18 pages • 36 minutes read
Gary SnyderFour Poems for Robin
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Haunting Memory of First Love
Falling in love for the first time can be a surge of emotion. For Robin and the speaker, they were “the youngest lovers” (Line 9). The relationship is depicted as a primarily happy, if brief, one. The speaker recalls “sleeping together in a big warm bed” (Line 8) and notes, “We had what the others / All crave and seek for” (Lines 62-63). However, the couple “left it behind” (Line 64). Robin’s notation that they’d be together “[a]gain someday, maybe ten years” (Line 45) suggests she might have felt too young for a commitment while the speaker, “obsessed with a plan” (Line 48), was driven to pursue another agenda. While it’s clear neither is completely to blame, the speaker can’t help but wonder what might have been had they stayed together or gotten back together. Did they make a mistake? It’s an unanswerable question because neither is the same person they were. It is only the ghost of young Robin that haunts the speaker throughout the “ten years and more” (Line 49), not the obviously still alive Robin who “teach[es] school back east” (Line 12). This indicates how a first love might be an illusion that has nothing to do with actual experience. Instead, it becomes part of the defining mythology of a life. Robin is to the speaker what Yugao is to Genji and Venus is to Jupiter. Like a celestial body or a ghost, she circles the speaker, and by the passage of time and location, she is always out of reach.
Meditation Toward Stillness
A key component of Zen meditation is to calm scattered mental activity to a state of stillness so one may experience the way the world truly is and to authenticate the self. The speaker’s fragmented feelings are shown by the varying locations, times, as well as impressions of Robin herself. The locations and times are plentiful and nonchronological in the poem, creating this sense of breakage. The night camping in Siuslaw Forest leads to a memory of Robin’s “big warm bed” (Line 8) years before. The “spring night” in Kyoto leads to the “orchard in Oregon” (Line 19) where the couple walked. During a Kyoto autumn dawn, an upset Robin is remembered in a dream the speaker has while sleeping outside. Finally, the breakup near the orchard, the last time Robin was seen, and another dream are all recalled by the dawn of a winter day in Yase near the temple. The echoes of these fragments show the speaker’s continual agitation about Robin.
While the speaker states he has dreamt of Robin only “three times in nine years” (Line 35), the fragmentation makes the mental obsession seem more frequent and widespread. The agitation is somewhat quieted in Yase, when the speaker accepts the truth of the breakup and acknowledges that he did not try to pursue another relationship with Robin. At the end of the poem, the speaker remains unsure whether his choice was correct, but he accepts that he is at the end of a phase of his youth. The wisdom is that he might “never now know” (Line 67) what would have happened had he chosen a life with her. This four-part meditation on Robin breaks the pattern and calms the frenetic mind.
The Constancy of Nature
The speaker in “Four Poems for Robin” claims, “I thought I must make it alone. I / Have done that” (Lines 57-58). He admits he was “obsessed with a plan” (Line 48). That plan is “living this way” (Line 13), travelling the world alone. While as a testament to love, this poem shows how lovers might remain star-crossed, it also solidifies the constancy of nature. In part, this is done via the passage of seasons—all four are mentioned in the poem—as well as the daily cycles of “dawn” (Line 39, Line 58) and “night” (Line 2, Line 19, Line 22, Line 27). Moreover, the speaker is continually aware of the beauty of the natural world, mentioning the blooms of the “rhododendron” (Line 1) and the “cherry” (Line 18), the “green hills” (Line 14), and the “long blue beach” (Line 14). In Japan, the speaker notes the vastness of the “thick autumn stars” (Line 33) including “the Pleiades” (Line 27), which is a cluster of stars visible from almost anywhere on Earth. He also sees the proximity of “Venus and Jupiter” (Line 39) for “the first time” (Line 40), perhaps due to the lack of electric lights around the temple of Shokoku-ji. The natural world remains more of a constant for the speaker, despite his nostalgia for Robin and their lost love; if the speaker stayed with Robin, he might have never siwashed in Siuslaw Forest, or travelled to “a garden of the old capital” (Line 23) of Japan, or seen the brightness of the “autumn stars” (Line 33).
