Edwin Arlington Robinson

“ Given me strength to crush my sorrow
With hate for her and the world that praised her—
To have left her, then and there—to have conquered
That old false life with a new and a wiser,—
Such things are easy in words. ”

“ And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.
Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us—
Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
And the long fall wind on the lake. ”

“ Where the bones of the brave in the wave are lying.
ENVOY
Prince, do you sleep to the sound alway
⁠Of the mournful surge and the sea-birds' crying?—
Or does love still shudder and steel still slay,
⁠Where the bones of the brave in the wave are lying? ”

“ Suffer enough, I say, to merit
All grace that a God can give.—The fashion
Of our belief is to lift all beings
Born for a life that knows no struggle
In sin's tight snares to eternal glory—
All apart from the branded millions
Who carry through life their faces graven
With sure brute scars that tell the story
Of their foul, fated passions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked. ”

“ XIII
Still through the dusk of dead, blank-legended,
And unremunerative years we search
To get where life begins, and still we groan
Because we do not find the living spark
Where no spark ever was ”

“ We always liked him well enough,
And always tried to use him well;
But now some things have come to light,
And James has vanished from our view,—
There isn’t very much to write,
There isn’t very much to do. ”

“ Ever to be appalled at what is not;
He sees beyond the groaning borough lines
Of Hell, God's highways gleaming, and he knows
That Love's complete communion is the end
Of anguish to the liberated man. ”

“ Flashed with a piercing flame, and the pavements
Pulsed and swayed with a warmth—or something
That seemed so then to my feet—and thrilled me
With a quick, dizzy joy; and the women
And men, like marvellous things of magic,
Floated and laughed and sang by my shoulder,
Sent with a wizard motion. Through it
And over and under it all there sounded
A murmur of life, like bees; and I listened
And laughed again to think of the flower
That grew, blood-red, for me! . . . This fellow
Was one of the popular sort who flourish
Unruffled where gods would fall. ”

“ In love's despite to break them. . . . Sinners
And saints—I say—are rocked in the cradle,
But never are known till the will within them
Speaks in its own good time. So I foster
Even to-night for the woman who wronged me,
Nothing of hate, nor of love, but a feeling
Of still regret ”

“ A dirge for the sundered years and a dirge for the years to be!
Better his end had been as the end of a cloudless day,
Bright, by the word of Zeus, with a golden star,
Wrought of a golden fame, and flung to the central sky,
To gleam on a stormless tomb for evermore:—
Whether or not there fell
To the touch of an alien hand
The sheen of his purple robe and the shine of his diadem,
Better his end had been
To die as an old man dies,—
But the fates are ever the fates, and a crown is ever a crown. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of most of us affrighted and diseased,
But rather by the common snarls of life
That come to test us and to strengthen us
In this the prentice-age of discontent,
Rebelliousness, faint-heartedness, and shame. ”

“ And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,
There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother. ”

“ And his, and hate's. And there was the struggle.
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But still my dream was to command
⁠New life into that shrunken clay.
⁠I tried it. Yes, you scan to-day,
With uncommiserating glee,
⁠The songs of one who strove to play
The broken flutes of Arcady. ”

“ Right through the forest, where none can see,
There's where I'm going, to Tilbury Town.
The men are asleep,—or awake, may be,—
But the women are calling John Evereldown.
Ever and ever they call for me,
And while they call can a man be free?
So right through the forest, where none can see,
There's where I'm going, to Tilbury Town. ”

“ And when I asked him what the deuce he meant
By doing that, he only looked at me
And grinned, and said it was a way of his.
And though I know the fellow, I have spent
Long time a-wondering when I shall be
As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is. ”

“ That women and men are on earth to travel
All on a different road. Hereafter
The roads may meet. . . . I trust in something—
I know not what. . . .
⁠Well, this was the way of it:—
Stung with the shame and the secret fury
That comes to the man who has thrown his pittance
Of self at a traitor's feet, I wandered
Weeks and weeks in a baffled frenzy,
Till at last the devil spoke. I heard him,
And laughed at the love that strove to touch me,—
The dead, lost love ”