ESSAY: THE POEM, "THE MILL", BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

     I thought I would put in a second essay written for the same Modern Poetry class I took with Professor Moritz back in the Paleolithic years. I can remember typing it out on a word processor which had a tiny screen that displayed a single line of text. Wow! Nineties' tech rocked! Now of course we have the World Wide Web and smart phones that can launch spacecraft into orbit. We have come a long way, baby! Pretty soon, AIs will be able to write our stuff for us so we can be free to sit around all day popping bubble wrap and await the Singularity…
     I figure that if I can read and write about poetry, and even make my own attempts at writing the stuff, then so can you. And until we are either swallowed up by The Machine, or spit out of same, we should try and do a little readin' and maybe even some writin'. It can't hurt.

    And don't forget, we still have to deal with love and sex and despair and death, and all the rest of the squishy, icky, human mess we call our lives; just like the miller's wife and her significant other.

The Mill

By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Born: December 22, 1869

Died April 6, 1935

The miller's wife had waited long,

The tea was cold, the fire was dead;

And there might yet be nothing wrong

In how he went and what he said:

"There are no millers any more,"

Was all that she had heard him say;

And he had lingered at the door

So long that it seemed yesterday.

Sick with a fear that had no form

She knew that she was there at last;

And in the mill there was a warm

And mealy fragrance of the past.

What else there was would only seem

To say again what he had meant;

And what was hanging from a beam

Would not have heeded where she went.

And if she thought it followed her,

She may have reasoned in the dark

That one way of the few there were

Would hide her and would leave no mark:

Black water, smooth above the weir

Like starry velvet in the night,

Though ruffled once, would soon appear

The same as ever to the sight.

 “The Mill”: Disturbing Silences in the Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote poems that portrayed the people he met and the society he lived in. He wrote about politics and history and human relationships. In particular, he wrote about the relationships between men and women. His interests and subject matter were wide-ranging, but despite this eclecticism, his poems were often cautious and subdued in form and tone. There is an air of quiet regret and failure to be found in many of them. In his poems, he often suggests that knowledge comes too little or too late, or is acted upon futilely. The present is seen as a place where the mistakes of the past are made, again and again. His form suggests caution by his use of traditional stanza, meter and rhyme schemes. His tone is subdued in that many of his poems end, seemingly unresolved, with their characters failing to achieve insight. As well, his poems often have the sense that the speaker accepts a view that suggests the inevitability of human failings, including the speaker’s own. This is in contrast to the ironic detachment, often found, in the speakers of many of Robert Frost’s poems, the irony being seen in the difference between what the speakers observe, and what they know to be true or know can be true. Such detachment is not usually found in Robinson’s poetry. His speakers are seen to share the shortcomings of those they observe and portray to a greater extent than those of Frost. If his poetry reflects his life, then life seems to have held few rewards and many defeats for Robinson.

“The Mill” is a dark and disturbing poem whose explicit storyline—the discovered suicide of the miller and the contemplated suicide of the miller’s wife—are made all the more unsettling by the manner in which Robinson’s speaker reveals the details of the story. The speaker implies much of the story’s actions. We are not told directly, for example, that it is the miller who was “hanging from a beam” (line 15) inside the mill, nor are we told, specifically, that the miller’s wife is contemplating suicide. As well, the speaker uses phrases that are ambiguous and often puzzling. For example, what does he mean by the following: “What else there was would only seem / To say again what he had meant;” (13-14)? An initial reading can make little sense of these lines. There is the sense in his descriptions that the speaker leaves much unsaid. What we shall discover in these ‘silences’ on the part of the speaker is that they mirror the silences that lie at the heart of the relationship between the miller and his wife, silences that both characterize and define their life together and which ultimately destroy it.

