Fathomer

Perhaps remembering this advice when she wrote her 1882 obituary of Rossetti for Harpers New Monthly Magazine, Robinson identifies Rossetti as one of the "pure artists, as distinguished from thinkers, prophets, or fathomers of nature"; she points out, however, "both [types of poet] are necessary to art, and neither is wholly independent of the other" (697).

She's neither humming nor moving, adjusting her focus on the infinite, the way our eyes do before a seascape--night falls, the air is still, the coconut palms rise all the way to the beach, and we wonder, seeing them thus against the light, whether they were not once humans, contemplators of the vastness, sentinels of the ages, fathomers of the abyss...