A Touch of the Wrong Poet
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.1.0087
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoIn Beyond the Horizon, Robert Mayo has two inherent problems—in addition to his alienated brother, his depressive wife and her fiendish mother, his doomed daughter, his deteriorating farm, his deepening poverty, and his revenant tuberculosis. First, in spite of his declaration that he “want[s] to write, or something of that sort,” he is, as St. John Ervine opined years ago, “a peevish Hamlet who whines and snivels through his futile and dismal life,” cursed by a lack of “ability.”1 Ervine himself is plenty long on peevishness; but, still, he has a point.Robert's second problem concerns his taste in poetry or the literary models that he brings to bear on a life that is essentially inert. A callow twenty-three year-old with one year of college, Robert has read neither deeply nor judiciously. The play calls attention to his bookishness several times, but the only writer with whom O'Neill identifies him is the English decadent Arthur Symons (1865–1945), whose ode “To Night” Robert reads at the start of the play. Symons, a respected critic and a determined writer of occasionally serviceable verse, seems to have caught O'Neill's attention in the playwright's mid-twenties, but not for long. How seriously should we regard a reader of Symons's poetry in a play drafted when Robert's creator was nearing thirty and had become a discriminating reader as well as a wide-ranging one?2 The question is preparatory to one that concerned Ervine and has concerned others since: is Robert substantial enough to carry a play that O'Neill described as “simon pure uncompromising American tragedy”?3I suggest that we take Robert seriously, but as a failure per se, not as a thwarted success of a sort more neatly congruent with the conventions of tragedy. And I suggest that we take Symons seriously, too, by recognizing both his modest role in O'Neill's history and his ironizing effect on the tragic energies of Beyond the Horizon. O'Neill had twice included mildly racy lines from Symons in letters to young paramours, by way of promoting himself sexually.4 But Robert's plodding encounter with the poet is purposive only insofar as it illustrates the imaginative limitations with which O'Neill has saddled his protagonist. Robert reads Symons's derivative poem in a labored manner, “his lips mov[ing] as if he were reciting something to himself” (1:573). The poem's subject—“holy and most secret Night”—is inaccessible to its reader. Robert is unable either to insinuate a decadent sensibility into his dully diurnal life or, as he approaches death, to articulate a credible alternative to the platitudes of decadence.5Robert's inability to reach a world “beyond the horizon” helps define the play as tragic, but his failure poetically to conceptualize that world alters the tone of this tragedy. The play is tragic, as O'Neill repeatedly claimed, but it is not “pure.” Due to intention or to inexperience, O'Neill wrote an ironic riff on a set of pseudo-poetical attitudes rather than proposing, as Ervine thought he had done, the substitution of these attitudes for the sturdier stuff of tragedy. Beyond the Horizon anticipates Ah, Wilderness!, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten in illustrating O'Neill's outgrowing of the poets whom Stephen A. Black ranks among the playwright's youthful “gods of sex and death.”6Employing a version of his pro forma description of sensitive youth, O'Neill introduces Robert as “a tall, slender young man of twenty-three” with “a touch of the poet about him expressed in his high forehead and wide, dark eyes” (1:573). This informs the reader that Robert is another of the playwright's “there but for fortune” characters, versions of himself gone wrong. As the play opens, Robert is working his way through Symons's poem: “I have loved wind and light and the bright sea. But holy and most secret Night, not as I love and have loved thee” (1:574).7 Robert's brother Andrew lumbers into the scene. Robert surrenders his book to him “rather reluctantly,” and Andrew receives it with “an exclamation of disgust” before reading Symons's stanza aloud “in a doleful, sing-song voice” (1:574). Neither poet nor poem is identified, and this sense of anonymity suits a play that concerns the evanescence of learning in an infertile mind. In the ensuing conversation, Robert alludes to “the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I've read” (1:577). His reliance on cliché is to the point. Other references to reading follow. Robert's wife-to-be Ruth laments the love of reading that had prevented a younger Robert from “paying any attention” to her (1:583). Once, Robert reads an unidentified book (1:611). We will learn that following his daughter's death, Robert “stayed indoors and took to reading books again” (1:641). But the books we see “piled carelessly on the sideboard” at the start of the second act (1:602) have disappeared by