Captain Craig: II by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Name: Captain Craig: II
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson

The narrator reflects warmly on Captain Craig’s letters, valuing their cheerful spirit even when their solemn passages provoke smiles among the few who knew him. In his first epistle, Craig declares himself “wisely alive,” responsive to spring, sunlight, children’s laughter, and the enduring child within men. He argues that misery and injustice must be recognized without allowing their shadows to extinguish joy or prevent people from leading others toward light. Craig recalls two riders who judged one another harshly: a wealthy, beautiful woman blind to suffering beyond her protected happiness, and a gloomy man who turns every pleasure into evidence of mortality and despair. Neither, he says, is wholly right or wrong; each is imprisoned by one-sidedness. He warns that sunlight as well as darkness has its devil, and that true sympathy requires difficult self-knowledge. Wisdom, courage, knowledge, reasoned faith, candor, generosity, and the childlike power to laugh and love are necessary to human achievement. He describes recurring visions of the Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, with Clotho laughing while Atropos rattles her shears. In a later letter, irritated by what he takes as the narrator’s irreverence toward Don César de Bazan, Craig defends old-fashioned romance and praises the poet’s costly glimpses of heaven through hell. Though he considers himself unproductive in worldly terms, he believes he has lived, died, and lived again inwardly, earning a sustaining light. Craig then recalls Count Pretzel von Würzburger, called the Obscene: a drunken, impoverished, eccentric pianist, poet, skeptic, critic, and vagabond. The Count’s wild playing and grotesque talk reveal, to Craig, a sincere and wounded soul in which starved art still survives. Pretzel reads a sonnet about Carmichael, whose tiresome joke about china frogs once made everyone laugh but later seems sad after his mind has failed. Pretzel grandly describes himself as a giver rather than a beggar, jokes about decay, genius, and death, and claims that he may have been a genius among trilobites. Craig cannot separate the man’s earnestness from his fantasy, but insists that receiving good from him matters more than excusing his squalor or folly. Craig says he has come to like Killigrew, though he thinks Killigrew smiles too much. While the narrator waits anxiously for a third epistle, Killigrew reports that the Captain is eating, sleeping, smoking, and pursuing his own large idea of himself. Craig’s next letter tells of winning the trust of three birds he names Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis, treating them as the Fates made tangible. His joking, he says, does not reject reason; levity is the ancestor of earnestness. He recounts a dream in which, exhausted and frightened beneath trees, he meets a smiling figure he recognizes as “the Man, the Mystery, the Child.” Craig calls himself a carpenter with nothing to do, but the figure challenges his skill, tells him his tools are dull yet usable, and orders him to grind and renew them, learn his trade, and find Nazareth. Craig follows this dream with reflections on failed or unrealized artists, whose ruined efforts may still contain an unheard divine rhythm. Finally, he declines to judge Killigrew’s “Ballad of London,” saying that age makes him no proper critic. He quotes the ballad, in which two travelers ride together toward London Town: one intends to marry a fair maid, while the other can give no reason for his journey except “God knows.” Craig teasingly calls the piece derivative but pretty, wonders whether Killigrew is in love or influenced by Rossetti, and asks when the narrator will return to Tilbury Town.

By Edwin Arlington Robinson · First published 1902 · Genre: Narrative Poetry, Dramatic Monologue, Philosophical Poetry · 7,286 words

First lines

YET that ride had an end, as all rides have; / And the days coming after took the road

Open reader

What this Textopian page supports

Captain Craig: II is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, dated 1902 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Work type: Poem
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson
Date: 1902 CE
Language: English
Genres: Narrative Poetry, Dramatic Monologue, Philosophical Poetry, Psychological Poetry, Literary Satire
Length: 7,286 words
Structure: 1 section, 521 paragraphs
Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)

Good citation fit

Work identity for Captain Craig: II by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
Readability and classroom-planning context
Passage-specific claims should cite the exact /read/ URL for the relevant chapter or paragraph

Similar titles

Genres

Narrative Poetry — The work advances through a speaker's recollections, Captain Craig's quoted letters, embedded anecdotes, dreams, and verse fragments, creating a sustained story-like poetic sequence.
Dramatic Monologue — Much of the section is voiced through Captain Craig's highly individualized epistles, whose digressive speech reveals his temperament, beliefs, memories, anxieties, and comic self-awareness.
Philosophical Poetry — Its central concern is an argument about suffering, happiness, self-knowledge, sympathy, mortality, art, faith, and the proper balance between illumination and despair.
Psychological Poetry — The poem closely examines opposed mental habits: sentimental optimism, cultivated pessimism, vanity, moral blindness, self-deception, and the unstable relation between cheerfulness and grief.