On "Miniver Cheevy"
Ellsworth Barnard
In Miniver Cheevy, where to Miniver's alcohol-eroded mind it is the age and not himself that is out of tune, the terseness of the image is that of a local idiom:
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
[....]
There are, however, other poems in which the contribution of form to effect is more obvious; and some analysis of these will throw light on the compositions that are more subtly contrived. In Miniver Cbeevy, for instance, the short last line with its feminine ending provides precisely the anticlimax that is appropriate to the ironic contrast between Miniver's gilded dream and the tarnished actuality:
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 mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.
[....]
In the dramatic poems comedy results if the disparity is never perceived by the character mainly involved, as in Miniver Cbeevy . . . .
from Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Study. Copyright © 1952 by the MacMillan Company.
W. R. Robinson
Robinson’s desire to make accurate reports about objective states of affairs led him, in his early poetry mainly, to "hold up some fragment of humanity for a moment’s contemplation"—as he perhaps did in "John Evereldown," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory," indeed, all his well-known poems about eccentric, small-town characters.
From Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act. © 1967 by The Press of Western Reserve University.
Radcliffe Squires
"Miniver Cheevy" is usually described as a mocking self-portrait, but such an observation tells us little about the poem itself. Indeed, such phrases as "mocking self-portrait" are usually a means of dodging a poem. I suggest that one must ask why Miniver Cheevy (not Edwin Arlington Robinson) prefers an earlier, more "romantic" era than his own, what it is that he loses, if anything, by being out of phase with his time, and, finally, if his anachronistic attachment is virtuous or vicious. These questions burden an admittedly middle-weight poem and I shall not burden it further with specific answers. Still, does not the sum of reasonable answers amount to an impression that Miniver's escapism is really an effort to establish an individuality which a world of "progress" denies?
From Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essay. Ed. Ellsworth Barnard. Copyright © 1969 by the University of Georgia Press.
Hyatt H. Waggoner
Miniver is the archetypal frustrated romantic idealist, born in the wrong time for idealism. He is close enough to being Robinson himself so that Robinson can smile at him and let the pathos remain unspoken.
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons.
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Here and throughout the poem the relation between what Miniver knows and what the speaker knows is subtle and effective. Miniver wept and the poet does not weep, but not because he thinks there are no reasons to weep. Robinson knew too much about the reasons for an idealist to weep to permit him to make Miniver a mere butt of humor. Apart from his intellectual reasons, which I have already said enough about, there were more personal and emotional ones that are relevant to any discussion of Robinson's identification with Miniver Cheevy. Robinson was born the third son of a family whose hearts were so set on having a daughter this time that they had made no provisions for the name of an unwanted son. For more than six months the boy remained unnamed, until strangers at a summer resort, feeling that he ought to be granted an identity beyond that of simply "the baby," put slips of paper with male first names written on them into a hat and chose someone to draw one out. The man who drew out the slip with "Edwin" written on it happened to live in Arlington, Massachusetts, which seemed to provide the easiest choice for a second name; and so by an "accident of fate," we have a poet named Edwin Arlington Robinson. Robinson hated the name and thought of himself as a child of scorn--and he had reasons.
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.
Like Miniver too, Robinson "dreamed of Camelot"--and wrote three very long, and very tedious, Arthurian poems in which the "dreaming' is compulsive and unrecognized. But in "Miniver Cheevv" the dreaming is compulsive only for Miniver, not for the poet. Who would not turn to the past for his values if he lived in an age when the "facts" of coldly objective knowledge seemed to leave no room for any "ideal" values and when a "mere poet" who made no money was considered a failure by Tilbury Town's standards? For Romance to be "on the town" meant for it to be the object of the township's charity, in the poor farm or on home relief; in either case the object not only of "charity" but of the scorn that would accompany it. "Vagrants"--tramps--would sometimes spend a few days or weeks "on the town" before wandering on. The connection between Miniver and Emerson comes through Captain Craig, who was also described as a "vagrant" and was also the object of charity; for the penniless philosopher of the earlier poem was not, as critics have so often said, Robinson himself but Emerson in extremis.
