn’t elaborate, lacing her self-interrogation with anxiety and uncertainty. 

Far from revealing any love for this man, the woman admits only that she stays because being alone would be worse, reflecting the bleak alternatives women faced in Gilded Age US. We do not know the legal status of their union. If she is his wife, divorce would be problematic at this time; if she is involved with a married man, even fewer choices would exist. 

She knows she is smarter than the man, but can reveal only a “blurred sagacity” (Line 9). While this relationship is unhappy, she clings to her only triumph: She is proud of staying with the man she loves despite the betrayals that cause her to call him “Judas” (Line 12), a reference to the biblical character who betrays Jesus to the Roman authorities for crucifixion. But her pride comforts her only “almost” (Line 13), an adverb suggesting the depth of her pain. Still, while the man’s place within the patriarchal world of the woman’s small town would not suffer if the relationship ended, the woman’s knowledge of his misdeeds affects him: He cannot help but be aware that he may be judged by the town, so he nervously “waits and looks around him” (Line 16).

In Stanza 3, the woman acknowledges what is most disturbing about her reality. She understands the compromises she is making. She knows this man with whom she is involved is arrogant; his smug confidence, his cruel deceptions, his emotional thinness are evident to her. But that leaves only the reality of time: “all her doubts of what he says / Are dimmed with what she knows of days” (Lines 21-22). 

The woman’s thoughts darken in Stanza 4. Drawing on imagery of the natural world around her coastal town, she regards the heavy crash of the nearby ocean waves as a “dirge” (Line 28), or funeral lament, that echoes her emotional distress—the “illusion” (Line 28) that her domestic captivity would ever change. To survive, she withdraws into the isolation of her home refuge, a “place where she can hide” (Line 32), leaving the town and its residents to their own busyness.

Those residents, the “We,” come to the fore in Stanza 5. Their careless cruelty toward her demonstrates the wisdom of the woman’s retreat from them. The neighbors dismiss getting to know this odd woman who does not associate with them. Rather, they are content to “guess” (Line 39) why the woman is as she is, content to maintain distance and deal in judgmental gossiping. 

An outside observer’s perspective closes the poem. Unlike the woman who believes she can endure in her isolation and unlike the town folk who believe they “do no harm” (Line 41) by speculating about her, this speaker sees a cry for help that no one hears. The speaker worries that the enticing lure of the crashing ocean waves calls to those depressed enough to see comfort in death by suicide. The metaphor of autumn moving inevitably into winter adds to the implication of life’s end.