"One Word After Another"

CAVENDER'S HOUSE--Edwin Arlington Robinson--Macmillan ($2).

Fragmentary, obscure, scattered in the recriminations of a self-tormented man, the narrative of Poet Robinson's new work engrosses the reader's efforts, distracts him from the tragic beauty of eerie moonlight, wraiths, tortured souls. Pieced together, the fragments recount Cavender, a man, virile, sensitive, arrogant, none too faithful to Laramie, his charming wife. Suspecting that she in turn had been unfaithful to him, he dashed her over a cliff. When early workmen found her body in the gorge below, he left the village, brokenhearted. For twelve years he wandered and wondered, hoping that he had been justified. He returned at last to the scene of his crime. Her presence confronted him, mocked him, awakened him to a course he had not thought of taking--to give himself up.

A specimen of the verse (Cavender with his wife's ghost):

"It was a grief

And a bewilderment to feel her there

So near him, and as far away from him

As when first he had held her in his arms,

A warm enigma that he would not read

Or strive to read. . . .

"If he had studied her

And all her changes, he might then have learned

That even in them there was a changelessness,

Performing in its orbit curiously,

But never with any wilful deviation

Out of its wilful course. He might, perhaps,

Have seen there was no evil in her eyes

That was not first in his. Seeing her longer

Before him now, he was not sure that evil

Had ever lived in them.

"He should have known

Before, not after; and he got of that

As good a compensation as one has

Of hoarding bottles that have held great wines

Of a lost vintage. She had been wine for him,

And of a power that had usurped his wits,

Once on a time, leaving of him a ruin

That was alive, a memory that could move. . . ."

The Author. In Yonkers, N. Y. (where Poet John Masefield once worked in a carpet factory), lived Poet Robinson. He had been through the good schools of Maine and spent two years at Harvard. In Manhattan next, while Masefield tended a Sixth Avenue bar, Robinson checked off loads of stone delivered for subway construction. There Theodore Roosevelt discovered him, offered him a consulship in Mexico. But the poet refused to leave Manhattan, accepted instead a job at the Customs House. A slow recognition, starting with the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, culminated two years ago with lavish sales of Tristram, his third Pulitzer Prize winner.

Poet Robinson nowadays spends his winters at leisure in New York, his summers at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire, where he works laboriously all day, shoots facile pool far into the night. Tall and slender, he has the drooped shoulders of the scholar. Shy, quiet, secretive, he has a brilliant occasional smile. Accused of an obscurity as great as Browning's he murmurs: "Why can't they read one word after another?"