Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose character studies of small-town loneliness earned him three Pulitzer Prizes, usually wrote about people whom the world misunderstands or overlooks. In “For Arvia,” written for the young Arvia MacKaye, daughter of his friend the playwright Percy MacKaye, the situation reverses: a child’s eyes turn on the poet, and he becomes the one under examination.
The poem is a direct address to “You Eyes, you large and all-inquiring Eyes.” Those eyes, the speaker says, “look so dubiously into me” and are “not satisfied with what you see.” He asks for the truth rather than comfort: “Tell me the worst and let us have no lies: / Tell me the secret of your scrutinies, / And of myself.” From that demand rises the poem’s central question: “Am I a Mystery? / Am I a Boojum—or just Company?” The Boojum arrives from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, where such a creature causes a character to vanish softly and suddenly. By asking whether he is a Boojum or just Company, the speaker is half-mockingly wondering if he is strange and unknowable or simply ordinary. The child’s eyes do not answer, but the speaker believes they think, “beyond a doubt,” because they have “the whole world to think about, / With very little time for little things.” The closing turn is generous rather than defeated: “let it all be fair— / For you, and for the rest who cannot share / Your gold of unrevealed awakenings.”
Formally, “For Arvia” is a sonnet, but it wears its structure with the ease of speech. The first eight lines rhyme ABBAABBA, with “Eyes” returning as the outer frame and “me/see/Mystery/Company” enclosed inside, as if the speaker is ringed by the very gaze he addresses. The sestet loosens into paired rhymes—“doubt” and “about,” “fair” and “share”—while “things” and “awakenings” reach across the final three lines to hold the thought open. Most of the poem moves in iambic pentameter, yet the opening line, “You Eyes, you large and all-inquiring Eyes,” has an extra stretching energy, as if the speaker cannot fit his unease into a perfectly regular meter. Capitalizing “Eyes” turns them into a separate presence, almost a judge. The cluster of “dubiously,” “scrutinies,” and “Mystery” creates an atmosphere of solemn inquiry, which the sudden childish word “Boojum” punctures with playfulness. That collision of tones is exactly where the poem lives.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to solve the question it raises. Robinson does not decide whether he is a Boojum or just Company; the silence of the child’s gaze is allowed to remain a kind of answer. The final phrase, “gold of unrevealed awakenings,” is neither sentimental nor vague. It grants the child an inner world that is rich, hidden, and not fully accessible to adults. In this small, witty sonnet, Robinson captures the discomfort of being seen honestly by someone who has no reason to flatter or deceive. The child’s gaze becomes a mirror that questions identity without replacing it, and the closing wish for fairness is not a resolution but a hope. That balance between self-doubt and tenderness is a quiet signature of Robinson’s art.