the beginning of the third and final act.With these passages begin and end our record of Robert's history as a reader. Their lack of specificity is impressive, as is their imagistic movement, from anonymity to absence. Writing, as an act, never materializes. Robert has “always wanted to write” (1:635), but he never does so, however much he might ridicule Andrew's graceless letters from abroad (1:615, 619). Robert's poetical “touch” seems more of a graze.Two concessions are in order. First, I grant that Robert's post-nuptial inability to curl up with a book is part of the play's tragic structure. Robert chooses a life for which he is unfit—farming—and as a consequence has neither time nor energy to pursue an enterprise—reading—that he prefers. Robert's putative love of literature, however, has left no apparent residue on him. Neither allusiveness nor breadth of intellect animates his present, so we are unsure of the benefit of whatever reading he has done or might have done were he not burdened, as he sees it, by marriage and its attendant obligations.A useful contrast is near at hand in Bread and Butter, in which O'Neill had honored tragedy's practice of frustrating a set of desires or aspirations authorized by the past. John Brown paints plentifully and well. His expectations of success are thus reasonable and are borne out by the eventual triumphs of his less-talented confrères. Failing to sell his work, he paints less and then paints not at all, finally marrying a Rosamond Vincy look-alike and taking his own life. The play's tragic structure could hardly be more obvious. A later instance: Harry Hope, formerly, he says, a great walker, wants only to cross the street. His failure to do so is in this sense tragic—indeed we feel it as deeply so. But there is little tragedy to be felt in an undiscerning reader's inability to find time to read. The uncertainty of Robert's past practices makes for a curious dramatic effect: the conventional expository scenes of tragedy are compressed into one introductory nod and several short references, at cost to Robert's credibility. To use a metaphor that O'Neill might have appreciated, Robert lacks ballast.I acknowledge as well that O'Neill's unwillingness to depict Robert reading and writing is to some extent a dramaturgical consideration. These activities stage poorly, and Shakespeare (Hamlet), Chekhov (The Seagull, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard), and Stoppard (Arcadia) are perhaps the only notable playwrights to dramatize them well. Crucially, however, O'Neill worked around this problem throughout his career. The lifeboat-bound poet of Fog thrums with bookishness but is perforce distant from his books. In Before Breakfast, the writer is never seen, only harangued by his wife. O'Neill staged reading and writing in Marco Millions but had to rely on stereotyping in his representations of Kublai, Kukachin, and Chu-Yin, whose learned “Oriental” introversion counterpoints Marco's public crassness, exemplified in his creation and destruction of his juvenile poem. In A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, O'Neill recurs to the strategy he had debuted in Before Breakfast. Reading and writing “happen” offstage in these plays, but characters onstage are aware of the importance of these acts. The Tyrones' arguments in Long Day's Journey Into Night often proceed as endorsements of their preferred authors or criticisms of those of their disputants; in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone quotes and quotes and quotes. We might not see the Tyrones reading, but that they read and what they read are never in doubt, nor should be O'Neill's propensity for solving tough dramaturgical challenges.Of course writing about reading (and writing) gave the younger O'Neill an opportunity to display his own burgeoning erudition. Reading and writing might not stage well, but a readerly character is red meat to a writer who reads widely. Yet a playwright who interlarded his earliest works with references to scripture, Shakespeare, and Swinburne created in Beyond the Horizon a type of himself whom he ties only to Symons.This should give us pause. Neither O'Neill's published correspondence nor the voluminous biographical work on him suggests that the playwright had any special interest in Symons. Louis Sheaffer, who interviewed hundreds of subjects for his biography, does not report any accounts that link O'Neill and Symons; neither does the more recent biographer Black, who has worked extensively with Sheaffer's papers.8 Agnes Boulton's memoir is mum on the subject. The silence is more compelling given that Sheaffer, Black, and Boulton have reconstructed an extensive list of writers beloved of O'Neill up to and beyond 1918, when he began work on Beyond the Horizon.9 The list is not short on obscurities. Boulton, for example, details O'Neill's fondness in the late 1910s for the poet Francis Thompson and the poet and short-fiction writer Richard Barham Middleton.10 Given that the young