The Garden

by Jeffrey Essmann | September 18, 2024 12:05 am

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This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

The Garden

There is a fenceless garden overgrown
With buds and blossoms and all sorts of leaves;
And once, among the roses and the sheaves,
The Gardener and I were there alone.
He led me to the plot where I had thrown
The fennel of my days on wasted ground,
And in that riot of sad weeds I found
The fruitage of a life that was my own.

My life! Ah, yes, there was my life, indeed!
And there were all the lives of humankind;
And they were like a book that I could read,
Whose every leaf, miraculously signed,
Outrolled itself from Thought’s eternal seed,
Love-rooted in God’s garden of the mind.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson (December 22, 1869 – April 6, 1935) was one of the most prolific American poets of the early 20th century—his Collected Poems (1921) won the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to poetry (the first of three Pulitzers he won)—though he is remembered now for only a few short poems. Robinson was devoted to his art and led a solitary, often makeshift existence. Writing at a time when Modernism and its literary experiments were moving into the cultural spotlight, Robinson was committed to working in classical forms, albeit with a contemporary voice and a dark thematic palette focused on failed lives, materialism, and the inevitability of change. A reviewer of one of the poet’s early collections found its tone too grim, saying that “the world is not beautiful to [Robinson], but a prison-house.” Robinson replied, “I’m sorry that I’ve painted myself in such lugubrious colors. The world is not a prison-house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.” His luck changed when then-President Teddy Roosevelt read an out-of-print collection of his, liked it, convinced the publisher to reissue it, and wrote a review of it himself, thus bringing Robinson firmly into the public eye—and into financial security for the first time in his life.

As the poet’s chief biographer notes, at his passing, “magazines and newspapers throughout the country took elaborate notice of Robinson’s death, reminding their readers that he had been considered America’s foremost poet for nearly 20 years and praising his industry, integrity, and devotion to his art.”

Source URL: https://integratedcatholiclife.org/2024/09/poetry-the-garden/

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