Second Dr. Alanson Tucker Schumann Residence
136 Maine Avenue, Farmingdale

Dr. Schumann resided in this mansion on Maine Avenue, Farmingdale, at the time of his death. When he died, Robinson wrote the following eulogy about his long-time friend and mentor. In part he said:
 
"I am sure that the name of Alanson Tucker Schumann, whose recent death in Florida has been reported, will be missed by many readers of the Transcript, who have read for the past 25 years the singularly polished and accomplished verses of this competent tho unostentatious, New England poet.
 
"By profession a physician in Gardiner, Me., he still found time to live what was probably to him the best part of his life in the land of fancy--a land where he saw much that others might not have seen. Dr. Schumann, with his highly responsive sense of beauty and his quiet sense of humor, seems to have had a rare and happy way of finding poetry in almost everything and his expression of it was more than often something near to perfect."

See Alice Frost Lord, “Gardiner Poet Was Friend of Edwin Arlington Robinson,” Lewiston Journal Magazine, January 27, 1934 wherein photographs of both of the Schumann properties on Lincoln Avenue and Maine Avenue are published.

There is no known association of Schumann with the following poem. It is chosen because it evokes idea of sacrifice that poets make to follow their profession.

< previous : return to map : next >

Verlaine
Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?
Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse
To tell the story of the life he led.
Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,
And let the worms be its biographers.
 
Song sloughs away the sin to find redress
In art’s complete remembrance: nothing clings
For long but laurel to the stricken brow
That felt the Muse’s finger; nothing less
Than hell’s fulfillment of the end of things
Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.

< previous : return to map : next >