The Wilderness by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The poem urges wanderers to leave a cold, desolate landscape and return to the people who love them. Frost, frozen water, wind, and the dying season make the country seem barren, while distant songs call them beyond the ridges toward a home marked by a shining window, a warm hearth, and a woman’s waiting eyes. The speaker contrasts their restless roaming with the promised joy and strangeness of home-coming, insisting that love lies beyond the mountains. At the same time, the wanderers fear the “roving-fiend,” a force that keeps men travelling until the end of their lives and cannot be treated as either friend or enemy. They resolve to set out quietly, recognizing that winter will return and that an unseen doom cannot be escaped. The final vision surrounds them with frozen dead men whose harsh, mocking laughter seems to mingle with the November rushes and the wind over the lake.
By Edwin Arlington Robinson · First published 1897 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Nature Poetry, Gothic Poetry · 534 words
First lines
COME away! come away! there's a frost along the marshes, / And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water; / There's a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland
Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.
What this Textopian page supports
The Wilderness is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, dated 1897 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: 1897 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Nature Poetry, Gothic Poetry, Elegiac Poetry, Romantic Poetry
- Length: 534 words
- Structure: 1 section, 25 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for The Wilderness by Edwin Arlington Robinson
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
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Genres
- Lyric Poetry — The work is a highly musical, emotionally concentrated poem built around repeated invocations of 'Come away!' and an expressive first-person communal voice.
- Nature Poetry — Its imagery and atmosphere are dominated by marshes, woodland, wind, frost, lake water, autumn, and November landscapes that reflect human feeling.
- Gothic Poetry — The poem creates a bleak, haunted mood through dead men, wailing winds, darkness, doom, spectral laughter, and an implied supernatural 'roving-fiend.'
- Elegiac Poetry — It mourns vanished seasonal beauty, lost joy, dead men, and the transience of human freedom, using dirge-like language and a pervasive sense of loss.
Tags
poetry · American literature · modernism · lyric poetry · philosophical · melancholic · psychological · introspective · symbolism · nature imagery · isolation · alienation