The Garden by Edwin Arlington Robinson
In a fenceless, overgrown garden, the speaker stands alone with the Gardener among roses, sheaves, buds, blossoms, and leaves. The Gardener shows him the ground on which he has wasted the fennel of his days, now crowded with sorrowful weeds. There the speaker recognizes the harvest of his own life, but also perceives within it the lives of all humankind. These lives become like a work whose leaves unfold from Thought’s eternal seed, rooted in love within God’s garden of the mind.
By Edwin Arlington Robinson · First published 1896 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Philosophical Poetry, Religious Poetry · 145 words
First lines
THERE is a fenceless garden overgrown
With buds and blossoms and all sorts of leaves; / And once, among the roses and the sheaves, / The Gardener and I were there alone.
He led me to the plot where I had thrown
The fennel of my days on wasted ground, / And in that riot of sad weeds I found
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Genres
- Lyric Poetry — The work is a compact, highly musical first-person poem focused on a single contemplative experience rather than narrative development.
- Philosophical Poetry — It meditates on individual life, humanity, thought, consciousness, and the spiritual origins of experience.
- Religious Poetry — Its culminating vision of lives growing from 'Thought's eternal seed' and being 'Love-rooted in God's garden of the mind' gives the poem a distinctly theological dimension.
- Symbolist Poetry — The garden, Gardener, weeds, leaves, and fruitage function as sustained symbols for memory, wasted experience, human life, and divine or eternal thought.
Tags
poetry · lyric poem · symbolism · nature imagery · garden imagery · roses · lilies · longing · melancholy · isolation · beauty · transience
What this Textopian page supports
The Garden is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, dated 1896 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: 1896 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Philosophical Poetry, Religious Poetry, Symbolist Poetry, Meditative Poetry
- Length: 145 words
- Structure: 1 section, 9 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for The Garden by Edwin Arlington Robinson
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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