O'Neill's conversational interests were overwhelmingly literary, it is almost inconceivable that a writer of more than fugitive interest to him would not have affixed himself more solidly to the biographical record.This slightness of Symons's presence is not surprising. Symons is a minor figure in English literary history, although not an insignificant one. As a critic, he could lay claim to some stature. Most notably, his Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) was well regarded beyond its day. Robert Browning, Pater, and Yeats were among those who had approved of Symons's criticism by 1918, even if their endorsements were fainter than Symons's recent biographer makes them out to have been.11 Symons's poetry, however, was not widely admired, and with good reason. As mournful and overheated twenty-somethings go, Symons was no Swinburne or D. G. Rossetti, no Dowson even, to limit the discussion to poets referenced in O'Neill's early work. Parnassian responses to his verse were usually polite but tepid, although Eliot's taut nod at Symons's “charming verse” is snarky, as is Wilde's gratitude for a friend's “generosity” in omitting Symons's latest effort from a posted packet of books.12 A mature Symons would say that he had written “many corrupt things which were valueless”; he could only have meant his early verse.13 On the occasion of his obscure death, the Times Literary Supplement suggested that “to find the true stature of Symons as a writer, it would be no bad plan to neglect all the poetry … and to concentrate on his prose.”14The author's attractiveness to precocious youth in the 1910s is nonetheless easy to understand. Symons did his best work as a young man, and the exuberance of his intellect, the generosity of his critical judgments, and the clarity of his love of literature are perhaps more specific to that stage of life than many elders might like to admit. He published critical and creative work feverishly from the age of seventeen, issuing his first book of criticism at twenty-one and his first volume of poetry three years later. His associates included Yeats, Havelock Ellis, Pater, Shaw, Conrad, Dowson, Whistler, Frank Harris, Beardsley, Beerbohm, and, in France, Rodin, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Huysmans. He encouraged the struggling Joyce, of whom O'Neill would become enamored during his work on Beyond the Horizon.15 The less prim intellectuals of O'Neill's generation would have appreciated Symons's adolescent experiment with atheism; his melancholy versifications of longing and surfeit; his editorship in the mid-1890s of the trendy Savoy; and his laudatory essays on iconoclasts like Ibsen, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Rossetti, Pater, Swinburne, and Dowson.16 In true late-Romantic and decadent style, Symons burned out early, suffering a mental breakdown in 1908 (in Italy, nonetheless) and thereafter enduring a period of confused semiproductivity that ended only with his death in 1945. The critical standing of his poetry was not high in the 1910s, and this may have heightened the frisson of his “discovery” by younger readers.17 In sum, Symons was flush in the credentials needed to impress a youngster like O'Neill.And, as a youngster, O'Neill seems to have been impressed; at the very least, he was moved to enlist Symons in his courtship of two young women. Letters to Maibelle Scott and Beatrice Ashe written after O'Neill's return to Connecticut in 1912 include transcriptions from Symons's poetry, although they offer no definitive evidence that Symons occupied a place of privilege in the young O'Neill's pantheon.18 Arthur and Barbara Gelb report that in 1912 O'Neill sent Scott verses headed “My Sentiments as expressed by Arthur Symons.”19 The lines are from Symons's impiously entitled “Magnificat” (1895). The first stanza that O'Neill transcribed is in context an attempt to parlay his own experience as a geographical and sexual adventurer into an argument for sexual coition: I wandered all these years among A world of women, seeking you.Ah, when our fingers met and clung, The pulses of our bodies knewEach other: our hearts leapt and sung.20 Lines written to celebrate union become in O'Neill's letter a plea for sex, implying that a man worldly enough to cite them must surely have a “pulse” worth knowing. O'Neill would have appreciated the Swinburnean resonance of “our veins the chalice of [Love's] wine” in a later stanza, but this points up the congruency of his and Symons's influences rather than indicating any exceptional enthusiasm for Symons.21 The epistolist dispenses with the passage bathetically, with a perfunctory “Like it?” and a question about the whereabouts of a volume of Wilde that he had loaned Scott.Although Symons et al. did not deliver Maibelle Scott to O'Neill's bed, the aspiring playwright would court Ashe in similar fashion, undertaking her poetical education while soliciting her sexual compliance (again without success).22 Symons remained in the