Eros Turannos

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

(collected poem 4) 

She fears him, and will always ask

   What fated her to choose him;

She meets in his engaging mask                  

   All reasons to refuse him;

But what she meets and what she fears

Are less than are the downward years,

Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs

   Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity

   That once had power to sound him,

Love and God, will not let him be.

   The seeker that she found him,

Her pride assuages her, almost,

As if it were alone the cost.

He sees that he will not be lost,

   And waits, and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees

   Envelops and allures him;

Tradition, touching all he sees

   Beguiles and reassures him;

And all her doubts of what he says

Are dimmed with what she knows of days,

Till even prejudice delays,

   And fades—and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates

   The reign of her confusion;

The pounding wave reverberates

   The crash of her illusion;

And home, where passion lived and died,

Becomes a place where she can hide,—

While all the town and harbor side

   Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a house

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been

   Or what they are, or would be.

Meanwhile, we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

Review:

    This poem is an example of a ballad. It has 6 stanzas with 8 lines, an octet. The poem     has four-stress lines and the stanzas rhyme ABABCCCB. It is about a couple who has a rocky relationship behind closed doors and the theme is love and hate. "Love and God." is an allusion because it mentions God, a holy figure. The repeated mentions about the ocean, and waves is symbolism for how the woman feels inside. It could also partly be foreshadowing, like the last line suggests, that the woman will drown herself in the sea.