Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

  Was in Alexis and Evander. 40

  And Old King Cole, with many a puff

  That haloed his urbanity,

  Would smoke till he had smoked enough,

  And listen most attentively.

  He beamed as with an inward light 45

  That had the Lord’s assurance in it;

  And once a man was there all night,

  Expecting something every minute.

  But whether from too little thought,

  Or too much fealty to the bowl, 50

  A dim reward was all he got

  For sitting up with Old King Cole.

  “Though mine,” the father mused aloud,

  “Are not the sons I would have chosen,

  Shall I, less evilly endowed, 55

  By their infirmity be frozen?

  “They’ll have a bad end, I’ll agree,

  But I was never born to groan;

  For I can see what I can see,

  And I’m accordingly alone. 60

  With open heart and open door,

  I love my friends, I like my neighbors;

  But if I try to tell you more,

  Your doubts will overmatch my labors.

  “This pipe would never make me calm, 65

  This bowl my grief would never drown.

  For grief like mine there is no balm

  In Gilead, or in Tilbury Town.

  And if I see what I can see,

  I know not any way to blind it; 70

  Nor more if any way may be

  For you to grope or fly to find it.

  “There may be room for ruin yet,

  And ashes for a wasted love;

  Or, like One whom you may forget, 75

  I may have meat you know not of.

  And if I’d rather live than weep

  Meanwhile, do you find that surprising?

  Why, bless my soul, the man’s asleep!

  That’s good. The sun will soon be rising.” 80

  Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford

  YOU are a friend then, as I make it out,

  Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us

  Will put an ass’s head in Fairyland

  As he would add a shilling to more shillings,

  All most harmonious, — and out of his 5

  Miraculous inviolable increase

  Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like

  Of olden time with timeless Englishmen;

  And I must wonder what you think of him —

  All you down there where your small Avon flows 10

  By Stratford, and where you’re an Alderman.

  Some, for a guess, would have him riding back

  To be a farrier there, or say a dyer;

  Or maybe one of your adept surveyors;

  Or like enough the wizard of all tanners. 15

  Not you — no fear of that; for I discern

  In you a kindling of the flame that saves —

  The nimble element, the true caloric;

  I see it, and was told of it, moreover,

  By our discriminate friend himself, no other. 20

  Had you been one of the sad average,

  As he would have it, — meaning, as I take it,

  The sinew and the solvent of our Island,

  You’d not be buying beer for this Terpander’s

  Approved and estimated friend Ben Jonson; 25

  He’d never foist it as a part of his

  Contingent entertainment of a townsman

  While he goes off rehearsing, as he must,

  If he shall ever be the Duke of Stratford.

  And my words are no shadow on your town — 30

  Far from it; for one town’s as like another

  As all are unlike London. Oh, he knows it, —

  And there’s the Stratford in him; he denies it,

  And there’s the Shakespeare in him. So, God help him!

  I tell him he needs Greek; but neither God 35

  Nor Greek will help him. Nothing will help that man.

  You see the fates have given him so much,

  He must have all or perish, — or look out

  Of London, where he sees too many lords.

  They’re part of half what ails him: I suppose 40

  There’s nothing fouler down among the demons

  Than what it is he feels when he remembers

  The dust and sweat and ointment of his calling

  With his lords looking on and laughing at him.

  King as he is, he can’t be king de facto, 45

  And that’s as well, because he wouldn’t like it;

  He’d frame a lower rating of men then

  Than he has now; and after that would come

  An abdication or an apoplexy.

  He can’t be king, not even king of Stratford, — 50

  Though half the world, if not the whole of it,

  May crown him with a crown that fits no king

  Save Lord Apollo’s homesick emissary:

  Not there on Avon, or on any stream

  Where Naiads and their white arms are no more, 55

  Shall he find home again. It’s all too bad.

  But there’s a comfort, for he’ll have that House —

  The best you ever saw; and he’ll be there

  Anon, as you’re an Alderman. Good God!

  He makes me lie awake o’nights and laugh. 60

  And you have known him from his origin,

  You tell me; and a most uncommon urchin

  He must have been to the few seeing ones —

  A trifle terrifying, I dare say,

  Discovering a world with his man’s eyes, 65

  Quite as another lad might see some finches,

  If he looked hard and had an eye for nature.

  But this one had his eyes and their foretelling,

  And he had you to fare with, and what else?

  He must have had a father and a mother — 70

  In fact I’ve heard him say so — and a dog,

  As a boy should, I venture; and the dog,

  Most likely, was the only man who knew him.

