Eros Turannos

In examining the complicated inner world of a middle-aged woman struggling with accommodating the reality of an empty and unrewarding love life, Edwin Arlington Robinson creates a portrait of a character whose motivations are at once evident and mysterious, simple and complex. 

In this, the poem reflects the massive early-20th-century cultural influence of the controversial theories about behavior and motivation of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), which were then shaping the burgeoning field of psychology. Behavior, Freud argued, is complicated, and conscious decision-making is motivated by the subconscious ramifications of past experiences. 

Robinson’s poem approaches its main character like a psychologist poring over a case study. The poem examines the woman objectively from three points of view: She speaks first, then the town, and then the speaker. This collective examination from different perspectives in the end yields no tidy explanation about the woman’s psychological makeup. That uncertainty, at once rewarding and futile, revealing and frustrating, intriguing and self-defeating, reflects Freud’s insights in to the complicated nature of human behavior.