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.
But unlike the Captain, Miniver is Robinson, or at least that part of Robinson that Robinson recognized as being romantic and idealistic. He too had "thought, and thought, and thought, / And thought about it," without arriving at any conclusions definite enough to be stated very clearly, even to himself. He too had resented his poverty while condemning practical materialism and popular notions of success. He too had "called it fate" and for many years "kept on drinking." A good deal of the time he was almost as convinced as Miniver that he had been "born too late."
It should be unnecessary to say that such a lining-up of the parallels between Robinson and his character is no substitute for a close critical analysis of the ways in which the poem works. My purpose in calling attention to the analogy is twofold. First, to illustrate the earlier generalization that Robinson wrote at his best level in the Tilbury Town poems when he wrote about a projection of an aspect of himself; and second, to prepare the way for a further conclusion, namely, that the side of himself that Robinson could stand off from and smile at was the believing side, never the deeper self that felt only the grief.
From American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present. Copyright © 1968, 1984 by Hyatt H. Waggoner.
Wallace L. Anderson
Even though the general idea of "Miniver Cheevy" is clear, the reader who does not know what is meant by the expression "on the town" misses half of the humor and irony of the poem. To be "on the town" means to be supported by the town, a charity case. Miniver, in other words, is the town ne'er-do-well, the town loafer. The poem is built on the ironic contrast between the unheroic Miniver as be is and his dreams of adventure, romance, and art associated with heroic figures of the Trojan War in ancient Greece, King Arthur's knights in the Middle Ages, and the dazzling brilliance and corruption of the Medici in the Renaissance. What a great figure he might have been, Miniver reasons, had he been born at the right time. That he has not succeeded is not his fault; he uses the classic excuse: the world is wrong! But that in all likelihood he would not have achieved much at any time is made clear by the way Robinson handles his material. The sequence of verbs is used with telling effect: assailed, wept, loved, sighed, dreamed, rested ("from his labors!"), mourned, cursed, scorned. Mainly, what Miniver did was think. Added irony and humor come from Miniver's attempts to apply his "intellect" to his situation:
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Ordinarily two "thoughts" would have been sufficient to make a point; three "thoughts" would have emphasized the idea of real, intense thinking; but the addition of the fourth "thought" changes the tone of the stanza entirely, making it absurd. What all this thinking amounted to is indicated by the continuation of the sequence to its conclusion in the final stanza, where "thinking" is paralleled by "drinking" ("kept on thinking . . . "kept on drinking"). The repetition of "thoughts" creates an impression of circularity, of going round and round, and establishes a link with "and he had reasons" in the first stanza. Miniver escapes from the world of reality into a world of dreams induced by alcohol. To each stanza the short last line with its feminine ending gives an appropriately tipsy rhythm. The name Miniver with its suggestion of the Middle Ages, patchwork royalty, and minuteness, coupled with the diminutive Cheevy, sums up his minimal achievement. The tone of the poem is one of humor, pathos, and sympathetic understanding, but there is a mocking note also that intimates that Miniver's unfortunate situation is not the result of any cosmic flaw.
From Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Introduction. Copyright © 1967 by Wallace L. Anderson.
