POEM OF THE DAY: Edward Arlington Robinson's "The Torrent"

For today, a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), a poet from my home-state of Maine who I am just now getting to know.

Donald Justice, in his afterward to the fascmilie edition of Robinson's first book, The Torrent and the Night Before, published exactly 100 years after the original by Tilbury House, Publishers in 1996, writes:

"The Torrent and The Night Before is the first sign in verse of the stirring of some new thing already felt in certain recent novels and stories. Once Robinson had opened the package of small blue-backed books he had paid $52 to have printed, once had began to address the 312 copies to the lucky recipients he had chosen, he was––he had become––the first modern American poet. This debut is less famous than Whitman's, and certainly less revolutionary, but it will do, and what fame it bears is not misplaced."

THE TORRENT

I found a torrent falling in a glen

Where the sun's light shone silvered and leaf-split ;

The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it

All made a magic symphony ; but when

I thought upon the coming of hard men

To cut those patriarchal trees away,

And turn to gold the silver of that spray,

I shuddered. But a gladness now and then

Did wake me to myself till I was glad

In earnest, and was welcoming the time

For screaming saws to sound above the chime

Of idle waters, and for me to know

The jealous visionings that I had had

Were steps to the great place where trees and torrents go.

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