Robinson's most debated title, "Mr. Flood's Party" (1920), is a more generous verse told in gracious lines that lull at the same time that they reveal. The text epitomizes one of Robinson's hard-bitten losers, Eben Flood, and reflects Robinson's firsthand knowledge of two derelict older brothers, one an alcoholic and the other a drug addict. The poem describes a public nuisance who lets drink drive him away from the hospitality and home life that once filled him with hope. Like a mirthful drinker, he hoists his spirits to "the bird . . . on the wing," a suggestion of the state of flux typical of human interactions. Too late "winding a silent horn," he makes empty gestures, like the French epic figure of Roland sounding the alarm when it is too late for rescue. The sounds of the final two stanzas reiterate plaintive oo's and oh's in do, too, moons, loneliness, alone, below, opened, and ago. Well under the influence of a night's drinking, Eben gazes up at a double moon, an emblem of instability and duplicitous face.
The social climate of Tilbury Town in the final four lines is ambiguous. Either Flood is ostracized for carousing or else has outlived old friends and is now an unknown consoling himself with drink. Composed in tight octets linked by masculine end rhymes in a pattern of abcb in conversational iambic pentameter, the poem speaks with third-party knowledge of the events that have estranged Eben from his neighbors. The mellow sot approaches sentimentality by watching over his jug in token of the fact that "most things break." He toasts himself "for auld lang syne" and contemplates the nothingness of no place to return to and no hope for a better future.
