'Yielding to the Change Assigned'

I think of Edwin Arlington Robinson as an autumnal poet, just as certain others are vernal. Even when the ostensible subject is elsewhere, the fall shows up in his work as setting or mood. His was a sensibility sensitive to time’s passage, endings, sundown, the imminence of winter and death. But he’s seldom morbid or maudlin. The title character in “Mr.Flood’s Party” says to himself one night: “‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon / Again, and we may not have many more . . .’” On October 5, 1893, at age twenty-three, in a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, before he had written the poetry we remember him for, Robinson writes: “It is a warm and magnificent day after a long cold rain, and I naturally think of the spot where the ashes of our old fires, with a few shrivelled corn-husks, are all there is to tell of the many jolly symposiums we held there only few weeks ago. It beats the devil how time creeps away with those skinny shanks of his.” October, of course, is the…