Reuben Bright

Last updated
Reuben Bright [1]

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

Contents

"Reuben Bright" is a (modified) Petrarchan sonnet [1] written by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, early in his career, and published in Children of the Night (1897). The poem acquired some fame as teaching material for English teachers.

Form and summary

"Reuben Bright" is a sonnet with decasyllabic lines of iambic pentameter. [2] Its structure is that of the Petrarchan sonnet according to Stephen Regan; [1] its rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDCD EE. In other words, the octet has two quatrains of enclosed rhyme, and the sestet has a quatrain of alternating rhyme and a concluding couplet.

The poem tells of a butcher, Reuben Bright, who might be supposed to be rough and unfeeling because of his profession, but when news is brought that his wife is to die, he cries like a baby. When she dies, he packs up all the articles she handcrafted in a chest and adds cedar boughs (a "traditional symbol of death" [2] ) and then destroys the slaughter house. One critic said the poem shows "a man's devotion to his wife". [3] Like many of Robinson's narrative sonnets, "Reuben Bright" has a "characteristic signature: usually a bizarre or extraordinary story", according to Donald Hall, who also noted that in its first printing the last line was altered significantly by a typo: the poem had been printed with the last line saying "tore down to the slaughter house". [4]

Critical appreciation

Robinson wrote "Reuben Bright" around the same time as "Richard Cory". David Perkins, in his A History of Modern Poetry (first published 1976), called some of those early poems including "Reuben Bright" and "Richard Cory" "revolutionary", with narrative elements of prose fiction brought into a lyric poetry written about realistic subject matter in vernacular language. [5] Stephen Regan likewise notes the "plain-speaking, intimately conversational idiom". The poem's value, he argues, lies in the tension between that "matter-of-fact" language (and the close tonal connection between, for instance, "Bright" and "brute") and the psychological depths Robinson hints at, opened by the butcher's "capacity for deep feeling". [1] Robinson critic Warner Berthoff had said that "Robinson is the poet of casualties; of broken lives and exhausted consciences", and Regan saw Reuben Bright as the best example of this quality. [1]

Unlike a regular sonnet of this form whose dramatic turn can be expected to come between the octet and the sestet, "Reuben Bright" has no such dramatic change in "mood or attitude", just a narrative development. An ironic twist does not come until the last line, which, as Milton R. Stern noted, is a device frequently found in Robinson's poetry. [2] Poet and critic Donald Hall also commented on the structure, and did note a kind of conclusion at the end of the octave: "Robinson's octave ends with wild grief; but the active imagination of the sestet is his genius--the cow-killer converted". [4]

Use in teaching literature

Milton Stern, writing in 1957, considered the sonnet to be an excellent poem to teach poetry to students who might have gotten jaded with traditional sonnets, and are challenged to try and figure out how the shocking ending results from the death of Bright's wife. That the poem does all this with rather ordinary language and without traditional poetic elements is important as well: "the student can more easily see that poetry does speak to our own human condition". According to Stern, "Robinson constantly takes 'little' people, 'ordinary' people, who lead the 'usual' life of all of us, and finds therein the dramatic, the poetic, and the human". [2] In an article published two years after, Stern again suggested "Reuben Bright", along with a few other Robinson poems, as very useful "Poems for Teaching". [6]

Martha Fisher, in a discussion of the process-intervention model in teaching literature, mentioned "Reuben Bright" (and "Richard Cory") as a narrative poem that students could be asked to rewrite as a short story or a play. [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sonnet</span> Poetic form, traditionally fourteen specifically-rhymed lines

A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, and the Sicilian School of poets who surrounded him then spread the form to the mainland. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect.

A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem.

An octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter or of hendecasyllables. The most common rhyme scheme for an octave is ABBA ABBA.

A sestet is six lines of poetry forming a stanza or complete poem. A sestet is also the name given to the second division of an Italian sonnet, which must consist of an octave, of eight lines, succeeded by a sestet, of six lines.

The Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, is a sonnet named after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, although it was not developed by Petrarch himself, but rather by a string of Renaissance poets. Because of the structure of Italian, the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet is more easily fulfilled in that language than in English. The original Italian sonnet form consists of a total of fourteen hendecasyllabic lines in two parts, the first part being an octave and the second being a sestet.

"The Soldier" is a poem written by Rupert Brooke. The poem is the fifth in a series of poems entitled 1914. It was published in 1915 in the book 1914 and Other Poems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabethan literature</span>

Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney and Thomas Kyd.

The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems.

This is a glossary of poetry terms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sonnet 1</span> Poem by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 1 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sonnet 30</span> Poem by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 30 is one of the 154 sonnets written by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. It was published in the Quarto in 1609. It is also part of the Fair Youth portion of the Shakespeare Sonnet collection where he writes about his affection for an unknown young man. While it is not known exactly when Sonnet 30 was written, most scholars agree that it was written between 1595 and 1600. It is written in Shakespearean form, comprising fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, divided into three quatrains and a couplet.

Sonnet 29 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is part of the Fair Youth sequence. In the sonnet, the speaker bemoans his status as an outcast and failure but feels better upon thinking of his beloved. Sonnet 29 is written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet.

The volta, or turn, is a rhetorical shift or dramatic change in thought and/or emotion. Turns are seen in all types of written poetry. In the last two decades, the volta has become conventionally used as a word for this, stemming supposedly from technique specific mostly to sonnets. Volta is not, in fact, a term used by many earlier critics when they address the idea of a turn in a poem, and they usually are not discussing the sonnet form. It is a common Italian word more often used of the idea of a time or an occasion than a turnabout or swerve.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Petrarch's and Shakespeare's sonnets</span>

The sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare represent, in the history of this major poetic form, the two most significant developments in terms of technical consolidation—by renovating the inherited material—and artistic expressiveness—by covering a wide range of subjects in an equally wide range of tones. Both writers cemented the sonnet's enduring appeal by demonstrating its flexibility and lyrical potency through the exceptional quality of their poems.

"London, 1802" is a poem by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In the poem Wordsworth castigates the English people as stagnant and selfish, and eulogises seventeenth-century poet John Milton.

"The World Is Too Much with Us" is a sonnet by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In it, Wordsworth criticises the world of the First Industrial Revolution for being absorbed in materialism and distancing itself from nature. Composed circa 1802, the poem was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).

Fixed verse forms are a kind of template or formula that poetry can be composed in. The opposite of fixed verse is free verse poetry, which by design has little or no pre-established guidelines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English Romantic sonnets</span>

The sonnet was a popular form of poetry during the Romantic period: William Wordsworth wrote 523, John Keats 67, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 48, and Percy Bysshe Shelley 18. But in the opinion of Lord Byron sonnets were “the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions”, at least as a vehicle for love poetry, and he wrote no more than five.

Children of the Night was the second volume of poetry published by the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. While the volume was weakly received, President Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit introduced the work to his father who, knowing his straits, secured Robinson a job at the NY Customs Office.

Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink is a 1931 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, written during the Great Depression.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Regan, Stephen (2019). The Sonnet. Oxford: Oxford UP. pp. 231–33. ISBN   9780191540592.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Stern, Milton R. (1957). "Reuben Bright". The Clearing House . 32 (3): 189–90. JSTOR   30198184.
  3. ↑ Crowder, Richard (1961). "E. A. Robinson and the Meaning of Life". Chicago Review . 15 (1): 5–17. doi:10.2307/25293633. JSTOR   25293633.
  4. 1 2 Hall, Donald (1993). "Long Robinson". The Threepenny Review . 55 (55): 17–19. JSTOR   4384244.
  5. ↑ Perkins, David (1987). A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (revised ed.). Harvard UP. ISBN   9780674399471.
  6. ↑ Stern, Milton R. (1959). "Poems for Teaching". The Clearing House . 33 (5): 311–14. JSTOR   30190867.
  7. ↑ Fisher, Martha A. (1984). "The Cloze: A Comment on "Toward a Process-Intervention Model in Literature Teaching"". College English . 46 (5): 507–509. doi:10.2307/377057. JSTOR   377057.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.