Edwin Arlington Robinson

“ And if there be no other life, And if there be no other chance To weigh their sorrow and their strife Than in the scales of circumstance, 'T were better, ere the sun go down Upon the first day we embark, In life's imbittered sea to drown, Than sail forever in the dark. But if there be a soul on earth So blinded with its own misuse Of man's revealed, incessant worth, Or worn with anguish, that it views No light but for a mortal eye, No rest but of a mortal sleep, No God but in a prophet's lie, No faith for "honest doubt" to keep ”

“ Be up, my soul! nor be afraid Of what some unborn year may show; But mind your human debts are paid, As one by one the phantoms go. ENVOY Life is the game that must be played: This truth at least, good friend, we know; So live and laugh, nor be dismayed As one by one the phantoms go.
Ballade of Broken Flutes (To A. T. Schumann.) In dreams I crossed a barren land, A land of ruin, far away; Around me hung on every hand A deathful stillness of decay; And silent, as in bleak dismay That song should thus forsaken be, On that forgotten ground there lay The broken flutes of Arcady. ”

“ Octaves I To get at the eternal strength of things, And fearlessly to make strong songs of it, Is, to my mind, the mission of that man The world would call a poet. He may sing But roughly, and withal ungraciously; But if he touch to life the one right chord Wherein God's music slumbers, and awake To truth one drowsed ambition, he sings well. II We thrill too strangely at the master's touch; We shrink too sadly from the larger self Which for its own completeness agitates And undetermines us; we do not feel — We dare not feel it yet — the splendid shame Of uncreated failure ”

“ And leave, to crumble as they may, The broken flutes of Arcady.
Ballade of Dead Friends As we the withered ferns By the roadway lying, Time, the jester, spurns All our prayers and prying — All our tears and sighing, Sorrow, change, and woe — All our where-and-whying For friends that come and go. Life awakes and burns, Age and death defying, Till at last it learns All but Love is dying; Love's the trade we're plying, God has willed it so; Shrouds are what we're buying For friends that come and go. Man forever yearns For the thing that's flying. ”

“ What does it mean when the one forgiven Shivers and weeps and clings and kisses The credulous fool that holds her, and tells him A thousand things of a good man's mercy, And then slips off with a laugh and plunges Back to the sin she has quit for a season, To tell him that hell and the world are better For her than a prophet's heaven? Believe me, The love that dies ere its flames are wasted In search of an alien soul is better, Better by far than the lonely passion That burns back into the heart that feeds it. ”

“ No matter what we are, or what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel.
The World Some are the brothers of all humankind, And own them, whatsoever their estate; And some, for sorrow and self-scorn, are blind With enmity for man's unguarded fate. For some there is a music all day long Like flutes in Paradise, they are so glad; And there is hell's eternal under-song Of curses and the cries of men gone mad. ”

“ XV I grant you friendship is a royal thing, But none shall ever know that royalty For what it is till he has realized His best friend in himself. 'T is then, perforce, That man's unfettered faith indemnifies Of its own conscious freedom the old shame, And love's revealed infinitude supplants Of its own wealth and wisdom the old scorn. XVI Though the sick beast infect us, we are fraught Forever with indissoluble Truth, Wherein redress reveals itself divine, Transitional, transcendent. Grief and loss, Disease and desolation, are the dreams Of wasted excellence ”

“ VII There is one battle-field whereon we fall Triumphant and unconquered; but, alas! We are too fleshly fearful of ourselves To fight there till our days are whirled and blurred By sorrow, and the ministering wheels Of anguish take us eastward, where the clouds Of human gloom are lost against the gleam That shines on Thought's impenetrable mail. VIII When we shall hear no more the cradle-songs Of ages — when the timeless hymns of Love Defeat them and outsound them — we shall know The rapture of that large release which all Right science comprehends ”

“ II Never until our souls are strong enough To plunge into the crater of the Scheme — Triumphant in the flash there to redeem Love's handsel and forevermore to slough, Like cerements at a played-out masque, the rough And reptile skins of us whereon we set The stigma of scared years — are we to get Where atoms and the ages are one stuff. Nor ever shall we know the cursed waste Of life in the beneficence divine Of starlight and of sunlight and soul-shine That we have squandered in sin's frail distress, Till we have drunk, and trembled at the taste, The mead of Thought's prophetic endlessness. ”

“ We only blink, and wonder. Last night it was the song that was the man, But now it is the man that is the song. We do not hear him very much to-day: His piercing and eternal cadence rings Too pure for us — too powerfully pure, Too lovingly triumphant, and too large; But there are some that hear him, and they know That he shall sing to-morrow for all men, And that all time shall listen. The master-songs are ended? Rather say No songs are ended that are ever sung, And that no names are dead names. When we write Men's letters on proud marble or on sand, We write them there forever. ”

“ There is one creed, and only one, That glorifies God's excellence; So cherish, that His will be done, The common creed of common sense. It is the crimson, not the gray, That charms the twilight of all time; It is the promise of the day That makes the starry sky sublime; It is the faith within the fear That holds us to the life we curse; — So let us in ourselves revere The Self which is the Universe! Let us, the Children of the Night, Put off the cloak that hides the scar! Let us be Children of the Light, And tell the ages what we are! ”

“ Zola Because he puts the compromising chart Of hell before your eyes, you are afraid; Because he counts the price that you have paid For innocence, and counts it from the start, You loathe him. But he sees the human heart Of God meanwhile, and in God's hand has weighed Your squeamish and emasculate crusade Against the grim dominion of his art. Never until we conquer the uncouth Connivings of our shamed indifference (We call it Christian faith!) are we to scan The racked and shrieking hideousness of Truth To find, in hate's polluted self-defence Throbbing, the pulse, the divine heart of man. ”

