Reuben Bright

"Reuben Bright" is a (modified) Petrarchan sonnet written by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, early in his career, and published in Children of the Night (1897). The poem acquired some fame as teaching material for English teachers. Form and summary "Reuben Bright" is a sonnet with decasyllabic lines of iambic pentameter. Its structure is that of the Petrarchan sonnet according to Stephen Regan; its rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDCD EE. In other words, the octet has two quatrains of enclosed rhyme, and the sestet has a quatrain of alternating rhyme and a concluding couplet. The poem tells of a butcher, Reuben Bright, who might be supposed to be rough and unfeeling because of his profession, but when news is brought that his wife is to die, he cries like a baby. When she dies, he packs up all the articles she handcrafted in a chest and adds cedar boughs (a "traditional symbol of death") and then destroys the slaughter house. One critic said the poem shows "a man's devotion to his wife". Like many of Robinson's narrative sonnets, "Reuben Bright" has a "characteristic signature: usually a bizarre or extraordinary story", according to Donald Hall, who also noted that in its first printing the last line was altered significantly by a typo: the poem had been printed with the last line saying "tore down to the slaughter house". Critical appreciation Robinson wrote "Reuben Bright" around the same time as "Richard Cory". David Perkins, in his A History of Modern Poetry (first published 1976), called some of those early poems including "Reuben Bright" and "Richard Cory" "revolutionary", with narrative elements of prose fiction brought into a lyric poetry written about realistic subject matter in vernacular language. Stephen Regan likewise notes the "plain-speaking, intimately conversational idiom". The poem's value, he argues, lies in the tension between that "matter-of-fact" language (and the close tonal connection between, for instance, "Bright" and "brute") and the psychological depths Robinson hints at, opened by the butcher's "capacity for deep feeling". Robinson critic Warner Berthoff had said that "Robinson is the poet of casualties; of broken lives and exhausted consciences", and Regan saw Reuben Bright as the best example of this quality.