Edwin Arlington Robinsons The Mill

Lucius Beebe critically analyzes Edwin Arlington Robinson's, The Mill best. Beebe's analysis is from an objective point of view. He points out to the reader that what seems so obvious may not be. She notes "The Mill is just a sad little tale of double suicide brought on by the encroachment of the modern world and by personal loss." Thus meaning The Mill carries a deeper underlying theme. Lucius Beebe expresses that a minor overflow of significant details has been exposed over Edwin Arlington Robinson's "The Mill," much of it concerned with whether the miller's wife did indeed drown herself after the miller had hanged himself. Another, even more provocative question has never been asked: did the Miller actually hang himself? Beebe suggests a close examination of the text suggests that both deaths may be imaginative constructs that exist only in the mind of the miller's wife.

The critics, and most casual readers, have neglected to remember that nothing is a given in Robinson's work. The exegetical evidence in this case rests largely upon Robinson's subtle handling of verb tenses, sentence structure, and punctuation. Beebe implies that the first line of the poem, "The miller's wife had waited long," is in past perfect, a tense that implies action previous to the simple past, and a rather more complicated, problematical placement in time than simple past alone suggests. This enclosing effect continues after the semicolon, which itself heralds dependency, and is indeed followed by a convoluted conditional clause that comprises the last six lines of the eight-line stanza. "The colon after 'said' implies an appositive clause equal in value to what went before, here the thoughts of the miller's wife as she waited by the dead fire." "'There are no millers anymore,' / Was all that she had heard him say" closes the parenthesis of past perfect tense that the first line opens, containing within it the miller's actual words, which Beebe and the reader can take to be the objective fulcrum upon which the rest of this intensely subjective poem balances.

It is even clearer that the past perfect is this stanza's essential condition of being when we come to the second past perfect verb, "had lingered," found in a clause subordinate to the one before. Thus, Lucius Beebe points out that Robinson sets up the stanza as a sort of verbal chandelier, with one clause hanging upon the meaning and mode of that before, and with the framework of past perfect verbs giving definition and tone to the whole. Robinson achieves much the same effect in the second stanza, which opens with the miller's wife "sick with a fear that had no form," which implies that the fear has a continuation in the past. Beebe implies that "a certain poetic inertia militates against supposing change, and much more is needed to indicate or certify such change than exists." This hypothesis is reinforced by the rest of the stanza, a single sentence formed by a pair of past conditional clauses. "What he had meant," as direct object, parallels "What else there was," as subject,