curriculum. Writing to Ashe from Cambridge early in 1915, O'Neill declared, “my mind is as sick and dreary as a March drizzle.” Adding some gravity to his conversational simile, he reproduced a stanza from “friend Symons”: What have I lost in losing you? Only the savour of all things. In the same sky the same bird sings,The same clouds darken in the blue;Only, all's changed, in losing you! The source is the first stanza of “Loss,” the second poem in a cycle entitled “Amoris Exsul” (1897).23As its title suggests, “Amoris Exsul” concerns a lover grappling with separation. References to weariness, remembered passion, and the loss of love, appetite, and youth permeate the work, sometimes, as in “Loss,” movingly. The imagery throughout the cycle is heavily nocturnal and often nautical; the sea imagery that Symons admired in Swinburne, O'Neill presumably admired in both poets.24In the stanza from “Loss” that O'Neill copied, the poet pays his addressee an elegant if conventional compliment, refreshingly free from the cardiovascular hoo-hah of the lines O'Neill had copied for Scott. But what is most likely to have appealed to O'Neill about the poem is its third stanza, the pertinence of which to O'Neill's life in 1915 perhaps lent the lines an intensity beyond their merit. This stanza brings us closer to an O'Neill trying to extricate himself from a period of sottish vagabondage and, somewhat more uncomfortably, beginning to crave a Nietzschean relational model based on the surrender of individuality, the rejection of externality, and the disinclination to discriminate among the sexual, uxorial, maternal, and devotional roles in one's beloved:25For I have lost, in losing you, Not you alone, but my own youth, My hope in fame, my faith in truth,And all I was to be and do,And life itself, in losing you! Here we see more of O'Neill proprio and less of his libido, to employ a distinction of which O'Neill would not then have approved. The first stanza conventionally ties the loss of the beloved to the loss of appetite for life. The third attempts something more, merging poet, subject, “youth,” aspiration, “faith,” and “life itself,” then assigning power over them all to the absent beloved. This is the adolescent view of love that would vex O'Neill's relationships throughout his life, most proximately in the case of Ashe, who would flee his mannered attentions for the solider comforts of bourgeois life, and most familiarly in his marriages to Boulton and Carlotta Monterey, the latter of whom would blame the misogyny she posited in O'Neill on his deification of Nietzsche and Strindberg.26Significantly, then, the presumed resonance of Symons in O'Neill tells us more about the playwright than the poet. Symons becomes one of a number of writers propounding models of intense mutuality, less lyrically than, say, Verlaine and less bracingly than Nietzsche and Strindberg. By the time he began work on Beyond the Horizon, O'Neill was developing more nuanced means of discussing the interdependencies of love than Symons was equipped to provide. A case unavoidably long on inference suggests that he came to regard Symons's poetry much as Symons's own contemporaries did: as workmanlike and, increasingly, dated. In Beyond the Horizon, the joke is that Robert Mayo doesn't get the joke.“To Night” does not occupy an eminent position even in Symons's canon. As far as I know, it has not been the subject of published criticism. None of its author's three biographers notices it, nor does the author of the pertinent volume in Twayne's English Authors series. The poem is merely recorded in Symons's primary bibliography and is not referenced in the secondary bibliography. Symons does not mention the poem in his Memoirs or in those letters that have been published. Although the poem was reprinted in Golden Book Magazine in 1927, it has not been anthologized.27 Its resuscitation of the archaism “clearliest” has yet to persuade the Oxford English Dictionary to dignify that word with an entry. This encomium on darkness is indeed “obscure.”In theme and imagery, “To Night” takes a page from the Swinburne playbook, praising its subject as simultaneously manifesting divinity and promising carnality. The tiredness of “joys whereof daylight dares not tell” would have been no less obvious to readers schooled in Verlaine, Rossetti, Wilde, and Swinburne than the mid-line fricative wipe-out that suggests the limits of these predecessors' influence. The spondees recall Hopkins but clunk rather than spring, although I would adduce “the close walls and the hard chain” as a felicitous exception. “Love … loves the night” is meretricious; “God, like all highest things, / Hides light in shade” is opportunistic and nonsensical. This is not good poetry. It is poetry beholden to good sources, and O'Neill could hardly have found in it much that he hadn't found better elsewhere.The ironizing effect of the poem is perhaps “clearliest” seen in O'Neill's placement of “To Night” in a play that resists nocturnality. Symons represents “God,” “Love,” and what's best about “Life” as nocturnal. Robert's imagination strains in this direction, too, but pseudo-poetically. Rhapsodizing about the “good fairies” whom he imagines living “beyond the horizon,” he tells Ruth that he “could actually hear them calling to me to come out and play with them, dance with them down the road in the dusk in a game of hide-and-seek to find out where the sun was hiding himself” (1:581). These wee buddies are harbingers of night, gatekeepers of the sacro-sexual playground that Symons praises. But of the play's six scenes, only the most populous and clangorous—act 1, scene 2—takes place at night. Five characters crowd the stage, loudly bringing the play to its first climax and mocking the “holy and most secret” conceptualization of night that animates Symons's poem and informs Robert's fantasy. Ruth is not on stage during the bitter family argument of act 1, scene 2. Her absence retracts the promise of the crepuscular opening scene, in which she and Robert had declared their love for each other. Not incidentally, it also hints at Ruth's remove from her biblical namesake, that is, from her husband's family and even from her husband himself. Poetry and myth take a beating in this scene, which illustrates Robert's inability to inhabit night as he has imagined it. Again we have a representational gambit. As we rarely see Robert reading, so we see him only once at night and then in a scene that refuses to accommodate his derivative notions of nocturnality. Both darkness and the literature that extols its pleasures are inaccessible to him. As his excursus on fairies suggests, his attempts poetically to conceptualize them are immature—presexual—and as such in contradiction to Symons's poem and the tradition on which it draws. Like writing, night is something that sounds intriguing to Robert but that he is unable to “do.”Robert's illness cements his connection to the decadent mode represented in Beyond the Horizon by Symons. Like his creator, Robert is tubercular, but the disease that glanced off O'Neill destroys his protagonist. Here, too, we find irony. Writing about European decadence, Barbara Spackman argues that “decadent writers place themselves on the side of pathology and valorize physiological ills and alteration as the origin of psychic alterity.”28 O'Neill tempts us to regard Robert as such a creation. With his hair “long and unkempt, his face and body emaciated” and “his cheekbones and his eyes … burning with fever” (1:631–32), he is both the embodiment of the decadent aesthetic and a manifestation of the sickliness of poets such as Thompson, Middleton, Dowson, and Symons himself. But Robert is not Thompson, Middleton, Dowson, or even Symons. He is just seriously ill, and his illness implies nothing beyond itself. O'Neill's notice of the essentially decadent connection between Robert's youthful sickliness and his stylized wanderlust (see 1:580) must be measured against Robert's sickly and place-bound present.The type has deep roots, especially in the English poetry that O'Neill seems to have preferred to the American strain. Robert's fervid eyes constitute a romantic debauchment of the “wide, dark eyes” of act 1, scene 1. At the same time, they position Robert ironically in the tradition of “wit and madness near allied,” satirized in this quotation from Dryden but celebrated by the likes of Smart, Collins, Gray, and Blake well before it came to inform the pathology of decadence.29 When the stricken Robert says he needs “a good, sound, restful sleep” (1:637), we recognize the urge for oblivion expressed by Tennyson and sustained by later Victorians like Swinburne as part of a critique of the period's mania for work. But again, the most striking aspect of Robert's affiliation with tradition is his unworthiness of it, as the swapping of the affectations of the epic (e.g., “The Lotos-Eaters”) or mythic (e.g., “The Garden of Proserpine”) for those of the pastoral (Beyond the Horizon) suggests.Robert's blend of sickliness and sensitivity is anachronistic, a prewar affectation in a postwar play. It is also out of synch with O'Neill's own representational tendencies in his early work and with those evident in several of the plays on which O'Neill drew in Beyond the Horizon. The swimmer-cum-playwright O'Neill had previously favored a meatier amalgam of mind and muscle. The Poet in Fog is remarkable not only for being more eloquent and humane than the Man of Business but also for being physically superior to him. Smitty's sensitivity is evident in both In the Zone and The Moon of the Caribbees, but he is tough enough to withstand life at sea, as Robert Mayo is not.30 In The Straw, where O'Neill dramatizes his own treatment for tuberculosis, the writer Stephen Murray outlasts the disease that attacks him as it had attacked O'Neill and would soon afflict O'Neill's character Robert Mayo. Ned Malloy in Exorcism ingests the contents of “several pillboxes” but is revived a day later, “reborn” and “forgiven.”31 Like