Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) made his early reputation by turning the isolated lives of small-town New Englanders into compact, formally controlled portraits. In the 1897 collection *The Children of the Night*, “Aaron Stark” appears among the Tilbury Town poems—Robinson’s name for the Gardiner, Maine, he knew—as a study of a pariah who has grown so used to contempt that pity becomes the one thing that makes him laugh.
The poem’s octave presents Stark as a kind of human gargoyle. He is “a meagre man,” “cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shrivelled, and morose,” with “eyes like little dollars in the dark.” That simile does more than describe greed; it replaces the eyes’ human warmth with cold coin, as if money has become Stark’s only way of seeing and being seen. A “miser’s nose” and “thin, pinched mouth” complete the caricature, but the imagery turns sharper in the animal comparisons: his “scattered fangs” and “snarled words” make him a wary “cur” that is “chary of its bark.” He is not merely mean; he is defensive, almost feral. Robinson’s iambic pentameter gives these lines a slow, deliberate current, and the octave’s envelope rhyme encloses Stark in his own sullen identity. The final word of line 8, “bark,” primes the poem’s turn from description to action.
In the sestet, Stark is no longer just a static grotesque. “Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,” he shambles through town “year after year,” a “loveless exile moving with a staff.” The word “glad” is startling: his isolation is not merely suffered but in some way savored. “Hard renown” suggests a reputation built on bitterness, and the verb “shambled” captures a body bent by age and perhaps by years of guarding his solitude. When pity reaches him, it is not warm or welcome; it is an “alien pity, touched with tears,” creeping into his ears like an unwanted sound. Then comes the sonnet’s most haunting line: “And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh.” The parenthesis isolates the condition with the force of a slammed door. Laughter, usually a sign of connection or relief, is here the opposite: a bitter recognition that other people’s compassion cannot reach him, or perhaps a dark triumph in being proved right about the world’s otherness. The rhyme of “staff” and “laugh” pairs his physical support with this mockery of company.
That final laugh is what makes “Aaron Stark” more than a portrait of a miser. Robinson refuses to explain it. The reader cannot be sure whether Stark laughs at the townspeople’s sentimentality, at his own ruined state, or at the absurd distance between their tears and his reality. What remains clear is that pity, for Stark, is not a bridge but another form of estrangement. He has become so identified with the role of the loveless exile that even the softest human feeling arrives as something foreign and faintly ridiculous.
The poem’s significance lies in this unresolved, unsettling core. Robinson wrote in a period when many poets still used the sonnet for elevated subjects, yet he gave the form to a shrunken small-town miser and found real psychological complexity there. “Aaron Stark” shows that the most frightening isolation may not be the loud suffering of a tragic hero but the quiet, habitual life of someone who has learned to live without love—and who answers the world’s pity with laughter.