The explicit story line suggests the miller’s wife waited a “long” (1) time for her husband to return, time being gauged by her domestic routines of making tea and tending to the hearth fire. Alerted over what she comes to realize was a disturbance in her husband’s mind, she goes to the mill and discovers his body. Apparently distraught and confused (she was reasoning “in the dark” 18), she, herself, now contemplates suicide in the “Black water, smooth above the weir” (21). It seems a tragic tale and a simple one: one of advancing technology eliminating a husband’s livelihood, of his ensuing despondency and subsequent suicide, and the suggestion his wife will follow him in death. It is a tragic tale, but as we shall see, it is not a simple one. The poem’s title suggests it will be concerned with a description of the mill; the poem is entitled “The Mill”. However, it is only indirectly that Robinson’s speaker deals with the mill at all. We see it only through its smell, the “mealy fragrance of the past” (12) and in the image of the “beam”. Thus, the poem’s physical structure, in terms of its title and body, suggests there will be an examination of the indirect, not the direct, the subtext, not the text. Here, in these two images of the mill, Robinson provides the first clue that suggests the poem will deal with the indirect, unspoken, silent aspects of the relationship between the miller and his wife.

Robinson provides a second clue suggesting this emphasis, this time in his choice of meter. I have said that Robinson’s poetry is characterized by his use of traditional meter forms. This poem is no exception. It is a four beat per line, standard iambic measure—except for one line. Line 2 has a fifth stressed syllable caused by the addition of the word “was” (2). The rest of the poem is metrically unbroken; only here is it disrupted. With his emphasis on the word “was”, Robinson seems to suggest that, while his poem describes the present moment of the relationship between the miller and his wife, his real concern is with their past. Alerted to Robinson’s special interest in time, the reader notes the odd descriptions of time the speaker provides in the first stanza: the miller’s wife “waited long” (1). Presumably, she waited a long time, but the phrase is vaguely uneasy. So, too, is the line, “[a]nd there might yet be nothing wrong” (3), that, again, makes sense enough, but is somehow unstable. The description of the miller as he ‘lingered” (7) at the door, seem straightforward , but the suggestion in the following line that he lingered so long it “seemed yesterday” (8) is puzzling.

In the first two stanzas, the speaker describes the thoughts and feelings of the miller’s wife, but there is a question as to whether he is directly transcribing them for us or is interpreting them instead. For example, the line “And there might yet be nothing wrong” could easily represent the speaker’s thoughts as he foreshadows the miller’s wife’s discovery of her husband’s body in the mill. The line could also suggest the thoughts of the miller’s wife as she clings to the hope that nothing has gone wrong—yet—because she has not yet discovered anything wrong. Robinson is again drawing our attention to the indirect in his poem by making us question just how directly a view of the miller’s wife we are actually getting. In doing so, he reminds us there is more to learn about the miller’s wife, but only indirectly. Robinson assists the reader in this process by providing perhaps his most important clue in his two descriptions of the mill. Here, in stanza 2, his speaker chooses words to describe the mill that have direct meanings that are at odds with their indirect meanings, and it is these indirect meanings that provide the reader with a clear understanding of the nature of the relationship between the miller and his wife. The speaker describes the smell of the mill as a “warm / And mealy fragrance” (11-12).  The obvious or direct meaning of the phrase changes considerably when the connotative meanings found in the words “mealy” and “fragrance” is examined. Mealy suggests mealy-mouthed, or tending to be indirect or obscure in speech, or not to use plain language. Fragrance has the sense of being affected or artificial, in other words, not a natural scent. The two together suggest that the “past” (the past of the miller and his wife, their life together), was characterized by artificiality and indirectness. In his second description of the mill, Robinson’s speaker uses the word “beam” in the line, “And what was hanging from the beam” (15), suggesting, by interpreting the word more closely, that her husband had move away from the path he had been on with her, that he had gone ‘off the beam’, as it were. The speaker suggests that the miller would no longer have followed her, that he would no longer have “heeded” (16) her.

With this new understanding of the character of the miller’s wife, we can now examine and make sense of some of the images from stanza 1 and 2. Her life and their domestic life together were as cold as her tea. Their “fire was dead” (2); the passion of their past life was now only “warm” (11). The miller “lingered’ at the door because he was dying. He lingered on in a relationship that only “seemed” like it was yesterday; yesterday was dead. She, herself, had “waited long” in the relationship: she had waited, not long in time, changing and growing over the course of their life together, but, rather, she waited obscurely, unchanging and indirectly. She had barely touched life or let it touch her. Now the enigmatic line of the miller is clear: “‘There are no millers anymore’”, he had said. It is an example of the indirect, obscure and ‘mealy-mouthed’ dialogue that had come to characterize their conversations. She did not attend to the real message of his words (I am in despair) because she could only hear the same words they had exchanged all their lives. Finally, the cryptic lines, “What else there was would only seem / To say again what he had meant[;]”, suggest that even the physical fact of her husband’s body (it is a “what” to her), its physical reality is obscure to her and only “seems” to say what he meant. By the end of stanza 2, the reader is unclear as to whether the miller’s wife understands the implication of his suicide. Stanza 3 does not clear up the matter.

