A Touch of the Wrong Poet: Arthur Symons and the Ironizing of Tragedy in Beyond the Horizon

In Beyond the Horizon, Robert Mayo has two inherent problems—in addition to his alienated brother, his depressive wife and her fiendish mother, his doomed daughter, his deteriorating farm, his deepening poverty, and his revenant tuberculosis. First, in spite of his declaration that he “want[s] to write, or something of that sort,” he is, as St. John Ervine opined years ago, “a peevish Hamlet who whines and snivels through his futile and dismal life,” cursed by a lack of “ability.”¹ Ervine himself is plenty long on peevishness; but, still, he has a point.

Robert’s second problem concerns his taste in poetry or the literary models that he brings to bear on a life that is essentially inert. A callow twenty-three year-old with one year of college, Robert has read neither deeply nor judiciously. The play calls attention to his bookishness several times, but the only writer with whom O’Neill identifies him is the English decadent Arthur Symons (1865–1945), whose ode “To Night” Robert reads at the start of the play. Symons, a respected critic and a determined writer of occasionally serviceable verse, seems to have caught O’Neill’s attention in the playwright’s mid-twenties, but not for long. How seriously should we regard a reader of Symons’s poetry in a play drafted when Robert’s creator was nearing thirty and had become a discriminating reader as well as a wide-ranging one?² The question is preparatory to one that concerned Ervine and has concerned others since: is Robert substantial enough to carry a play that O’Neill described as “simon pure uncompromising American tragedy”?³

I suggest that we take Robert seriously, but as a failure per se, not as a thwarted success of a sort more neatly congruent with the conventions of tragedy. And I suggest that we take Symons seriously, too, by recognizing both his modest role in O’Neill’s history and his ironizing effect on the tragic energies of Beyond the Horizon. O’Neill had twice included mildly racy lines from Symons in letters to young paramours, by way of promoting himself sexually.⁴ But Robert’s plodding encounter with the poet is purposive only insofar as it illustrates the imaginative limitations with which O’Neill has saddled his protagonist. Robert reads Symons’s derivative poem in a labored manner, “his lips mov[ing] as if he were reciting something to himself ” (1:573). The poem’s subject—“holy and most secret Night”—is inaccessible to its reader. Robert is unable either to insinuate a decadent sensibility into his dully diurnal life or, as he approaches death, to articulate a credible alternative to the platitudes of decadence.⁵

Robert’s inability to reach a world “beyond the horizon” helps define the play as tragic, but his failure poetically to conceptualize that world alters the tone of this tragedy. The play is tragic, as O’Neill repeatedly claimed, but it is not “pure.” Due to intention or to inexperience, O’Neill wrote an ironic riff on a set of pseudo-poetical attitudes rather than proposing, as Ervine thought he had done, the substitution of these attitudes for the sturdier stuff of tragedy. Beyond the Horizon anticipates Ah, Wilderness!, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten in illustrating O’Neill’s outgrowing of the poets whom Stephen A. Black ranks among the playwright’s youthful “gods of sex and death.”⁶

Employing a version of his pro forma description of sensitive youth, O’Neill introduces Robert as “a tall, slender young man of twenty-three” with “a touch of the poet about him expressed in his high forehead and wide, dark eyes” (1:573). This informs the reader that Robert is another of the playwright’s “there but for fortune” characters, versions of himself gone wrong. As the play opens, Robert is working his way through Symons’s poem: “I have loved wind and light and the bright sea. But holy and most secret Night, not as I love...