Veteran Sirens

The ghost of Ninon would be sorry now
To laugh at them, were she to see them here,
So brave and so alert for learning how
To fence with reason for another year.

Age offers a far comelier diadem
Than theirs; but anguish has no eye for grace
When time’s malicious mercy cautions them
To think a while of number and of space.

The burning hope, the worn expectancy,
The martyred humor, and the maimed allure,
Cry out for time to end his levity,
And age to soften its investiture.

But they, though others fade and are still fair,
Defy their fairness and are unsubdued;
Although they suffer, they may not forswear
The patient ardour of the unpursued.

Poor flesh, to fight the calendar so long;
Poor vanity, so quaint and yet so brave;
Poor folly, so deceived and yet so strong,
So far from Ninon and so near the grave.

The poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) frequently represent encounters with individuals – memorably named, often unassuming small-town Americans whose characters and wry personal stories are relayed with fine and subtle empathy. In Veteran Sirens, the approach, and even the title with its myth-summoning irony, may imply a greater distance between Robinson and his human material. But the lyric compression of this “group portrait” also allows him to investigate the core of the sirens’ plight, and his own reaction to it, without being sidetracked by circumstantial detail.

He begins, unusually, by enlisting a historical figure, the accomplished 17th-century courtesan and salonnière known as Ninon. She is set up as a moral exemplar, whose ghost would now resist laughing at the women (“ageing barflies, perhaps prostitutes”, as DH Tracy defines them) whom she might once have mocked. Mockery, the poet’s and the reader’s, is banished by the presence of Ninon and the depiction of these far less privileged women as “So brave and so alert for learning how / To fence with reason for another year”. The implied criticism of “fencing with reason” stings less than it might, in the context of the women’s need to survive, and to survive cleverly and proudly.

The attributes listed in the second stanza are made memorable by their adjectives: “The burning hope, the worn expectancy, / The martyred humor, and the maimed allure”. Even if these are shared attributes, crying out in unison for “time to end his levity”, each of the first three qualities may have a different emphasis according to the individual woman’s character and style. The startling antithesis of “maimed allure”, a quality undoubtedly common to the group, is particularly vivid, and edged with honest disgust. Beauty is present in the word “allure” but it is a beauty fatally injured into ugliness, “maimed” by time. These qualities utter an outcry against time, but the women themselves do not.

The abstract terminology of “number” and “space” is well judged to indicate the women’s aloofness from the realities of ageing. We’d say now they were refusing to “grow old gracefully”, and probably add “good for them!” Robinson isn’t saying that: he spies out the disadvantages of rebellion against the inevitabilities. The women might have had “a comelier diadem” from age, they might have retained a subdued “fairness” if they hadn’t pushed against the limits, clothes and makeup presumably overdone in the attempt at a beauty no longer attainable. Empathy wins, though: Robinson senses “anguish” in the struggle, and powerlessness to relinquish it. “But they, though others fade and are still fair, / Defy their fairness, and are unsubdued; / Although they suffer, they may not forswear / The patient ardour of the unpursued.” This last line profoundly universalises the women’s predicament: Robinson, we know from the biography, has experienced that kind of patience and that kind of ardour … and, the poem seems to ask, who hasn’t?

Time, personified as a male in “his levity” may be mocking the women but the poet is neither mocking nor patronising. He evades moral castigation, too, in a clever last stanza, modelled to some extent on that finely wrought list of qualities in the first two lines of stanza three. His triad of heavily freighted words derives from traditional Christian associations with sin: “flesh”, “vanity” and “folly”. All are modified by the epithet “poor”, and further given their measure of complexity, “vanity” in particular, being described as “so quaint and yet so brave”. Even “folly” which is “so strong” is also “so deceived”. There is no punitive ring to Robinson’s lament.

Ninon reappears in the poem’s last line, her youth, privilege and charm briefly reprised in the judgment, “so far from Ninon and so near the grave”. The Veteran Sirens were always “far” from her in status – but the unavoidable argument with Robinson’s conclusion is that “the grave” is where Ninon, too, has ended her career. In the miniature tragedy of the poem, it is death which erases beauty and individuality, whether the life was privileged and accomplished or lowly and striving.

Veteran Sirens was first published in Robinson’s collection The Man Against the Sky.