18 pages • 36 minutes read
Eros Turannos
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Much like his contemporary Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson did not embrace the experimental open verse favored by Walt Whitman, the dominant poet of post–Civil War America. Frost and Robinson disliked Whitman’s abandonment of the tight patterns of traditional rhythm and rhyme because they believed in shaping words into the subtle music of prosody.
“Eros Turannos” reflects Robinson’s respect for the formal traditions of the ancient poets and the British Romantics he admired in his youth. The poem is built around 6 octaves (stanzas with eight lines). Each stanza follows the same ABABCCCB rhyme scheme, a rigid pattern that suggests the rigidly conventional morality that characterizes the townspeople in Stanza 4 and makes the woman feel like she has a dearth of choices in the face of her loveless relationship.
The poem structure contrasts the formless ambiguity of the woman’s agonies—the reader sees her exactly from the outside, but cannot learn the truth about how the man betrayed her or why she stays. Robinson’s tightly chiseled, carefully patterned lines echo the dilemma of the woman, locked up to suffer unknown within the neat streets of her New England home.
Cubist Perspective
The poem examines the woman by depicting how she is looked at. Thus, it is less an investigation into a flawed relationship and more an investigation into how that relationship is perceived. Much as European Cubist painters in the first decade of the 20th century were experimenting with using multiple perspectives on a single canvass to bring a subject to life, Robinson uses several points of view in his character study. The first four stanzas feature the woman’s own opinion of her situation, Stanza 5 considers the judgmental gaze of the town’s chorus, and the poem ends with the warning of an outside observer who predicts but cannot intervene in the woman’s fate.
Triplet Rhyming Lines
Each of the poem’s six stanzas includes a kind of interlude of three consecutive lines with end rhymes. Lines 5-7 in each stanza, regardless of the shifting narrative perspective, maintain this pattern, interrupting the more conservative ABAB rhyme scheme.
These interludes demonstrate Robinson’s signature intricate rhythms and rhymes, using prosody to broaden his thematic argument. The triplet lines, trapped in each stanza, represent an unexpected moment of lift, a quickening as the rhymes resonate and interrupt the otherwise predictable form that Robinson establishes. The triplets represent the experience of the woman, trapped within the tight claustrophobic environs of her small town (which in this analogy is the verse in which the triplets are imbedded). The triplets, with their carefree near-comic lilt, defy the poem’s apparent tragic inevitability. The prosody reminds the reader that the woman is not dead yet, that the town has not entirely destroyed her.
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By Edwin Arlington Robinson
