Who is Eben Flood?

Answer 1

Eben Flood is the character portrayed in the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson of the same name. The name is a play on words (ebbing flood) as it portrays a lonely old man for whom the tide of life is running out.

The poem is a character study and consists in part of a dramatic monologue by Mr. Flood. At the literal narrative level, he is wandering drunk with a jug of moonshine above the town where he has lived his life, talking to himself about time and its passing. The poem is an interesting study in the manipulation of tone, since it is by turns ironic-satiric (ridiculing an intoxicated, maudlin old man), comic (presenting to us the drunken man's elaborate, mannered, courteous dialogue with himself) and, in its closing, plangently sorrowful. It somehow manages to achieve all of these tones without falling into into sentimentality.