Yet maybe we ought to respect Robinson for his modesty in picking a near-cliche that is, nonetheless, an acceptably accurate description. To associate wheat with the colour “gold” is hardly original: one might find references to golden wheat in a million texts. The speaker who registers the wonderful phenomena also registers the connivance of his imagination. “As by some vast magic”, “As if a thousand girls” – a wariness of metaphor is marked at such points. Yet the concession to “some vast magic undivined” is moderated by a certain scrupulous realism, almost offstage but clearly audible as the sonnet unfolds. The Sheaves at first glance, then, looks aberrant, a poem in which Robinson lets down his hair and indulges in suppressed romantic and metaphysical tendencies, entwining them in a final glorious union. Robinson’s forms were traditional, his subjects and approach were not. His wry vignettes and unheroic narratives were executed with the detachment and specificity of a certain kind of fiction writer – Chekhov might not be far off the comparative mark. Even in his shorter pieces, Robinson favoured offbeat human characters, the “queer odd sticks of men”, as he described them (and women, too, of course). This week’s poem is one of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s later sonnets and is, in some ways, an atypical work. So in a land where all days are not fair, Fair days went on till on another day A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, Shining and still, but not for long to stay – As if a thousand girls with golden hair Might rise from where they slept and go away.
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