It seems to me that the clerks must surely be old friends of Robinson's from Gardiner days (Note, by the way, how Robinson, like Eliot, so often makes himself seem old and disenchanted) who have never fulfilled the promise of their youth--or better, have fulfilled it entirely by growing old. He could see, even in his twenties, some of his friends slipping into the pattern of small-town commerce. We can take the term "clerk" as a generic one for any man involved in commercial enterprise below what the contemporary jargon styles "the executive level," though I am by no means sure Robinson rules out such exalted types. Be that as it may, these clerks are men, both good and human--as good and as human "as they ever were." If Robinson had ended his poem with the octave, we might have doubts as to his sympathy; irony leaks out from the description of the men with their "shopworn brotherhood," a phrase which evokes Kiwanis and Rotary, while the final phrase of the octave "as they ever were" cuts two ways: how good were they, ever?

The sestet answers: as good as you and I, then, now or later! The speaker of the poem clearly involves himself in the human disaster of living: "poets and kings," you and I, all of us high, low and in between, are "clerks of Time." That very capacity to understand without sentimentality, to maintain a moral view without rigidity, to face reality without showing off about it: these attitudes and capacities demand the ironic tone, and irony can be both misunderstood and misapplied when it deals with common life and affairs. Many of Robinson's poems were thus misunderstood for a very long time.