On "The House on the Hill"

Sometimes we look in a poem for what is not there and was never intended to be there. We find him protesting to Mrs. Richards, with impatience showing through his jocularity "Good heavens, no! ‘The House on the Hill’ is no house that ever was, and least of all a stone house still in good order. I don’t know why they assume and say such fool things, but they do, and they will do so for evermore."¹³ The poem seems mainly an effort to embody in words a moment of nostalgia, perhaps much like that which finds expression in On the Night of a Friend’s Wedding, and which was caused by the ringing of church bells "for the wedding of two people in whom I had not the remotest interest." These statements prepare us for the grimness of his comment that The Gift of God, where the theme of mother love blind to a son’s shortcomings is so trite that it could have been made into poetry only by a union of pathos and irony and irresistible music such as nothing but genius could command, "has been interpreted as a touching tribute to our Saviour."

Two versions of one of his early success, the much-anthologized villanelle, "The House on the Hill," show him groping toward the characteristic style of his maturity, distinguished (though the advance is slight and uncertain in this instance) by a more concentrated specification of feeling and, coincidentally, a provocative obliquity of statement The first version, written out in a letter of February, 1894, antedates the second and published version by more than two years:

They are all gone away,
The house is shut and still:
There is nothing more to say.

Malign them as we may,
We cannot do them ill:
They are all gone away.

Are we more fit than they
To meet the Master's will?--
There is nothing more to say.

What matters it who stray
Around the sunken sill?--
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away.

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

One resists pushing the autobiographical too far, yet the House on Lincoln Avenue, decaying New England and the decay of his own family before his very eyes—Dean, hopelessly addicted and very nearly a ghost, haunted the house in the flesh—must have had something to do with "The House on the Hill" and other "houses" in the long catalogue: Cavender's, Matthias’, Old King Cole’s, and above all that notable one with "the stairway to the sea," to mention only a few.

In 'The House on the Hill', the bleakness issues from the sense that, now that the house in question is in 'ruin and decay' and its inhabitants are departed, any comment seems a superfluous gesture. The opening lines announce this perception:

To try to attach words to vacancy, to clothe transience and loneliness in language, is a futile gesture, the poem suggests. More remarks are added to the opening ones: but the constant repetition of the first three lines, in varying sequence, gives the impression that nothing more is really being said. Perhaps there is indeed 'nothing more to say'. Nevertheless, Robinson keeps on trying to say more. . . .