The Tavern by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The abandoned Tavern, overgrown with weeds and marked by torn curtains and broken glass, fills the speaker with fear. Passing it, the speaker imagines the ghost of its murdered host, old Ham Amory, staring with dead, blazing eyes. Although the Tavern’s full story is unknown, people remember that, long after midnight years earlier, a stranger rode hard from Tilbury Town and nearly ran down John Evereldown, a disreputable man crazed by skirts.
By Edwin Arlington Robinson · First published 1910 · Genre: Narrative Poetry, Gothic Poetry, Mystery · 145 words
First lines
WHENEVER I go by there nowadays
And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass, / The torn blue curtains and the broken glass, / I seem to be afraid of the old place; / And something stiffens up and down my face,
For all the world as if I saw the ghost
Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host, / With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.
What this Textopian page supports
The Tavern is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, dated 1910 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: 1910 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Narrative Poetry, Gothic Poetry, Mystery, Ghost Story, Dark Romanticism
- Length: 145 words
- Structure: 1 section, 8 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for The Tavern by Edwin Arlington Robinson
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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Genres
- Narrative Poetry — The work is a lyric narrative in verse, presenting a speaker's encounter with an abandoned tavern and recounting fragments of its ominous history.
- Gothic Poetry — Its ruined setting, ghostly suggestion, murder, midnight arrival, fear, and unresolved secret create a distinctly Gothic atmosphere.
- Mystery — The central event—the murder of Ham Amory and the tavern's concealed history—remains unexplained, making uncertainty and local rumor essential to the poem.
- Ghost Story — The speaker imagines seeing the murdered host's ghost staring from the derelict tavern, giving the poem supernatural overtones.
Tags
poetry · American literature · modernism · lyric poem · melancholy · isolation · mortality · disillusionment · social alienation · loneliness · small-town life · psychological portrait