Tasker Norcross by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Name: Tasker Norcross
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Tasker Norcross is presented through Ferguson’s bitter, philosophical account of a man he considers neither good nor bad, but almost devoid of personality, pleasure, faith, or imaginative life. Ferguson describes Norcross’s white, square, cold house among too many trees, above a road, railroad, and river, as an outward image of its owner’s confinement. Though Norcross has gold and gives money, he gains no satisfaction from it and would exchange it for a more sufficient face in the mirror. Norcross is tortured not by ignorance but by knowledge. He knows that art, music, poetry, beauty, faith, and spiritual meaning exist for others, yet he cannot experience them. Books, pictures, music, sculpture, stars, silence, and religious nourishment remain inaccessible to him. He regards art as a lie because it is not life, dismisses philosophy and faith as futile, and sees the world’s treasures as meaningless where he himself is unable to feel their life. His awareness of this exclusion turns his existence into a small inner desert. The narrator listens with a mixture of irony and unease, recognizing that Ferguson’s harsh portrait may also expose Ferguson’s own haunted nature. Years later, traveling near Norcross’s birthplace, the narrator visits the same cold house. A resident says that Ferguson died and that the house was sold at auction; people remember Ferguson vaguely, as one might know a tree, but none has heard of Tasker Norcross.

By Edwin Arlington Robinson · First published 1910 · Genre: Narrative Poetry, Dramatic Monologue, Psychological Poetry · 3,378 words

First lines

"WHETHER all towns and all who live in them -

So long as they be somewhere in this world

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Tasker Norcross is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, dated 1910 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson
Date: 1910 CE
Language: English
Genres: Narrative Poetry, Dramatic Monologue, Psychological Poetry, Philosophical Poetry, Tragic Poetry
Length: 3,378 words
Structure: 1 section, 240 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

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Genres

Narrative Poetry — The poem develops a sustained story about Tasker Norcross through Ferguson's account, the speaker's responses, and a concluding visit to Norcross's former home.
Dramatic Monologue — Ferguson's extended, highly individualized speech dominates the work, revealing both his judgment of Norcross and his own severe, obsessive temperament.
Psychological Poetry — Its central concern is Norcross's inward condition: his painful self-awareness, spiritual vacancy, incapacity for aesthetic feeling, and isolation.
Philosophical Poetry — The poem repeatedly considers mortality, self-knowledge, faith, art, mediocrity, despair, and the conditions that make life bearable.