Souvenir by Edwin Arlington Robinson
In “Souvenir,” the speaker recalls encountering, by forgotten chance in youth, a house that has since vanished. Its wet honeysuckle-covered window, dark dahlias, violently reaching hydrangeas, moths, and blurred bat create an eerie, dreamlike scene. Inside the house seem to linger dim traces of past days and years. While waiting amid its silences, the child hears a faint, fading sound and recognizes it as the voice of someone whose occupation was to die.
By Edwin Arlington Robinson · First published 1920 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Sonnet, Elegy · 113 words
First lines
A VANISHED house that for an hour I knew
By some forgotten chance when I was young
Had once a glimmering window overhung
With honeysuckle wet with evening dew.
What this Textopian page supports
Souvenir is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, dated 1920 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: 1920 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Sonnet, Elegy, Symbolist Poetry, Gothic Poetry
- Length: 113 words
- Structure: 1 section, 13 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for Souvenir by Edwin Arlington Robinson
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
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Genres
- Lyric Poetry — The work is a compact, highly musical fourteen-line poem centered on a single subjective memory and emotional impression rather than narrative development.
- Sonnet — It is a fourteen-line poem with a sonnet-like structure, formal rhyme pattern, and a concluding thematic turn toward mortality.
- Elegy — Its vanished house, faded sounds, lost years, and final image of a dying person create a mournful meditation on absence, death, and remembrance.
- Symbolist Poetry — Sensory images such as the glimmering window, wet honeysuckle, moths, blurred bat, shadows, and dim presences operate suggestively as symbols of memory, decay, and death.
Tags
poetry · American literature · modernism · lyric verse · melancholy · memory · loss · mortality · nostalgia · introspection · human nature · psychological depth