18 pages • 36 minutes read
Eros Turannos
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Symbols & Motifs
Home
For the woman, home symbolizes a refuge. It is a manifestation of her isolation. Given the loveless ruin of her relationship where “passion lived and died” (Line 29) and given the cold judgmental nature of her neighbors, the woman sees her home as a “place where she can hide” (Line 30). Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem thus plays ironically against the conventional wisdom of the Gilded Age that regarded “home, sweet home” as a comforting place where families create a reassuring space animated by love, happiness, and emotional support.
Home also often symbolizes identity, both in its aesthetic and socioeconomic contexts—the material comforts of a home and the style of its decor typically are used as characterization in fiction. Robinson upends this symbolic link in his suggestion that the woman’s home is more akin to voluntary incarceration—a prison where she is unwilling and uninterested in engaging the identity-making busyness of life around her. For her, the home symbolizes not presence but absence of self, the tangible manifestation of her empty heart.
The Weirs
When the woman looks ahead to the time she has left, the vision is bleak. Her future in this relationship is symbolized by river waters draining through weirs, or narrow walls that convert a river’s unpredictable power into constant and steady movement, maintaining a constant level of water to prevent flooding. Hence, the woman calls them “foamless weirs” (Line 7). If weirs do their job correctly, the surface of the water, indeed the river itself, never changes, stirs, or churns.
That sense of sameness, while reassuring to an engineer and to those who live along the river, represents for the woman a bleak assessment of her future. Like the relationship, which ostensibly was once exciting and full of possibility but where now “passion lived and died” (Line 37), the river’s potential for chaos has been reined in by the weirs constructed along the sides. Looking ahead, the woman sees only the monotony of her frustration, depression, and isolation, day after day, year after year.
Judas
The deepest mysteries in the poem are the exact nature of the man’s treachery, the motivation for the masks he wears, and the details of his connection to the woman who reviles but will not leave him.
The woman calls him “Judas” (Line 12), but never provides a backstory. The name is freighted with negative connotations as a symbol. In the New Testament of the Bible, part of which relates the story of Jesus Christ, Judas holds the majority of the blame for the crucifixion. Originally a disciple of Jesus, Judas eventually turns him in to Roman soldiers and collects 30 pieces of silver for his help with the arrest. Through the centuries, Judas’s name has become synonymous with the vilest kind of betrayal. For example, in Dante’s Inferno (1307), traitors like him are put into the deepest circle of Hell.
By never clarifying how the man is like Judas, the poem only raises questions, putting readers into the same gossiping position as the townspeople who speculate about the couple from afar. The effect of this obfuscation is to reify the unfathomable mystery of people suffering/delighting under the sorrows/joys of the glory/tyranny of love.
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By Edwin Arlington Robinson
