The torn blue curtains and the broken glass,
I seem to be afraid of the old place;
And something stiffens up and down my face, 5
For all the world as if I saw the ghost
Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host,
With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.
The Tavern has a story, but no man
Can tell us what it is. We only know 10
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 changless 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 5
Who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way,
Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,
To vanish in irrevocable night.
What does it mean, this barren age of ours?
Here are the men, the women, and the flowers, 10
The seasons, and the sunset, as before.
What does it mean? Shall there not one arise
To wrench one banner from the western skies,
And mark it with his name forevermore?
George Crabbe
GIVE him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, —
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows, 5
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 10
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.
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 5
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, 10
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all — above, beyond it all —
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light.
On the Night of a Friend’s Wedding
IF ever I am old, and all alone,
I shall have killed one grief, at any rate;
For then, thank God, I shall not have to wait
Much longer for the sheaves that I have sown.
The devil only knows what I have done, 5
But here I am, and here are six or eight
Good friends, who most ingenuously prate
About my songs to such and such a one.
But everything is all askew to-night, —
As if the time were come, or almost come, 10
For their untenanted mirage of me
To lose itself and crumble out of sight,
Like a tall ship that floats above the foam
A little while, and then breaks utterly.
Sonnet
THE MASTER and the slave go hand in hand,
Though touch be lost. The poet is a slave,
And there be kings do sorrowfully crave
The joyance that a scullion may command.
But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understand 5
The mission of his bondage, or the grave
May clasp his bones, or ever he shall save
The perfect word that is the poet’s wand.
The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes
Are for Thought’s purest gold the jewel-stones; 10
But shapes and echoes that are never done
Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes
Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones
The crash of battles that are never won.
Verlaine
WHY do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?
Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse 5
To tell the story of the life he led.
Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,
And let the worms be its biographers.
Song sloughs away the sin to find redress
In art’s complete remembrance: nothing clings 10
For long but laurel to the stricken brow
That felt the Muse’s finger; nothing less
Than hell’s fulfilment of the end of things
Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.
Sonnet
WHEN we can all so excellently give
The measure of love’s wisdom with a blow, —
Why can we not in turn receive it so,
And end this murmur for the life we live?
And when we do so frantically strive 5
To win strange faith, why do we shun to know
That in love’s elemental over-glow
God’s wholeness gleams with light superlative?
Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all,
Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, 10
Or anything God ever made that grows, —
Nor let the smallest vision of it slip,
Till you may read, as on Belshazzar’s wall,
The glory of eternal partnership.
Supremacy
THERE is a drear and lonely tract of hell
From all the common gloom removed afar:
A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,
Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.
I walked among them and I knew them well: 5
Men I had slandered on life’s little star
For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar
Upon their brows of woe ineffable.
But as I went majestic on my way,
Into the dark they vanished, one by one, 10
Till, with a shaft of God’s eternal day,
The dream of all my glory was undone, —
And, with a fool’s importunate dismay,
I heard the dead men singing in the sun.
The Chorus of Old Men in “Ægeus”
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, 5
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, 10
Into the mist they go,
Into the mist of death.
O shades of you that loved him long before
The cruel threads of that black sail were spun,
May loyal arms and ancient welcomings 15
Receive him once again
Who now no longer moves
Here in this flickering dance of changing days,
Where a battle is lost and won for a withered wreath,
And the black master Deat
h is over all 20
To chill with his approach,
To level with his touch,
The reigning strength of youth,
The fluttered heart of age.
Woe for the fateful day when Delphi’s word was lost — 25
Woe for the loveless prince of Æthra’s line!
Woe for a father’s tears and the curse of a king’s release —
Woe for the wings of pride and the shafts of doom!
And thou, the saddest wind
That ever blew from Crete, 30
Sing the fell tidings back to that thrice unhappy ship! —
Sing to the western flame,
Sing to the dying foam.
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, 35
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 40
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.
The Wilderness
COME away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes,
And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;
There’s a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland
Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.
There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn 5
Put off the summer’s languor with a touch that made us glad
For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we cannot follow,
To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores.
Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,
Calling us to come to them, and roam no more. 10
Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,
There’s an old song calling us to come!
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, 15
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;
But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us
In the strangeness of home-coming, and a woman’s waiting eyes. 20
Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us —
Nothing now to comfort us, but love’s road home: —
Over there beyond the darkness there’s a window gleams to greet us,
And a warm hearth waits for us within.
Come away! come away! — or the roving-fiend will hold us, 25
And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
There are no men yet may leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,
There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.
So we’ll be up and on the way, and the less we boast the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: — 30
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
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, 35
And the long fall wind on the lake.
Octaves
I
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 5
Of uncreated failure; we forget,
The while we groan, that God’s accomplishment
Is always and unfailingly at hand.
II
TUMULTUOUSLY void of a clean scheme
Whereon to build, whereof to formulate, 10
The legion life that riots in mankind
Goes ever plunging upward, up and down,
Most like some crazy regiment at arms,
Undisciplined of aught but Ignorance,
And ever led resourcelessly along 15
To brainless carnage by drunk trumpeters.
III
TO me the groaning of world-worshippers
Rings like a lonely music played in hell
By one with art enough to cleave the walls
Of heaven with his cadence, but without 20
The wisdom or the will to comprehend
The strangeness of his own perversity,
And all without the courage to deny
The profit and the pride of his defeat.
IV
WHILE we are drilled in error, we are lost 25
Alike to truth and usefulness. We think
We are great warriors now, and we can brag
Like Titans; but the world is growing young,
And we, the fools of time, are growing with it: —
We do not fight to-day, we only die; 30
We are too proud of death, and too ashamed
Of God, to know enough to be alive.
V
THERE is one battle-field whereon we fall
Triumphant and unconquered; but, alas!
We are too fleshly fearful of ourselves 35
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. 40
VI
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; and we shall read, 45
With unoppressed and unoffended eyes,
That record of All-Soul whereon God writes
In everlasting runes the truth of Him.
VII
THE GUERDON of new childhood is repose: —
Once he has read the primer of right thought, 50
A man may claim between two smithy strokes
Beatitude enough to realize
God’s parallel completeness in the vague
And incommensurable excellence
That equitably uncreates itself 55
And makes a whirlwind of the Universe.
VIII
THERE is no loneliness: — no matter where
We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends
Forsake us in the seeming, we are all
At one with a complete companionship; 60
And though forlornly joyless be the ways
We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams
Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there,
Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets.
IX
WHEN one that you and I had all but sworn 65
To be the purest thing God ever made
Bewilders us until at last it seems
An angel has come back restigmatized, —
Faith wavers, and we wonder what there is
On earth to make us faithful any more, 70
But never are quit
e wise enough to know
The wisdom that is in that wonderment.
X
WHERE does a dead man go? — The dead man dies;
But the free life that would no longer feed
On fagots of outburned and shattered flesh 75
Wakes to a thrilled invisible advance,
Unchained (or fettered else) of memory;
And when the dead man goes it seems to me
‘T were better for us all to do away
With weeping, and be glad that he is gone. 80
XI
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; and thus we die, 85
Still searching, like poor old astronomers
Who totter off to bed and go to sleep,
To dream of untriangulated stars.
XII
WITH conscious eyes not yet sincere enough
To pierce the glimmered cloud that fluctuates 90
Between me and the glorifying light
That screens itself with knowledge, I discern
The searching rays of wisdom that reach through
The mist of shame’s infirm credulity,
And infinitely wonder if hard words 95
Like mine have any message for the dead.
XIII
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, 100
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.
Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson Page 9