Edwin Arlington Robinson

Monadnock Through the Trees

Before there was in Egypt any sound

Egyptian pyramid construction

The 'prodigious means / For the self-heavy sleep' refers to pyramids—tombs so massive they literally weigh down the dead. Robinson's periphrasis emphasizes their absurd scale.

Of those who reared a more prodigious means
For the self-heavy sleep of kings and queens
Than hitherto had mocked the most renowned,—
Unvisioned here and waiting to be found,

Unvisioned here

Monadnock existed before humans conceived of it or named it. The mountain predates human consciousness itself.

Alone, amid remote and older scenes,
You loomed above ancestral evergreens
Before there were the first of us around.

If we know how

The conditional is crucial—Robinson doubts humanity's capacity for genuine self-awareness even at the end of history.

And when the last of us, if we know how,
See farther from ourselves than we do now,
Assured with other sight than heretofore
That we have done our mortal best and worst,—
Your calm will be the same as when the first
Assyrians went howling south to war.

Assyrians went howling

The Assyrian Empire (circa 2500-609 BCE) was known for brutal military campaigns. 'Howling' suggests both war cries and animalistic violence.

The OutlookEdwin Arlington Robinson
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Deep Time and Human Insignificance

Robinson structures this sonnet as a temporal sandwich: Monadnock existed before the pyramids (octave) and will remain unchanged after humanity's end (sestet). The mountain becomes a measuring stick for geological time that dwarfs human history.

The opening's elaborate circumlocution—'those who reared a more prodigious means / For the self-heavy sleep'—forces readers to work for the word 'pyramids,' mimicking how human monuments seem impressive until measured against true deep time. The pyramids were already ancient when Robinson wrote this (1931), yet Monadnock predates them by 400 million years. [CONTEXT: Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire is a monadnock—an isolated mountain that resisted erosion while surrounding peaks wore away.]

The sestet's vision of 'the last of us' seeing 'farther from ourselves than we do now' imagines humanity finally achieving perspective on its own insignificance. But Robinson undercuts this enlightenment with 'if we know how'—doubting we'll ever escape our self-absorption. The final couplet delivers the punch: Monadnock's calm remained unchanged during the Assyrian wars and will remain unchanged when we're gone.

Notice how Robinson bookends human history with Assyrians (among the earliest empire-builders) and Egyptians (whose pyramids symbolize permanence), yet both are equally dwarfed. The mountain 'loomed' before us and will loom after us, indifferent to whether we've done our 'mortal best and worst.'

The Sonnet's Architecture

Robinson builds this Petrarchan sonnet as a before/after diptych with Monadnock as the constant. The octave establishes geological priority ('Before... Before'), while the sestet projects forward to humanity's extinction ('when the last of us').

The volta at line 9 ('And when') shifts from deep past to distant future, but the rhetorical structure stays parallel: both halves subordinate human civilization to the mountain's permanence. The octave's four-line opening sentence, with its nested dependent clauses, creates syntactic difficulty that mirrors the conceptual difficulty of imagining pre-human time.

Watch Robinson's word choices for human activity: pyramids mock the dead, Assyrians go howling, we do our mortal best. Every human descriptor emphasizes limitation, noise, or death. Meanwhile, Monadnock gets calm, loomed, waiting—verbs of patient presence. The mountain doesn't act; it simply is.

The final couplet's present tense ('Your calm will be the same') collapses time—what was true for Assyrians will be true for our descendants. Robinson achieves what the poem describes: a perspective that sees human history as a brief flicker between geological eternities.