Eros Turannos

American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s 1914 poem “Eros Turrannos” (Latin for “The Tyranny of Love”) depicts a middle-aged woman in a New England coastal town at the turn of the 20th century. She is coming to terms with her loveless relationship with an emotionally manipulative man and how the only thing she will ever know of love is how to live without it. 

The poem is part of the emergence in the late 19th century of a radical kind of realism informed by the then-new controversial work of Sigmund Freud. His pioneering theories in the new science of psychology suggested that seemingly ordinary lives were extraordinarily complicated and far more layered than had ever been suspected. 

Robinson experiments here with multiple points of view. The woman speaks first, then the town’s collective “we,” and finally an unnamed observer who attempts to understand the implications of the woman’s quiet tragedy. The poem concludes that no one can quite understand the woman or account for her willingness to remain in a relationship that makes her feel alone and unhappy. The poem explores the tyranny of conventional love, the hard weight of narrow-minded small-town life, and the impossibility of certainty. 

POET BIOGRAPHY

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in Head Tide, a hamlet on the Sheepscot River in southern Maine. His father ran a lucrative lumber business and then accepted a position as a bank president. 

Robinson worshipped his two older brothers, but he had few friends. He loved poetry, discovering the ancient Greek and Roman poets, and the British Romantics, and beginning to write his own verse. Robinson matriculated at Harvard in 1891, but when his family’s financial assets were wiped out by the Panic of 1893, he had to leave Harvard and return home. 

Three years later, Robinson published at his own expense the collection The Torrent and the Night Before, later much revised as The Children of the Night. Over the next several years, Robinson lost both his parents and brothers: One was a pharmacist who overdosed on prescription medication, and the other lost a fortune and developed alcohol addiction. 

Robinson moved to New York City, finding friends in the city’s bohemian artist community but little financial security. His poetry, while receiving critical plaudits, sold unevenly. In 1904, unexpectedly, President Theodore Roosevelt, who admired Robinson’s poetry, secured him an appointment at the federal Custom House in New York, guaranteeing him a steady income. 

Over the next ten years, Robinson’s reputation grew. He published more than 15 volumes of poetry. His poems fused his appreciation for classical poetic forms with his fascination with the emotional lives of people in rural New England. In 1922 his Collected Poems received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, an award Robinson also received in 1925 and 1928. Now an established figure, Robinson began exploring more ambitious poetic forms and drawing on the legends of Arthurian England. 

Robinson died in 1935 of stomach cancer. He was buried alongside his brothers in Gardiner, Maine.

POEM TEXT

She fears him, and will always ask 

   What fated her to choose him; 

She meets in his engaging mask

   All reasons to refuse him;

But what she meets and what she fears 

Are less than are the downward years, 

Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs 

   Of age, were she to lose him. 

Between a blurred sagacity 

   That once had power to sound him,

And Love, that will not let him be 

   The Judas that she found him, 

Her pride assuages her almost, 

As if it were alone the cost.— 

He sees that he will not be lost, 

   And waits and looks around him. 

A sense of ocean and old trees 

   Envelops and allures him; 

Tradition, touching all he sees 

   Beguiles and reassures him; 

And all her doubts of what he says 

Are dimmed with what she knows of days— 

Till even prejudice delays  

   And fades, and she secures him. 

The falling leaf inaugurates 

   The reign of her confusion; 

The pounding wave reverberates 

   The dirge of her illusion; 

And home, where passion lived and died, 

Becomes a place where she can hide, 

While all the town and harbor side 

   Vibrate with her seclusion. 

We tell you, tapping on our brows, 

   The story as it should be,— 

As if the story of a house 

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between 

Her visions and those we have seen,— 

As if we guessed what hers have been, 

   Or what they are or would be. 

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they 

   That with a god have striven, 

Not hearing much of what we say, 

   Take what the god has given; 

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree, 

Or like a stairway to the sea  

   Where down the blind are driven.

Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “Eros Turannos.” 1914. Poetry Foundation.

SUMMARY

In the opening stanza, a woman wonders why she has stayed so long within a relationship with a man she does not love—“She fears him” (Line 1), she admits. The reasons for her fear—whether he might be abusive or prone to violence—are never identified. That uncertainty creates a free-floating anxiety, increased by the woman’s inevitable question: “What fated her to choose him?” (Line 2). After all, he only pretends to care about her, wearing what she calls “his engaging mask” (Line 3). 

She thinks of reasons to leave the relationship, or to refuse to cooperate with the logic of her own emotional imprisonment. She acknowledges, however, the one overwhelming reason to stay: to leave would condemn her to growing old and dying alone in “the foamless weirs / Of age” (Lines 7-8). 

In the second stanza, she hints that this partner has betrayed her, calling him “Judas” (Line 12). Again, the context for this accusation is unclear, adding to the poem’s ambiguous portrayal. Despite this betrayal, the woman has decided to maintain her commitment to the relationship, proud of doing the noble thing—at least by conventional standards. This may also have altered the power dynamic between them, as the reality of his betrayal leaves him now forever paranoid over what she may or may not catch him doing, what she may or may not say to their neighbors and friends: He “waits and looks around him” (Line 16). 

To explain their relationship, in Stanza 3, the woman turns to the metaphors of nature, such as the ebb and flow of the nearby ocean and the cyclical seasons of the ancient trees. She understands time and memory: No memory is ever entirely lost within the unrelenting currents of time, like the detritus in ocean waves. The man for his part is content within the relationship because of tradition—staying together is what their community expects. Their life together is a convenience and a reliable social construct. Tradition “beguiles and reassures him” (Line 20).  

With nature as her guide, the woman confesses in Stanza 4 that she can find no peace or emotional satisfaction. Her painful memories cannot die. Her loneliness cannot be violated. The falling leaves, the seasons as they pass, and the endless surge and crash of the ocean waves only become the “dirge” (Line 28), or funeral song, of the illusion of her happy marriage. She endures isolated, as home is now where “passion lived and died” (Line 29). Nevertheless, home still offers her refuge, a “place where she can hide” (Line 30), while all about her the town vibrates with the busyness of daily life. 

In Stanza 5 the townspeople speak like a chorus from a Greek tragedy. “We” have watched her from a distance, they say. We have thought long about her odd and solitary life, they add, tapping their brows to suggest the depth of their contemplation. But they never seek to shatter her isolation or actually approach her: “We’ll have no kindly veil between / Her visions and those we have seen” (Lines 37-38). Instead, they gossip and “guess what hers [sorrows] have been” (Line 39), rationalizing their callousness by saying that sympathy would never lead to understanding

In Stanza 6 the poet speaks. The poet acknowledges that on the surface, it seems that the townspeople “do no harm” (Line 41) with their speculations and rumors. They have left the woman alone. Yet the poet chides these god-fearing Christians who have managed to justify isolating this lonely neighbor trapped by the tyranny of love, more dead than alive.  

The speaker’s perception is far more disturbing. The woman, he senses, is moving toward a bleak position where she may see suicide as her best, last hope. That assessment is suggested by the poem’s closing three images: waves breaking noisily on the shore, trees surrendering to the inevitability of winter, and the beckoning call of the ocean to the “blind” (Line 48)—those who are so driven by bleak circumstances they throw themselves into the crashing surf as a “stairway to the sea” (Line 47).