The sense that she is close to confronting the reality of her life is suggested when the speaker says she was, “[s]ick with a fear that had no form” (9). Her life, up to that point, had been arranged carefully—formally—by the domestic routines that both she and her husband had accepted and the silences they both had never intruded upon. Robinson aptly suggests this moment of realization had always been with her in the following lines that have her move, apparently without any physical effort, into the mill. “[S]he was there at last; / And in the mill (10-11). If these lines suggest that the miller’s wife is about to confront her guilt, the final stanza leaves the reader wondering. The first four lines of stanza 3 suggest she is contemplating her guilt, as well as her suicide, but interestingly, the speaker’s observations are qualified with, “[a]nd if” (17) and “[s]he may have” (18), suggesting, clearly, that at this point, the speaker is not aware of her thoughts. He assumes if she feels guilty, that is, if her guilt “followed her” (17), then she would be thinking of suicide. The speaker goes on to suggest that she would then contemplate a suicide that “would leave no mark” (20). The reader feels here that the speaker means the miller’s wife would be concerned about a suicide that would disfigure or mark her body. Suicide by drowning would alleviate that concern, but the imagery of the last four lines suggests that the “mark” the speaker assumes she would be concerned about is not a mark upon her body, but upon life. The water above the weir is described as “velvet” (21) and though it is “ruffled” (23) once (as by a body falling in), it soon appears exactly as it was before. It is interesting, however, to remember that this darkly beautiful imagery of an all-encompassing oblivion, with its smooth surface barely disturbed by human kind, comes from the speaker. The miller’s wife may or may not be considering suicide. She may not look upon the waters as an escape, as the speaker suggests. Furthermore, the feminine imagery that likens the water’s surface to ruffled velvet suggests this is the speaker imagining what the miller’s wife is thinking. It also suggests, as do the words  “mealy” and “fragrance” discussed earlier, a certain artificiality to the water: it may not be a real escape for her after all (though, it should be added, it does not seem to be the intention of the speaker to imply such ambiguity). The imagery of escape, of being swallowed up by death, nevertheless suggests the kind of life the miller’s wife has been depicted as living: she has lived life with an ‘unruffled’ surface. The final lines of the poem suggest her one desire may be to leave life as untouched as she lived it. This, however, may only be how the speaker feels.

Works Cited

              Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “The Mill”. Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2^nd ed. NY: Norton, 1988. 221. Print.

     

Professor Moritz’s Comments:

 “The Mill”: Disturbing Silences in the Poetry of E.A. Robinson  A

     Don, this is just excellent, patient, detailed, insightful reading of the poem; I’m privileged to have received it. I feel you attack EAR’s poetry just at the right places: its silences and apparent (which in some, less successful case, becomes real and impenetrable) obscurities. And you have illuminated them very well. Among the many excellences let me point to your reading of the last stanza, and of the speaker’s elation t the wife’s psychology in general: extremely well done. Let me suggest a related thought. One possible weakness, it strikes me, is that your thoughts on “mealy”, “fragrance” and “beam” are perhaps over-ingenious and questionable, although you certainly do make convincing use of them, which tends to add conviction to them. But you have ignored one strong factor that comports with your view and would perhaps help support your analysis of these words while bringing s in a linked and more certain idea. The fact that he “lingered at the door / So long that it seemed yesterday” implies securely that she did not answer him, or answer him satisfactorily, whether due to her insensitivity or their mutual alienation, and that he had waited for a response and for help that had not been forthcoming. It implies financial difficulty and resulting marital dissatisfaction; it makes the statement “There are no millers” into an ‘implicit suicide’ note expressed impersonally.  

    Unfolding from that are various possibilities, or at least leaving him to stew in his despair; that only too late she realizes the effect that this will have on her herself; etc. Such ideas support and add to your penetrating interpretation.