Robert, Stephen and Ned are self-absorbed, but unlike him they are equipped to survive. The suicides of Bread and Butter and Before Breakfast obviously are not, but they end their lives in bursts of activity, dignified after a fashion by literary convention.In plays cited as influences on Beyond the Horizon, brother often pairs with brother and one of the two is usually moonier than the other. Nowhere, however, do we find sickliness and inertia ennobled in a protagonist. Nathan'l Berry, Robert's analogue in Herne's popular Shore Acres (1892), is intellectually progressive but not an aesthete. He survives his falling-out with his grasping brother Martin and becomes a doting uncle to the brood of children that Martin raises with Ann, whom both brothers had loved.32 T. C. Murray's Birthright (1910), which had “made a deep impression on O'Neill” when the Abbey Players brought it to New York in 1911, endorses a Fog-like melding of creativity and athleticism.33 Hugh Morrissey's prowess as a hurler, a hockey player, and a poet makes him a closer match for earlier O'Neill protagonists than for Robert Mayo, other similarities between Birthright and Beyond the Horizon notwithstanding. Another candidate for influence, Edward Sheldon's The High Road (1912), is most pertinent for featuring a repellent bibliophile, the bully Alan Wilson. As O'Neill would do in both The Straw and Beyond the Horizon, Sheldon reminds us that a love of literature does not reflexively equate to moral dignity.Robert's association with the pathology of decadence, that is, constitutes one of O'Neill's adaptations of his materials, in effect the supercategory into which fits the subcategory labeled Symons. Robert gets the sickness without the genius, the decadent death without the decadent life, in this perhaps echoing Osvald Alving from Ibsen's Ghosts. The tubercular mediocrity and diurnal nocturnalist—also the poet-farmer ignorant of the poetical resonance of the land from Virgil to Pope, Wordsworth, and Whitman—joins the Ruth who goes nowhere and seems not much to care for her “people,” sword or distaff, as conspicuous among the play's ironies.Only in his dying scene does Robert slough off the encumbrance epitomized by Symons. Even here it is the playwright and not the character who drives the point home, and even here irony thrives in this disjunction. Untried as a poet and failed as a farmer, Robert declares his desire “to see the sun rise” (1:637). He crawls out the window and into the dawn of the second of the play's two matutinal scenes, the climactic final act.34 The earlier of these scenes—act 2, scene 1—had found the family rent by despair and incipient poverty, in Symons's words imprisoned behind life's diurnal “prison-bars.” Robert is annoyed when his brother's gritty letter from Singapore fails to coincide with his own roseate imaginings of “the East.” He is again irritated when Andrew returns home and describes a typhoon without the panache of a Conrad, to posit an association with a famous novella set, like Andrew's account, in the China Sea. Robert denigrates Andrew for reminding him that his own literary imagination is powerless to rescue him from the dullness of daily life. Familial discord results, without benefit to Robert. The “hot and cloudless” mid-day of act 2, scene 1, finds the family in a Strindbergian hell, as distant as they will ever be from the alleged charms of night (1:617).Death brings a different Robert into the daylight. As the sun rises on the final scene, Robert notices, as he had earlier, the beauty “beyond the hills” (1:652; cf. 1:580–81). Exultingly, he declares that he has earned “the right of release” and may now venture “beyond the horizon.” Forcing himself upright, he expostulates “The sun!” then “Remember!” (1:652). He dies and is beatified by Andrew, who “kisses [him] reverentially” (1:653).The terminal death of the sensitive character would have been familiar to viewers of predecessive plays like Henry Leslie's Mariner's Compass (1865) and Herne and Belasco's Hearts of Oak (1879). But O'Neill is not Leslie or Belasco or Herne, and irony lingers as the curtain falls. Robert's attempted transformation from a “peevish Hamlet” to the mightier and more aggrieved ghost of old Hamlet (“Remember!”) hints at the depth of his affectedness, and his claim that he “can hear the old voices calling me to come” indicates the extent of his confusion (1:652). The “old voices” beckoned Robert to night and transgressivity or, more simply, to fairies. Now they call him to the pat brightness of the Christian afterlife, a place as remote as the Mayos' farm from the “joys whereof daylight dares not tell.” The atheism with which both he and Symons once flirted has vanished (see 1:634), and Robert remains militantly diurnal and steadfastly befuddled by his “voices.”Robert's death is both apotheosis and failure. As such, it seems a textbook instance of tragic irony. In violation of tragic convention, however, O'N
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