Mr. Flood's Party by Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Mr. Flood's Party" by Edwin Arlington Robinson is a poignant narrative poem that explores themes of solitude, aging, and nostalgia through the character of Eben Flood, an old man returning home after a visit to the village of Tilbury Town. The poem is structured in seven stanzas of iambic pentameter, employing a consistent rhyme scheme that creates a rhythmic flow. As Eben climbs a hill under the moonlight, he pauses to drink from a jug, suggesting a struggle with loneliness and perhaps alcoholism. Through his introspective monologue, he reflects on his past and the friends he has lost, revealing a deep sense of isolation and the passage of time.
The poem's simplicity in diction belies its emotional depth, as Eben converses with his alter ego, symbolizing his internal conflicts and memories. The imagery evokes a sense of longing for connection, yet he recognizes that he faces existence alone, with only the moon as his companion. Robinson’s use of metaphor and simile enhances the narrative, presenting Eben as both a valiant figure and a tragic one, reminiscent of a knight in faded glory. Ultimately, "Mr. Flood's Party" captures the bittersweet essence of reminiscence and the inevitability of loss, inviting readers to reflect on their own lives and relationships.
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Mr. Flood's Party by Edwin Arlington Robinson
First published: 1921, in Avon’s Harvest
Type of poem: Narrative
The Poem
“Mr. Flood’s Party” by Edward Arlington Robinson consists of seven eight-line iambic pentameter stanzas, each rhyming in an abcbdefe scheme. The rhythm is steady, natural, and unobtrusive. The rhymes are simple and precise, never forced or ostentatious. Thus, in the first stanza, lines 2, 4, 6, and 8 end, respectively, “below,” “know,” “near,” and “here.”
The poem presents an ambivalent verse portrait of an old man named Eben Flood. As he is walking up a hill one night back to his humble little house, he halts in the moonlit road to have a drink or two from the jug he refilled in the village, called Tilbury Town, down below. The first stanza of the poem alerts the reader at once to “Old” Eben’s solitary status: He is “climbing alone”; it is dark; and he is returning to his “forsaken upland hermitage,” which holds “as much as he should ever know/ On earth again of home.” Thus, he has no wife, has no family, is companionless, and undoubtedly has few possessions. The possibility that he is an alcoholic looms quickly—it is said that he “paused warily” to note that there was no “native near.” He can safely have a quick drink, not simply for the road but while actually on it.
Instead of lugubriously lamenting that he is close to death, Eben phrases his thoughts aloud in this stoic manner: “The bird is on the wing, the poet says/ And you and I have said it here before.” The “I,” introduced here, is his other self. Eben begins to think of “the dead,” his old friends, salutes them in a wavering voice—to the tune of another welcome slug of whiskey—and grows dim-eyed. Feeling his liquor and apprehensive that he might drop his jug and break it, he sets it down, “as a mother lays her sleeping child/ Down tenderly.”
Rather inebriated now, Eben offers to shake hands with “Mr. Flood,” his alter ego, and addresses him thus: “many a change has come/ To both of us, I fear, since last it was/ We had a drop together.” Welcoming the other Flood “home,” he holds “the jug up to the light,” perhaps to check the level of what remains, and accepts the implicit invitation. However, this time, “Only a very little, Mr. Flood.” Moistened now, his voice is ready for a song, “For auld lang syne.” The landscape rings, with only the moon for his uncommunicative companion. Eben “regretfully” inspects the jug again and shakes his head, thus ridding himself of the false notion that he has really been drinking with someone else. Sure enough “again alone,” he heads home, well aware that if he had knocked at any of several houses “in the town below,” strangers would have shut the doors that many old friends once opened to offer him hospitality “long ago.”
Forms and Devices
Although “Mr. Flood’s Party” is a short narrative poem of only fifty-six lines, Robinson includes aspects of the dramatic monologue in it. Eben Flood speaks in four of the seven stanzas, for a total of 113 words. His fragmentary snatches of talk thus constitute a soliloquy, during the delivery of which he thinks, or perhaps only pretends to think, that he is addressing his other self, who answers courteously. Moreover, the poem satisfies another requirement of the dramatic monologue: Eben’s words reveal his essential character at an epiphanic moment and in the presence of a listener.
Robinson combines generally simple diction and profound meaning. His most complex words here are “acquiescent,” “convivially,” “harmonious,” and “salutation.” Similarly, his meter and rhymes are basic and unvaried. For example, the following lines have ten syllables each, which when read aloud are found to be naturally accented on the even-numbered syllables: “Alone, as if enduring to the end” and “And there was nothing in the town below.” The words constituting Robinson’s rhyme scheme are also precise, with two exceptions, which are sight rather than sound rhymes: “come” and “home,” and “done” and “alone.”
The point of view in “Mr. Flood’s Party” is that of an objective, omniscient, third-person observer. He watches and listens as Eben is returning home, pausing, drinking, and talking to himself. This objectivity is forgotten for a moment, however, when it is said that Eben’s boozy rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” is heard by “two moons.” The observer is sober enough, but Eben momentarily sees double. This is the poem’s only touch of humor.
The most notable technical feature of “Mr. Flood’s Party” is a pair of apt figures of speech. Eben is responsible for the first figure, which is a metaphor and occurs when he paraphrases Edward FitzGerald’s translation of two lines from Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859, rev. 1868, 1872, 1879): “The Bird of Time has but a little way/ To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.” Eben’s life is obviously hastening toward its close.
The second figure of speech, a simile, comes from the narrator, who describes Eben as virtually helpless but relying briefly on his jug. He stands in the road “as if enduring to the end/ A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn.” Like a knight in a dented breastplate, he resembles “Roland’s ghost winding [blowing] a silent horn.” The alert reader will visualize Eben shouldering his jug and tilting its aperture to his mouth like a bugle. This is the standard posture of a New Englander sneaking a gulp from his gallon of moonshine in the 1920’s.
The brilliant literary reference is to the hero of Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland, twelfth century). In it, Roland, the legendary knight, sounds his magic horn for help from Charlemagne’s army at the battle of Roncesvalles (778), but his appeal is too late. For his part, Eben is merely calling on “the dead,” and those old friends can no longer bring him any relief.
Bibliography
Anderson, Wallace L. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Coxe, Louis. Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry. New York: Pegasus, 1969.
Franchere, Hoyt C. Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: Twayne, 1968.
Joyner, Nancy Carol. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.
Murphy, Francis, ed. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
Smith, Chard Powers. Where the Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: Macmillan, 1965.