Miniver Cheevy, Child of Scorn

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Since I’m vacationing in Maine, I’m featuring a Maine poet in today’s post.  My cousin Dan Bates, a lawyer who lives in Gardiner, is a passionate lover of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetry and has turned me on to him.  (Robinson isn’t the only noteworthy poet from Gardiner: Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and Laura Richards, author of “Eletelephony,” are also from there.)  Since this is a website devoted to the impact of literature on our lives, I have chosen a poem about a man who, Don Quixote-like, finds his life embittered by the contrast between his existence and the books he reads:

Miniver Cheevy

By Edwin Arlington 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 send 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 medieval 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. 

I wonder whether Robinson, a bookish man in an unbookish (and sometimes even anti-bookish) culture, is laughing ruefully at himself in this poem, recognizing that he has some elements of the snobbish Miniver Cheevy in himself.   I recognize some of these elements in myself.

True, I disavow identification with Cheevy.  I don’t like to think of myself as a snob—to be a snob is un-American—and I am careful not to feel scorn for others.  Yet I’m drawn to literature as many of my compatriots are not and find myself excoriated by certain populist politicians for being of the intelligentsia (which they contrast with “of the people,” who are from “real America”).  I have dreamt of Thebes and Camelot and Troy.  My fantasies have soared through reading stories of medieval knights, and at times I have shied away from realist fiction, clad as it is in khaki (the stuff of everyday life).  I have been fascinated by the Medicis and the Italian Renaissance.  At times I have thought of myself as “born too late” and have wished that Romance and Art were more honored by our pragmatic and materialist culture.  I feel that we are too obsessed with money  (but sore annoyed would I be without it).

Robinson is famous for his female rhymes (those where the stress does not fall on the final syllable— “seen one/been one” and “thinking/drinking” are female rhymes).  Compared to serious-sounding male rhymes, female rhymes can seem whimsical and comic.   I’m sure that Robinson is laughing at and distancing himself from Cheevy, even while he understands him.

Or at any rate, this is my response to the poem.  “Miniver Cheevy” helps me to be on the watch for superiority tendencies within myself.   Sensitive as I am, the poem warns me not be excessively sensitive, thereby setting myself up for bitterness and excessive thinking and drinking.  (Robert Frost found the fourth “thought” in the next to the last stanza to be comically brilliant.)  It reminds me that to elevate feeling sorry for myself to “fate” is self-indulgent.

The hard aggressive theory of comedy is that we laugh at.  The soft theory of comedy is more sympathetic: we laugh with.  I see “Miniver Cheevy” through both prisms.  I laugh at Miniver because he reminds me of a side of myself that I do not like and that I wish to disavow.   By creating a caricature of a snob with an outlandish name, Edward Arlington Robinson (who had a pretentious name himself, which he hated), writes about his and my insecurities from a safe distance.  On the other hand, I laugh with Miniver because I think I understand the frustrations and longings that have pushed him into his contortions.  The cough in the last stanza reminds us that death is always out there and that, in this earthly realm, we grope clumsily for mystery and love and transcendent meaning.  Miniver Cheevy is both a comic and a tragic figure.  So are we all.