Hoyt C. Franchere
Moreover, even those poems most clearly identified with the myth, with personal history, often transcend the strictly individual and personal life of the character described. In "Miniver Cheevy," without question a self-portrait, Robinson could laugh at the contradictions in his own life; but, while laughing, he could see that Miniver was a character to be projected into the universal. If he held the glass before his eyes and saw through himself, that was one thing and was important because it gave the poem substance and a sense of the real. But Robinson was acutely aware of the complex and highly structured nature of poetry; and he was, moreover, too skillful a craftsman not to insist upon excellence in poetic form. Further still, he was especially conscious of the quality of language; the variable responses that words can and do elicit. In Cheevy, juxtaposed contrasts of past and present, of ideality and reality, of contempt for money and a recognized need for it, of Art and Romance on the one hand and vagrancy on the other: these are the elements that lift the poem onto a high plane of artistic achievement. Language and structure agree perfectly; and, as Robert Frost once noted, that fourth "thought" in the last line of the seventh stanza, lying in wait for the reader just around the corner of the preceding line, is a crashing crescendo of the irony infused into the whole poem. [. . . ] In "Miniver Cheevy" Robinson portrays with wry irony a chap who misses, and complains about missing, all the beauty and all the glorious evil of the past. Paradoxically, the reader smiles and is sad; for Miniver is a humorous figure and at the same time one to be pitied. Unredeemed and unredeemable, Cheevy scratches his head and coughs; he keeps on swigging his liquor and sinks into a comfortable oblivion.
. . . [Robinson] seems usually to have been most sharply aware of structure; aware, too, of the particular impact upon the reader he could expect by arranging his words in particular relationships. Seldom did he conceive a poem in his head and dash it onto paper as rapidly as it had come to him. His irony, especially in the short poems, is sharper or more humorous, as the case may be, when he put a word in a certain position in a line. Robert Frost, as has been said, saw the power in the repetition of the word "thought" as it appears in the next to last stanza of "Miniver Cheevy."
Miniver thought and thought and thought
And thought about it.
The position of the fourth "thought" accounts for the weighted irony of the entire stanza. Similarly, the adjective "ripe" in the first line of the fourth stanza ("Miniver mourned the ripe renown") enhances the irony of the first two lines. We could insist that Robinson was concerned with alliteration chiefly in this instance; or we could likewise note that the word "ripe" has a peculiarly effective meaning as well. But its position in the sentence, a position of emphasis, is equally significant. Looking backward to "mourned" and forward to "renown," it becomes the key to the ironic statement.
from Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Twayne Publishers, Inc.
Winifred H. Sullivan
"Miniver Cheevy" is generally regarded as a self-portrait. The tone, characteristics sketched by Robinson and shared by the poet and Miniver, and the satiric humor of the poem all lead to that interpretation. Yet, although as a satire of the poet himself it is a delightful poem, Robinson jousts with a double-edged satiric lance. More than a clever spoof of Robinson as Miniver, the poem satirizes the age and, especially, its literary taste.
The more readily acknowledged thrust is, of course, his satire on himself. David Nivison offers as evidence that the poem is a self-parody the fact that the poet customarily found some compassion for his characters and some redeeming quality in failure. In this poem Robinson does not sympathize with Miniver, but lampoons his faults and "laughs at him without reserve in every line." Moreover, Robinson frequently made fun of himself in letters to his friends and, like Miniver, he was lean, he drank, and in the eyes of early twentieth-century America he was a failure. In that materially-oriented, production-minded society Robinson, like Miniver, was a "minimal achiever." The poem's combination of feminine endings and short final stanzaic lines contribute to the satiric effect, Ellsworth Barnard notes, as do the images and thoughts conveyed. Overtly, "Miniver Cheevy" emphasizes Miniver and gains its unity by the repetition of the name, the full name appearing at the beginning of the first and last stanzas and "Miniver" opening the intervening stanzas. Furthermore, by making his character ludicrous, Robinson makes clear within the context of the poem that Miniver is out of tune with the age.