  A dog, for all I know, is what he needs

  As much as anything right here to-day, 75

  To counsel him about his disillusions,

  Old aches, and parturitions of what’s coming, —

  A dog of orders, an emeritus,

  To wag his tail at him when he comes home,

  And then to put his paws up on his knees 80

  And say, “For God’s sake, what’s it all about?”

  I don’t know whether he needs a dog or not —

  Or what he needs. I tell him he needs Greek;

  I’ll talk of rules and Aristotle with him,

  And if his tongue’s at home he’ll say to that, 85

  “I have your word that Aristotle knows,

  And you mine that I don’t know Aristotle.”

  He’s all at odds with all the unities,

  And what’s yet worse, it doesn’t seem to matter;

  He treads along through Time’s old wilderness 90

  As if the tramp of all the centuries

  Had left no roads — and there are none, for him;

  He doesn’t see them, even with those eyes, —

  And that’s a pity, or I say it is.

  Accordingly we have him as we have him — 95

  Going his way, the way that he goes best,

  A pleasant animal with no great noise

  Or nonsense anywhere to set him off —

  Save only divers and inclement devils

  Have made of late his heart their dwelling place. 100

  A flame half ready to fly out sometimes

  At some annoyance may be fanned up in him,

  But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out;

  He knows how little room there is in there

  For crude and futile animosities, 105

  And how much for the joy of being whole,

  And how much
for long sorrow and old pain.

  On our side there are some who may be given

  To grow old wondering what he thinks of us

  And some above us, who are, in his eyes, 110

  Above himself, — and that’s quite right and English.

  Yet here we smile, or disappoint the gods

  Who made it so: the gods have always eyes

  To see men scratch; and they see one down here

  Who itches, manor-bitten to the bone, 115

  Albeit he knows himself — yes, yes, he knows —

  The lord of more than England and of more

  Than all the seas of England in all time

  Shall ever wash. D’ye wonder that I laugh?

  He sees me, and he doesn’t seem to care; 120

  And why the devil should he? I can’t tell you.

  I’ll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday,

  Trim, rather spruce, and quite the gentleman.

  “What ho, my lord!” say I. He doesn’t hear me;

  Wherefore I have to pause and look at him. 125

  He’s not enormous, but one looks at him.

  A little on the round if you insist,

  For now, God save the mark, he’s growing old;

  He’s five and forty, and to hear him talk

  These days you’d call him eighty; then you’d add 130

  More years to that. He’s old enough to be

  The father of a world, and so he is.

  “Ben, you’re a scholar, what’s the time of day?”

  Says he; and there shines out of him again

  An aged light that has no age or station — 135

  The mystery that’s his — a mischievous

  Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame

  For being won so easy, and at friends

  Who laugh at him for what he wants the most,

  And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire; — 140

  By which you see we’re all a little jealous.…

  Poor Greene! I fear the color of his name

  Was even as that of his ascending soul;

  And he was one where there are many others, —

  Some scrivening to the end against their fate, 145

  Their puppets all in ink and all to die there;

  And some with hands that once would shade an eye

  That scanned Euripides and Æschylus

  Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop

  To slush their first and last of royalties. 150

  Poor devils! and they all play to his hand;

  For so it was in Athens and old Rome.

  But that’s not here or there; I’ve wandered off.

  Greene does it, or I’m careful. Where’s that boy?

  Yes, he’ll go back to Stratford. And we’ll miss him? 155

  Dear sir, there’ll be no London here without him.

  We’ll all be riding, one of these fine days,

  Down there to see him — and his wife won’t like us;

  And then we’ll think of what he never said

  Of women — which, if taken all in all 160

  With what he did say, would buy many horses.

  Though nowadays he’s not so much for women:

  “So few of them,” he says, “are worth the guessing.”

  But there’s a worm at work when he says that,

  And while he says it one feels in the air 165

  A deal of circumambient hocus-pocus.

  They’ve had him dancing till his toes were tender,

  And he can feel ’em now, come chilly rains.

  There’s no long cry for going into it,

  However, and we don’t know much about it. 170

  But you in Stratford, like most here in London,

  Have more now in the Sonnets than you paid for;

  He’s put one there with all her poison on,

  To make a singing fiction of a shadow

  That’s in his life a fact, and always will be. 175

  But she’s no care of ours, though Time, I fear,

  Will have a more reverberant ado

  About her than about another one

  Who seems to have decoyed him, married him,

  And sent him scuttling on his way to London, — 180

  With much already learned, and more to learn,

  And more to follow. Lord! how I see him now,

  Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us.

