Reuben Bright
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.
"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 (poetry collection) (1897). The poem acquired some fame as teaching material for English teachers.
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 cddc efef gg. In other words, the octet has two quatrains of enclosed rhyme, and the sestet has a quatrain of alternating rhyme and a concluding couplet.
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.[3] 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]
References
- ^ a b c d e Regan, Stephen (2019). The Sonnet. Oxford: Oxford UP. pp. 231–33. ISBN 9780191540592.
- ^ Robinson, Edwin Arlington; Stern, Milton R. (1957). ""Reuben Bright"". The Clearing House. 32 (3): 189–90.
- ^ Perkins, David (1987). A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (revised ed.). Harvard UP. ISBN 9780674399471.