The brilliance and sharpness, however, of the Miniver edge of the satiric blade (to use the metaphor that seems in keeping with Miniver's visions of swashbucklers) or, more precisely, the reader's tendency to see the poet in Miniver, put into shadow the other edge of the blade, the poem as a satire on the age. Although Robinson recognized himself as out of step with the time in which he lived, the anomaly was based on his choice to continue as a poet despite the public's lack of acceptance of his poetry. He objected, also, to the ideology of materialism and was not alone in criticizing the age. In "Miniver Cheevy" three aspects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, as analyzed by T. J. Jackson Lears, resonate: materialism, which with its components of work, action, and acquisition formed the ethos of the age and the measure of progress; militarism, a manifestation of the effort to overcome the ennui of the age and what was perceived as the feminization of American culture in the latter nineteenth century; and antimodernism, an expression of the desire to escape the material-spiritual dilemmas that persisted and an effort to retrieve, if only in the imagination, the glories and principles of an earlier time. Clearly, the three are inter-related and all find satirical rendering in Robinson’s poem.
Materialism is the root cause of the manifestations of militarism and antimodernism, and although Miniver hardly can be called a man of the hour in terms of acquisition, he places himself with his more successful countrymen in the one respect that he "scorned the gold he sought." For while accumulating wealth the bourgeoisie of the age also "scorned" it in the sense that they needed to create a Spartan image to offset the ennui that their wealth brought. But Robinson rotates this image, for although Miniver may wish for wealth (even while, ostensibly, scorning it), he does no more than wish, or dream (and the scorn, as well, is a dream); he is a negation of the work ethic that culminates in riches. His ostensible search for gold is mere delusion, and his "rest . . . from his labors" merely a rest from dreaming. Yet he is no more the poser than were the bourgeoisie or real life, for it is questionable whether the work ethic was a moral stance or simply a lust for gold. There is a tie, paradoxically, between Miniver Cheevy and society in the self-delusion of both.
It is with antimodernism as manifested in much of the writing of the period, however, that Robinson would particularly quarrel and against which the satire of "Miniver Cheevy" has its greatest force.
. . . When Robinson himself later turned to medieval legend, it was not as escape from reality but as study of human behavior and the human dilemma and as an indictment of war and the claims of empire. Although Miniver Cheevy has been flattered by "false dreams" of splendor in the past, his creator recognized the "simple sad-color" of life past and present and the debauchery of art in his own time. Howells adds in his essay that while the new romance "addresses mostly a crude and ignorant audience, . . . some better informed person may overhear. . . ." Robinson overheard.
In "Miniver Cheevy" his choice of medieval knights-in-armor as the focus of Miniver's dreams most firmly connects the poem with modern romance literature, but the structure and diction as well as the imagery all point to a comment on contemporary society and its literature underlying the more apparent satire of himself. Sketching a physical description and Miniver's attitude and problem, the first stanza may be said to be external. The next five stanzas then dwell mostly within Miniver's ruminations on a more glorious past before the poem moves outward again in its conclusion. While the first stanza thus sets the scene and introduces the character, it is chiefly in these inner stanzas that the double meaning—the two-edged satiric blade—is wrought.
The neatly juxtaposed and sharply contrasting images and diction of the first and second stanzas point up Miniver's problem and his temporary escape from his everyday misery:
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.
Although his finer tastes run to the classics, Miniver has been infected by his literary surroundings. And while real life is a cause for weeping, romance is a cause for dancing. The very ludicrousness of the latter image not only sharpens the satire but, significant to the underlying theme, heightens the sense of contrast between the real and the unreal. Miniver's escape into Romance parallels that of the contemporary reader.
