For some while now, The New York Sun has been insisting that Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) be remembered as the major American poet he was. Robinson deserves to be in our minds somewhere near Dickinson, Whitman, and Frost. Our Poem of the Day feature has already run Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party” and “Luke Havergal,” the most beautiful suicide poem in English. And today we add “Miniver Cheevy,” a tale of a man out of time.

Actually, that needs to be “a tale of a man who thinks himself out of time,” for Robinson is relentless in his ironic description of a man who makes himself miserable with deluded imaginings of how much better the past must have been: “Miniver sighed for what was not.” Published in Robinson’s 1910 collection, “The Town down the River,” the poem is often placed alongside two of Robinson’s more famous earlier poems, “Richard Cory” and “Reuben Bright,” as accounts of modern figures of unhappiness, rendered in traditional forms. 

Where those earlier poems kept the narrator’s view more neutral, however, “Miniver Cheevy” allows the comic eye some room to see just how self-destructive the poor man is. The poem has eight quatrains, rhymed abab, with the a-rhyme masculine (stressed on the last syllable: “old” and “bold”), and the b-rhyme feminine (stressed on the penultimate syllable: “prancing” and “dancing”). The first three lines of each stanza are tetrameter, with the comedy aided by the truncating of the fourth line to two feet. And through it all, “Miniver Cheevy, born too late, / … kept on drinking.”

Miniver Cheevy
by E.A. Robinson

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
   Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
   And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
   Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
   And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
   And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
   That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
   And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
   Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
   Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
   Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought
   But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
   And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate, 
   And kept on drinking.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.