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Daily · Classics

Children of the Night

Edwin Arlington Robinson · poetry collection, 1897·1 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version1 hrs → 50 sec
  • The title poem never says what the darkness actually is. "For those that never know the light, / The darkness is a sullen thing," Robinson writes, then spends four stanzas refusing to name it as poverty, doubt, or death, only that it swallows the weak and the strong alike.
  • John Evereldown walks to Tilbury Town for a reason he cannot defend. Three times the town asks why he is leaving so late, and three times he answers only "I follow the women wherever they call," a compulsion he cannot explain, adding that God is no friend to John Evereldown.
  • Luke Havergal is told to walk straight toward his own death. "Out of a grave I come to tell you this," a voice commands him at a western gate hung with crimson vines, promising that "the dark will end the dark, if anything," one of the bleakest seductions in American verse.
  • Richard Cory looks like everything the town wants to be. He is "richer than a king," "admirably schooled in every grace," and glitters when he walks; in the poem's final two lines he goes home one calm summer night and "put a bullet through his head," no explanation given.
  • Cliff Klingenhagen drinks the bitter glass on purpose. At dinner he fills two glasses, one wine and one wormwood, and without asking, drains the wormwood himself and hands his guest the wine, who spends years wondering how Cliff manages to be so happy.
  • The book ends chasing a music no instrument can play. In "L'Envoi," the closing poem, Robinson admits "no kind of instrument" can make the sound in his head sing, then answers his own doubt: after "time and place are overthrown," God's touch will keep its one chord quivering.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it introduces Tilbury Town and gives American poetry its first great deadpan twist ending, sixteen lines that taught a generation of writers how much you can leave unsaid.

A small-town gallery of quiet desperation, where the richest man in the poem goes home one summer night and shoots himself, and Robinson never tells you why.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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