But ideas of weeping and dancing play back and forth, for Miniver is aware that those days of old and all they held—he believes—of dash and glory have been lost in modern times, and in the fourth stanza we learn the "mourned Romance, now on the town, / And Art, a vagrant." Robinson's use of the "local idiom" takes on deeper satirical coloring, how ever, by the fact of fictional romances overrunning the market, feeding Miniver's dreams and a tasteless reading public. Robinson's placing of the reference to art in the last line of the stanza reinforces the satire. Its position and brevity—it is the only specific note on art—relegates his character's mourning for art to little more than a passing thought. Miniver's concentration, like that of contemporary society in its escape from real life, is on knights in shining armor, as the return to that image two stanzas later shows. Robinson's is on art. Although he may parallel Miniver in having been "born too late," it is for an age when literature, not knighthood, was in flower that the poet yearned. Robinson's literary integrity that insisted on realism in all its colors has been noted. Similarly, he had few illusions about the past. His greatest stroke of satire in "Miniver Cheevy" is thus his devastation, by his allusion to the Medici, of the notion that the past was all glory and honor:
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
The stanza is the more humorously, satirically striking for its having been replaced immediately after the reference to art. The vagrant art is in fact the modern romance that wanders so far from truth. And Miniver Cheevy, so similar on the surface of the poem to his creator, paradoxically is symbolic of the society hypnotized into forgetting or ignoring the evils of the past—or the present, for that matter. There is no didacticism in the stanza, of course, the diction keeping the Medici reference on the satirical plane and Miniver on the ridiculous. The opposition of "loved" and "sinned," the juxtaposition of the rather lofty-sounding word, "Albeit," with the absurd idea that follows, the ingenious inclusion of the one four-syllable word, "incessantly," among two lines otherwise containing all single-syllable words, and the images and references suggested by the stanza cause it to vibrate in two satirical directions, one enlarging the picture of a humorously pathetic character, the other destroying the image of a glorious past.
An equally absurd idea, in the next stanza, is that of armor being graceful:
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.
More significant is Robinson's graceful motion back toward the present through the image of the khaki suit, emblematic of modern American militarism. The poet continues with images of the present in the penultimate stanza with its allusions to the lust for gold. In fact, three strategically placed words, labors, khaki, and gold in the third, fifth, and sixth stanzas, respectively, keep important aspects of the present before the reader even while most of the allusions are to the past. In the final stanza the imagery of the poem is drawn from the real world, with a clear picture of Miniver sitting in a barroom, scratching his head, coughing, and drinking. These final images contrast not only with the visions of the romantic past but also with the description of the current era's typical American: vigorous and active, progressive and financially successful. Miniver is here again the caricature of the poet (whose sense of humor and self-irony helped rescue him, however, from his demon) sunk in drink and in the inertia of thought—anathema to this age of action. But in Robinson's deeper-cutting satire not only Miniver the drunkard, but the age, is degenerate: in its materialism and, most offensive to Robinson and other serious writers, in its literary taste.
Robinson's central concern in the visions of romance he gives to Miniver is the shallowness of a large amount of the published verse and fiction that1eaves "art a vagrant." His method in poetry often was "simply to present his story, leaving the application to his reader, ending a poem, however, in a manner that may prompt reflection." Because "Miniver Cheevy" is so easily perceived as simply self-ridicule, the further reflection that Robinson's poetry usually demands may seem unnecessary. But white an easy poem may now and then be granted this complex and often obscure poet, "Miniver Cheevy" functions at the deeper level as well. This poem, popular and enjoyable in any reading, thus warrants reflection, after all, and by the demands and rewards of reflection proves the richer. And at a time when America loved vigor but produced (with notable exceptions) an anemic literature, a final irony, in retrospect, is that the ingenious double satire of "Miniver Cheevy" proves Robinson's own vigor, a vigor not physical, but artistic.
from "The Double-Edged Irony of E. A. Robinson's 'Miniver Cheevy.'" Colby Library Quarterly 22.3 (Sept. 1986).
David H. Burton
In no poem in The Town Down The River was the problem of the artist more sharply etched than in the popular "Miniver Cheevy." Miniver Cheevy was drawn to the past as he dreamed of Thebes and Camelot. He disliked the present, cursing the commonplace. But the crux of his difficulty was that he "scorned the gold he sought/ But sore annoyed was he without it." This was a succinct rendering of the dynamic which motivated much of Robinson's commentary on mankind's search for happiness.
from Edwin Arlington Robinson: Stages in a New England Poet's Search. Edwin Mellen Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by David H. Burton.
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