18 pages • 36 minutes read
Gary SnyderFour Poems for Robin
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Four Poems for Robin” is divided into four parts via location and time subheadings. Each part is of random length, with the fourth being the longest and the least descriptive. Snyder does not use rhyme and employs no rhythmic meter. “Four Poems for Robin” is organized by theme, with each part featuring the speaker’s thoughts or dreams of Robin and their relationship. The parts are linked emotionally and through repeating physical motifs, a deliberate strategy Snyder employs with his longer poetry. As he told the interviewer Ekbert Faas in 1973 (See: Further Readings & Resources), he often worked in the “ideogrammic method” in which the “juxtaposing apparently unrelated things […shows] the connections automatically. That is, of course, what I’d have in mind in my work.” (Faas, Ekbert. Towards a New American Poetics: Essays and Interviews. Black Sparrow Press, 1978). In other words, the motifs that center around Robin (temperature, flower blooms, stars, and sensual connection) repeat in a nonchronological manner. The parts of “Four Poems for Robin” are fragments of the speaker’s relationship with his former girlfriend, but they are leading to the speaker’s realizations regarding love and loss and how these will affect him in his next stage of life.
Spacing Within Lines in Part One
The spacing of the poem is mostly conventional, excepting the first section, Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest. This is purposeful as it is the first moment when the speaker realizes that they are thinking of Robin. The reality of the surrounding forest is dimmed by lack of sleep, which is echoed by the white spaces in the lines themselves:
I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep (Lines 1-6).
This technique reflects the long night of sleeping then waking in the forest. It enhances the surreal fragmentation of the experience, setting up the mythic comparisons later in the poem. Further, it highlights the sense of being buried by memories: “I slept under” (Line 1) followed by white space suggests a journey to the subconscious from which one must awake, and it hints at the interior exploration about to unfold.
Alliterative Phrasing
Alliteration is the use of repeating sounds at the starts of nearby words. This adds to the musicality of poetic language. Snyder, who writes in a straightforward diction, uses alliteration to create lyricism, or a songlike quality. This gives the poem an echoing effect of sound, which enhances the idea of Robin’s memory following the speaker, even on the primal level of language. While “shivering on a sheet of cardboard” (Line 3), the speaker remembers how he slept in a “big warm bed” (Line 8) with Robin. Despite his love of the “blue beach” (Line 14), he can’t help but think of Robin when “sometimes sleeping in the open” (Line 15). Later in Japan, he remembers how “we walked” (Line 18) in an “orchard in Oregon” (Line 19). Later, however, there is “moonlight, / Bitter memory” (Lines 28-29) despite the starry sky. Finally, the speaker remembers how he once thought he “must make it alone” (Line 56), and now his first love is “only in dream, like this dawn” (Line 58). The speaker feels like he has “lived many lives” (Line 66), questioning whether he has “done what [his] / karma demands” (Lines 69-70) The alliterative repetition of sounds in these several lines gives the language in the poem the effect of a mantra, a sacred sound that aids in meditation, something the speaker is attempting. It might also add to the feeling of grief, as sometimes mourners make a low sound or wail, a keening.
