Avon's Harvest by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Name: Avon's Harvest
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Avon’s Harvest portrays a man destroyed by a hatred, remorse, and fear that began in his schooldays and has haunted him for twenty years. The unnamed narrator first notices a fearful change in Avon and later sees the same fear in Avon’s wife. Unable to learn its cause until Avon chooses to confess, he visits Avon alone in the room called the Library, where Avon locks the door and tells his history. At sixteen, Avon was a capable but ordinary schoolboy when a strange new pupil arrived. The newcomer fastened himself upon Avon with an unwanted, persistent attachment, while treating others with contempt. Avon finds the boy physically and morally repellent, calling him reptilian and unclean, yet gradually feels a reluctant pity mixed with a profound hatred. The boy seems devoted to Avon and may even have been willing to risk himself for him, but Avon cannot tolerate him. In June, the newcomer tells a lie that dishonors one of Avon’s friends. Avon’s accumulated hatred bursts out, and he beats the boy. Although Avon becomes a hero among the others, he is horrified by the defeated boy’s tears, vengeance, and desolation. The next day, as the boy leaves in a carriage, Avon cannot bring himself to apologize. The boy tells him, “If you are silent, I shall know where you are until you die.” Avon remains silent. For years afterward, Avon receives an unsigned card every birthday bearing those words. He repeatedly encounters the man abroad: in Rome, in London, and seemingly wherever he goes. Each meeting renews Avon’s sense that the other man is pursuing him with the same silent vengeance. When the man’s name appears among those dead after the Titanic strikes ice, Avon feels intense relief. The yearly messages cease, and he believes himself free. That freedom ends during an October visit to a remote Maine camp owned by Avon’s friend Asher. While Asher paddles to a distant village, Avon sits alone by the lake at dusk and becomes aware of hidden presences across the water and behind him. Terror overwhelms him. He locks himself in the camp, makes a fire, lies down fully clothed, and falls into a rigid, conscious paralysis. In the moonlit room he sees the man from school enter, approach his bed, stare at him with vengeful sorrow, and raise an arm holding a flash of metal. Asher and the Admiral later find Avon unconscious; he has no proof of what happened, but he believes the apparition returned to him. Avon expects another message on his next birthday and fears that whatever pursued him may come again. After sending the narrator away, he dies before dawn in the locked room. A doctor tells the narrator that Avon had long been living in fear and attributes the death publicly to an aneurism, though he suspects that fear itself killed him. Avon’s wife heard him at the moment of death, but there are no signs that anyone entered the room.

By Edwin Arlington Robinson · First published 1921 · Genre: Narrative Poetry, Psychological Horror, Gothic Fiction · 10,756 words

First lines

FEAR, like a living fire that only death

Might one day cool, had now in Avon's eyes

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Avon's Harvest is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, dated 1921 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson
Date: 1921 CE
Language: English
Genres: Narrative Poetry, Psychological Horror, Gothic Fiction, Supernatural Horror, Tragedy
Length: 10,756 words
Structure: 1 section, 748 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

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Genres

Narrative Poetry — The work is a long verse narrative told through a framing speaker and Avon's extended confession, using sustained blank-verse-like poetic diction, dialogue, imagery, and dramatic progression.
Psychological Horror — Its central terror arises from Avon's obsessive hatred, remorse, paranoia, and escalating fear, leaving uncertain whether the threatening figure is external, imagined, or generated by his damaged mind.
Gothic Fiction — The poem employs Gothic elements including a haunted protagonist, a possibly revenant persecutor, locked rooms, ominous footsteps, nightmarish visions, dark interiors, death, and an equivocal supernatural conclusion.
Supernatural Horror — Avon's lake-side encounter and apparent visitation by the man he believes dead are rendered as a terrifying apparition, while the final death invites the possibility of demonic or ghostly intervention.