  Whatever he may have meant, we never had him;

  He failed us, or escaped, or what you will, — 185

  And there was that about him (God knows what, —

  We’d flayed another had he tried it on us)

  That made as many of us as had wits

  More fond of all his easy distances

  Than one another’s noise and clap-your-shoulder. 190

  But think you not, my friend, he’d never talk!

  Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened —

  Thereby acquiring much we knew before

  About ourselves, and hitherto had held

  Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose. 195

  And there were some, of course, and there be now,

  Disordered and reduced amazedly

  To resignation by the mystic seal

  Of young finality the gods had laid

  On everything that made him a young demon; 200

  And one or two shot looks at him already

  As he had been their executioner;

  And once or twice he was, not knowing it, —

  Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay

  And saying nothing.… Yet, for all his engines, 205

  You’ll meet a thousand of an afternoon

  Who strut and sun themselves and see around ‘em

  A world made out of more that has a reason

  Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;

  Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit 210

  But we mark how he sees in everything

  A law that, given we flout it once too often,

  Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.

  To me it looks as if the power that made him,

  For fear of giving all things to one creature, 215

  Left out the first, — faith, innocence, illusion,

  Whatever ’tis that keeps us out o’ Bedlam, —

  And thereby, for his too consuming vision,

  Empowered him out of nature; though to see him,

  You’d never guess what’s going on inside him. 220

  He’ll break out some day like a keg of ale

  With too much independent frenzy in it;

  And all for cellaring what he knows won’t keep,

  And what he’d best forget — but that he can’t.

  You’ll have it, and have more than I’m foretelling; 225

  And there’ll be such a roaring at the Globe

  As never stunned the bleeding gladiators.

  He’ll have to change the color of its hair

  A bit, for now he calls it Cleopatra.

  Black hair would never do for Cleopatra. 230

  But you and I are not yet two old women,

  And you’re a man of office. What he does

  Is more to you than how it is he does it, —

  And that’s what the Lord God has never told him.

  They work together, and the Devil helps ‘em; 235

  They do it of a morning, or if not,

  They do it of a night; in which event

  He’s peevish of a morning. He seems old;

  He’s not the proper stomach or the sleep —

  And they’re two sovran agents to conserve him 240

  Against the fiery art that has no mercy

  But what’s in that prodigious grand new House.

  I gather something happening in his boyhood

  Fulfilled him with a boy’s determination

  To make all Stratford ‘ware of him. Well, well, 245

  I hope at last he’ll have his jo
y of it,

  And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves,

  And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover,

  Be less than hell to his attendant ears.

  Oh, past a doubt we’ll all go down to see him. 250

  He may be wise. With London two days off,

  Down there some wind of heaven may yet revive him;

  But there’s no quickening breath from anywhere

  Small make of him again the poised young faun

  From Warwickshire, who’d made, it seems, already 255

  A legend of himself before I came

  To blink before the last of his first lightning.

  Whatever there be, there’ll be no more of that;

  The coming on of his old monster Time

  Has made him a still man; and he has dreams 260

  Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow.

  He knows how much of what men paint themselves

  Would blister in the light of what they are;

  He sees how much of what was great now shares

  An eminence transformed and ordinary; 265

  He knows too much of what the world has hushed

  In others, to be loud now for himself;

  He knows now at what height low enemies

  May reach his heart, and high friends let him fall;

  But what not even such as he may know 270

  Bedevils him the worst: his lark may sing

  At heaven’s gate how he will, and for as long

  As joy may listen, but he sees no gate,

  Save one whereat the spent clay waits a little

  Before the churchyard has it, and the worm. 275

  Not long ago, late in an afternoon,

  I came on him unseen down Lambeth way,

  And on my life I was afear’d of him:

  He gloomed and mumbled like a soul from Tophet,

  His hands behind him and his head bent solemn. 280

  “What is it now,” said I,— “another woman?”

  That made him sorry for me, and he smiled.

  “No, Ben,” he mused; “it’s Nothing. It’s all Nothing.

  We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re done;

  Spiders and flies — we’re mostly one or t’other — 285

  We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re done;

  “By God, you sing that song as if you knew it!”

  Said I, by way of cheering him; “what ails ye?”

  “I think I must have come down here to think,”

  Says he to that, and pulls his little beard; 290

  “Your fly will serve as well as anybody,

  And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies,

  And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance;