Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

These lines open Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy,” a character sketch of a man who romanticizes the past and despises his own era. Robinson (1869–1935) often wrote compact narrative poems about frustrated, self-defeating figures in small-town America. “Miniver Cheevy” was published in Robinson’s collection *The Town Down the River* (1910), during a period when the poet was gaining wider recognition for his psychologically incisive portraits. The poem’s speaker describes Miniver as chronically dissatisfied—“assailing the seasons” suggests he rails against time itself—setting up the satire of a man whose nostalgia and resentment become a way of avoiding life as it is.

The passage introduces Miniver as someone defined by contempt (“child of scorn”) and by a self-dramatizing misery that he treats as justified (“And he had reasons”). Robinson’s irony lies in the tension between Miniver’s grand, almost heroic posture and the pettiness or futility of his complaint: he “assailed the seasons,” as if the ordinary passage of time were an enemy. The lines establish a portrait of corrosive nostalgia and existential grievance—Miniver’s sorrow is real, but it is also performative and self-perpetuating. In the full poem, this attitude becomes a critique of escapism: longing for an imagined golden age can turn into a refusal to act, work, or engage with the present.