Robinson’s speaker admits a weakness many people share: we are too attached to what is gone. Instead of facing the present, we keep returning to old roads and old fields, romanticizing what has already died. That pull toward the past becomes a kind of failure of nerve—“We lack the courage to be where we are.” The speaker feels drawn to ruined walls and moonlit stones, even though the moonlight gives them a false beauty. It is called “a lying glory,” and its friendship is really “a wizard’s enmity”—an enchantment that wounds. The mood is wistful and quietly eerie, as if the speaker is both seduced by the past and aware that it is a beautiful trap.
Octaves XVII — Summary
We lack the courage to be where we are: -- We love too much to travel on old roads, To triumph on old fields; we love too much To consecrate the magic of dead things, And yieldingly to linger by long walls Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight That sheds a lying glory on old stones Befriends us with a wizard's enmity.