Alma Mater

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/alma-mater/

He knocked, and I beheld him at the door–
A vision for the gods to verify.
“What battered ancient is this,” thought I,
“And when, if ever, did we meet before?”
But ask him as I might, I got no more
For answer than a moaning and a cry:
Too late to parley, but in time to die,
He staggered, and lay ahapeless on the floor.

When had I known him? And what brought him here?
Love, warning, malediction, fear?
Surely I never thwarted such as he?–
Again, what soiled obscurity was this:
Out of what scum, and up from what abyss,
Had they arrived–these rags of memory.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Memories from our pasts can haunt us if we let them. Sometimes these memories that we think are gone show up again, if only for a brief moment. It could be a billboard, a fragrance, a phrase, or any number of thinks that trigger a chemical reaction in our brains to remember something specific. Sometimes it’s not even a memory that is triggered, but an emotion. An emotion that can capture our curiosity in it’s relation to our past. Why did this particular thing trigger an emotion or partial memory? There are missing pieces but I can’t put it all together.

In Alma Mater, Robinson writes about a character that is experiencing this phenomenon but what has triggered his memory is a dieing person knocking at his door. The first stanza describes the dieing man knocking at the door as an indiscriminate person, asking only, “When, if ever, did we meet before?” However, the second stanza leaves the stranger and goes into the second characters head as he searches his memory. The character has to recollect his past, possibly reliving all of his encounters positive and negative to find how he knows this dead man. He is sickened by all of his emotions as he sees his past in the dead.