Eros Turannos

For the woman, home symbolizes a refuge. It is a manifestation of her isolation. Given the loveless ruin of her relationship where “passion lived and died” (Line 29) and given the cold judgmental nature of her neighbors, the woman sees her home as a “place where she can hide” (Line 30). Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem thus plays ironically against the conventional wisdom of the Gilded Age that regarded “home, sweet home” as a comforting place where families create a reassuring space animated by love, happiness, and emotional support. 

Home also often symbolizes identity, both in its aesthetic and socioeconomic contexts—the material comforts of a home and the style of its decor typically are used as characterization in fiction. Robinson upends this symbolic link in his suggestion that the woman’s home is more akin to voluntary incarceration—a prison where she is unwilling and uninterested in engaging the identity-making busyness of life around her. For her, the home symbolizes not presence but absence of self, the tangible manifestation of her empty heart.

When the woman looks ahead to the time she has left, the vision is bleak. Her future in this relationship is symbolized by river waters draining through weirs, or narrow walls that convert a river’s unpredictable power into constant and steady movement, maintaining a constant level of water to prevent flooding.