The House On The Hill
Edwin Arlington Robinson
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
Hi Richard:
I liked speaking (too briefly) with you about Robinson’s poem. But I left feeling unsatisfied about what it means even as I think I understood us saying that its meaning might be either a certain kind of worked through acceptance or mere rumination, ie obsessive repetition. So (given my own obsessiveness 😊)I looked at the poem more closely, more leisurely and gave it some thought, as I sometimes do with poems we’ve read.
I think the final repetition of “They are all gone away” is said differently from how it’s said earlier. At first it seems declarative. We’re told of the fact of absence.
But comes the question: “Why is it then we stray / Around the sunken sill?”, which suggests knowing the fact isn’t enough. We know they’re gone, but we keep returning to where they were. The fifth stanza then makes it plain that imaginative efforts are futile in coming to terms with this loss: “our poor fancy-play / For them is wasted skill.”
At poem’s end , therefore, has the speaker not gotten a certain kind of acceptance? The last “There is ruin and decay” is stated after the speaker has worked through the impossibility of accommodating in any way ruin and decay. And so when “There is nothing more to say” finally comes, it means more than literally “I have nothing else to say”. It means there is nothing that can be said, that can alter the fundamental fact of the loss, neither language nor imagination.
There’s no consoling substitute, no transcendence, reunion, religious assurance, or claim that the dead somehow live on. Acceptance here means accepting the impossibility of any consolation or comfort. The house remains ruined; the people remain gone; and the only response finally is literal and notional silence, poem’s end.
I see the poem’s movement as not simply from the fact of loss as ruin and decay to bleak acceptance. It’s more a repeated attempt to come terms with loss. The speaker in effect asks: “I know they’re gone; why, then, do I keep returning to them?” The answer finally emerges in “our poor fancy-play,” the recognition that efforts somehow to accommodate ruin and decay are useless.
So the six-times repeated refrain is like a thought being worked through. Doesn’t each “There is nothing more to say” have a slightly different quality as the speaker struggles with what it all means? At first it’s assertion; then it’s perplexity; then admonition to stop imagining; and finally, after “ruin and decay” have been squarely faced, it’s acceptance of the irredeemability of loss.
My view is that the repetition of “There is nothing more to say” isn’t opposed to the speaker’s thinking; it’s how it’s conducted. The speaker keeps circling the house until fully confronting that there’s nothing there. Isn’t there too much amplitude in this struggle to deal with, think through, loss to obviate it as mere rumination? For example and as noted:
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
The final “There is nothing more to say” is now the conclusion the speaker has finally come to terms with.
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