Arthur Stringer, a Canadian-born poet, novelist, and screenwriter who lived from 1874 to 1950, wrote in a period when Victorian moral certainty was giving way to a more personal, skeptical lyric voice. His poem “The Question” reflects that shift: it is not a piece of tidy consolation but a dramatic inner quarrel. The speaker is both “glad with the wine of life” and aware that the wine cannot keep the shadow away forever. The early twentieth-century context matters chiefly as a mood—old answers about mortality and meaning were loosening, leaving individuals alone with their own unanswered questions.
The poem stages a struggle between two claims on the speaker’s attention. On one side is the world of “the wine and the open road,” with its heat, movement, and freedom. On the other is “the waiting Door,” the final stop that waits beyond every ordinary doorway. The speaker glimpses this truth in the “lucid moment”: the shadow across the lintel, the ghostly whisper, and the “small dark house” where he must sleep, which compresses the fear of the grave into a cramped domestic image. The central idea is not that the speaker chooses life over death, but that he chooses to escape the thought of death. He returns to the beaker, re-drains his “cup of dream,” and drowns the whispering voices. The question of which is finally true remains deliberately unresolved; it is less a riddle than a voice that speaks from the edge of sleep.
Stringer builds the poem around the speaker’s own swaying consciousness. The lines are short and irregular, but they carry a strong rhythmic pulse, as if the speaker’s drunken stride is shaping the verse. There is no regular rhyme scheme, yet echoes such as “life,” “lips,” “wine,” and “way” keep the language loosely connected. The first movement rises toward the stark clarity of “And I see the small dark house / Where I must sleep.” That plain sentence feels like a sudden chill because the images narrow from the wide open road to a single, claustrophobic house. The repeated “And” clauses in the lucid-moment passage—shadow, whisper, glimpse, vision—build the slow accumulation of dread. Then the poem turns back. “Song turns sour on my lips” mixes taste and sound, making the joyful song suddenly feel nauseating. The warmth going out of the blood makes the awareness of death physical.
Two families of imagery do most of the work. Wine, beaker, cup, blood, and song belong to a world of intoxication and vitality; they suggest heat, pouring, momentum, and the body in motion. Door, lintel, shadow, whisper, and house belong to a world of thresholds and endings; they suggest silence, enclosure, and waiting. The word “ghostly” makes the whisper both delicate and persistent, as though the question is always at the edge of hearing. The capital-letter “Door” becomes more than an object—it is a fate and a presence. The “open road” draws the eye horizontally toward a limitless horizon, while the final “?” keeps the reader suspended. The speaker can banish the ghostly question, but the poem’s ending refuses to banish it for the audience.
The significance of “The Question” lies in its honesty about avoidance. The speaker does not pretend to have an answer or to be brave. He drinks again because the wine is all he has. That is a recognizably modern response to mortality: not heroic denial, but repeated, fragile self-forgetting. Stringer leaves the two symbols—wine and door—side by side at the end, so the reader inherits the very question the speaker tried to drown. It is a short poem, but its unease lingers because it refuses to resolve what most people spend their lives trying not to ask.