“ The Dead Village Here there is death. But even here, they say, — Here where the dull sun shines this afternoon As desolate as ever the dead moon Did glimmer on dead Sardis, — men were gay; And there were little children here to play, With small soft hands that once did keep in tune The strings that stretch from heaven, till too soon The change came, and the music passed away. Now there is nothing but the ghosts of things, — No life, no love, no children, and no men ”

“ There are moments In all men's lives when it stops, I fancy, — Or seems to stop, — till it comes to cheer them Again with a larger sound. The curtain Of life just then is lifted a little To give to their sight new joys — new sorrows — Or nothing at all, sometimes. I was watching The slow, sweet scenes of a golden picture, Flushed and alive with a long delusion That made the murmur of home, when I shuddered And felt like a knife that awful silence That comes when the music goes — forever. The truth came over my life like a darkness Over a forest where one man wanders, Worse than alone. ”

“ This mortal surge That beats against us now is nothing else Than plangent ignorance. Truth neither shakes Nor wavers; but the world shakes, and we shriek. XXI Nor jewelled phrase nor mere mellifluous rhyme Reverberates aright, or ever shall, One cadence of that infinite plain-song Which is itself all music. Stronger notes Than any that have ever touched the world Must ring to tell it — ring like hammer-blows, Right-echoed of a chime primordial, On anvils, in the gleaming of God's forge. ”

“ The Tavern has a story, but no man Can tell us what it is. We only know That once long after midnight, years ago, A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town, Who brushed, and scared, and all but overran That skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.
Sonnet Oh for a poet — for a beacon bright To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray; To spirit back the Muses, long astray, And flush Parnassus with a newer light; To put these little sonnet-men to flight Who fashion, in a shrewd, mechanic way, Songs without souls, that flicker for a day, To vanish in irrevocable night. ”

“ Come away! come away! — for the scenes we leave behind us Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that's young forever; And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind, That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains. The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us, And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years ”

“ Credo I cannot find my way: there is no star In all the shrouded heavens anywhere; And there is not a whisper in the air Of any living voice but one so far That I can hear it only as a bar Of lost, imperial music, played when fair And angel fingers wove, and unaware, Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are. No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call, For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears, The black and awful chaos of the night ”

“ XIX To you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves, And wonder if the night will ever come, I would say this: The night will never come, And sorrow is not always. But my words Are not enough; your eyes are not enough; The soul itself must insulate the Real, Or ever you do cherish in this life — In this life or in any life — repose. XX Like a white wall whereon forever breaks Unsatisfied the tumult of green seas, Man's unconjectured godliness rebukes With its imperial silence the lost waves Of insufficient grief. ”

“ What are we, — Slaves of an awful ignorance? puppets Pulled by a fiend? or gods, without knowing it? Do we shut from ourselves our own salvation, — Or what do we do! I tell you, Dominie, There are times in the lives of us poor devils When heaven and hell get mixed. Though conscience May come like a whisper of Christ to warn us Away from our sins, it is lost or laughed at, — And then we fall. ”

“ But into soundless Acheron The glory of Greek shame was cast: Long centuries have come and gone, The suns of Hellas have all shone, The first has fallen to the last: — Since Persia fell at Marathon, Long centuries have come and gone.
John Evereldown "Where are you going to-night, to-night, — Where are you going, John Evereldown? There's never the sign of a star in sight, Nor a lamp that's nearer than Tilbury Town. Why do you stare as a dead man might? Where are you pointing away from the light? And where are you going to-night, to-night, — Where are you going, John Evereldown?" ”

“ For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold Sweeping the chords of Hellas with firm hand, He wakes lost echoes from song's classic shore, And brings their crystal cadence back once more To touch the clouds and sorrows of a land Where God's truth, cramped and fettered with a band Of iron creeds, he cheers with golden lore Of heroes and the men that long before Wrought the romance of ages yet unscanned. ”

“ Ye gods that have a home beyond the world, Ye that have eyes for all man's agony, Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen, — Look with a just regard, And with an even grace, Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king, Here on a suffering world where men grow old And wander like sad shadows till, at last, Out of the flare of life, Out of the whirl of years, Into the mist they go, Into the mist of death. ”

“ Or does love still shudder and steel still slay, Where the bones of the brave in the wave are lying?
Ballade by the Fire Slowly I smoke and hug my knee, The while a witless masquerade Of things that only children see Floats in a mist of light and shade: They pass, a flimsy cavalcade, And with a weak, remindful glow, The falling embers break and fade, As one by one the phantoms go. ”

“ As long as the earth we tread holds something A tortured heart can love, the meaning Of life is not wholly blurred; but after The last loved thing in the world has left us, We know the triumph of hate. The glory Of good goes out forever; the beacon Of sin is the light that leads us downward — Down to the fiery end. The road runs Right through hell ”

“ In spite of all fine science disavows, Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill There yet remains what fashion cannot kill, Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows. Whether or not we read him, we can feel From time to time the vigor of his name Against us like a finger for the shame And emptiness of what our souls reveal In books that are as altars where we kneel To consecrate the flicker, not the flame. ”

“ The Altar Alone, remote, nor witting where I went, I found an altar builded in a dream — A fiery place, whereof there was a gleam So swift, so searching, and so eloquent Of upward promise, that love's murmur, blent With sorrow's warning, gave but a supreme Unending impulse to that human stream Whose flood was all for the flame's fury bent. ”