Sally Ossana

Mrs. Jackie Burr, Instructor

English 1010, Section 5
5, January 2017
The Use of Metaphor, Tone and Structure
in The Mill by Edwin Arlington Robinson
In the narrative poem, The Mill written by Edwin Arlington Robinson , the poem tells a
story about a man and a wife. The wife is waiting for the husband to come home. She goes to the
mill to look for him, and finds him hanging from a beam, dead. She is so helpless that she goes
to the river and jumps off a weir to end her own life. Robinson utilizes metonymy, tone, and
structure to develop the theme that the miller and his wife feel useless to the rest of the world.
Robinson uses the structure of his poem to accomplish separation between stanzas and
create a different feeling with each one. Each octave in the poem takes place in a different
setting. The first octave takes place in the home of the husband and wife. The second octave is
set in the mill, when the wife finds out that her husband is dead. The final octave takes place
outside by the river. Each stanza creates a different image in the readers head, shows shows the
different emotions that the wife feels. It separates the different aspects of the poem, and makes
them distinctively different. Each octave has a rhyme scheme, of a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d. As the reader
reads the rhyme scheme makes the poem flow and shows how anxious and uneasy the wife feels.
The rhythm that the rhymes create, makes the reader slow down, and really think about what the
author is saying.

The tone of the mill is panicked, fearful and foreboding. The wife knows that there is
something wrong in the first octave in the house. She talks about how her husband has been gone
for a remarkably long time by stating, and he had lingered at the door / so long that it seemed
yesterday (lines 7-8). Over half of the poem, is leading up to the revealing that the husband has
killed himself. The diction used, forebodes that something is not quite right. The phrase [t]here
are no millers any more really shows that the miller is gone. He was saying this when he was
alive, putting himself in past tense as he is already gone (line 5). When he says this he feels
hopeless, like he has no use in the world. Once this statement is said, a chain reaction happens.
The miller kills himself because he feels demoralized, then the wife feels helpless without her
husband, so she decides to take her life because she has no purpose in life.
The poem offers metaphors to show how the wife was feeling during her realization that
her husband might be gone forever. [M]ealy Fragrance of the past shows how the smell of the
mill reminds her of her husband. Another metaphor, sick with fear that had no form shows that
the millers wife was so sick, and so scared that her body was weightless. She was afraid so she
could not think correctly, and not wrap her mind around the truth.
Sadly, the miller and his wife no longer have a purpose in a world that emphasizes
technology. The miller knows that the mill, is important and vital to humanity. However, the
miller feels like he is not needed at the mill anymore, because of the technology that is taking
over his role in life. They both think that no will notice when they are gone, and decide to end
their life because of their feeling of hopelessness.

Works Cited
Robinson, Edwin Arlington. The Mill. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael
Meyer. 10th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2013. 1076. Print.