Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson
Page 10
XIV
THOUGH the sick beast infect us, we are fraught 105
Forever with indissoluble Truth,
Wherein redress reveals itself divine,
Transitional, transcendent. Grief and loss,
Disease and desolation, are the dreams
Of wasted excellence; and every dream 110
Has in it something of an ageless fact
That flouts deformity and laughs at years.
XV
WE lack the courage to be where we are: —
We love too much to travel on old roads,
To triumph on old fields; we love too much 115
To consecrate the magic of dead things,
And yieldingly to linger by long walls
Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight
That sheds a lying glory on old stones
Befriends us with a wizard’s enmity. 120
XVI
SOMETHING as one with eyes that look below
The battle-smoke to glimpse the foeman’s charge,
We through the dust of downward years may scan
The onslaught that awaits this idiot world
Where blood pays blood for nothing, and where life 125
Pays life to madness, till at last the ports
Of gilded helplessness be battered through
By the still crash of salvatory steel.
XVII
TO you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves,
And wonder if the night will ever come, 130
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 — 135
In this life or in any life — repose.
XVIII
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 140
Of insufficient grief. 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.
XIX
NOR jewelled phrase nor mere mellifluous rhyme 145
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, 150
Right-echoed of a chime primordial,
On anvils, in the gleaming of God’s forge.
XX
THE PROPHET of dead words defeats himself:
Whoever would acknowledge and include
The foregleam and the glory of the real, 155
Must work with something else than pen and ink
And painful preparation: he must work
With unseen implements that have no names,
And he must win withal, to do that work,
Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill. 160
XXI
TO curse the chilled insistence of the dawn
Because the free gleam lingers; to defraud
The constant opportunity that lives
Unchallenged in all sorrow; to forget
For this large prodigality of gold 165
That larger generosity of thought, —
These are the fleshly clogs of human greed,
The fundamental blunders of mankind.
XXII
FOREBODINGS are the fiends of Recreance;
The master of the moment, the clean seer 170
Of ages, too securely scans what is,
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 175
Of anguish to the liberated man.
XXIII
HERE by the windy docks I stand alone,
But yet companioned. There the vessel goes,
And there my friend goes with it; but the wake
That melts and ebbs between that friend and me 180
Love’s earnest is of Life’s all-purposeful
And all-triumphant sailing, when the ships
Of Wisdom loose their fretful chains and swing
Forever from the crumbled wharves of Time.
Two Quatrains
I
AS eons of incalculable strife
Are in the vision of one moment caught,
So are the common, concrete things of life
Divinely shadowed on the walls of Thought.
II
WE shriek to live, but no man ever lives 5
Till he has rid the ghost of human breath;
We dream to die, but no man ever dies
Till he has quit the road that runs to death.
The Torrent
I FOUND a torrent falling in a glen
Where the sun’s light shone silvered and leaf-split;
The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it
All made a magic symphony; but when
I thought upon the coming of hard men 5
To cut those patriarchal trees away,
And turn to gold the silver of that spray,
I shuddered. Yet a gladness now and then
Did wake me to myself till I was glad
In earnest, and was welcoming the time 10
For screaming saws to sound above the chime
Of idle waters, and for me to know
The jealous visionings that I had had
Were steps to the great place where trees and torrents go.
L’envoy
NOW in a thought, now in a shadowed word,
Now in a voice that thrills eternity,
Ever there comes an onward phrase to me
Of some transcendent music I have heard;
No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered, 5
No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory,
But a glad strain of some vast harmony
That no brief mortal touch has ever stirred.
There is no music in the world like this,
No character wherewith to set it down, 10
No kind of instrument to make it sing.
No kind of instrument? Ah, yes, there is;
And after time and place are overthrown,
God’s touch will keep its one chord quivering.
Captain Craig, Etc.
TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN HAYS GARDINER
Captain Craig
I
I DOUBT if ten men in all Tilbury Town
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,
Or called him by his name, or looked at him
So curiously, or so concernedly,
As they had looked at ashes; but a few — 5
Say five or six of us — had found somehow
The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,
Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,
By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life
And in his way had shared, with all mankind, 10
Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,
By some resplendent metamorphosis,
Whatever he was not. And after time,
When it had come sufficiently to pass
That he was going patch-clad through the streets, 15
Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid
Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve,
And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence,
Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,”
He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on, 20
And after it moved others — one or two;
For Captain Craig, before the
day was done,
Got back to the scant refuge of his bed
And shivered into it without a curse —
Without a murmur even. He was cold, 25
And old, and hungry; but the worst of it
Was a forlorn familiar consciousness
That he had failed again. There was a time
When he had fancied, if worst came to worst,
And he could do no more, that he might ask 30
Of whom he would. But once had been enough,
And soon there would be nothing more to ask.
He was himself, and he had lost the speed
He started with, and he was left behind.
There was no mystery, no tragedy; 35
And if they found him lying on his back
Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might, —
Well, once upon a time there was a man —
Es war einmal ein König, if it pleased him.
And he was right: there were no men to blame: 40
There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune —
A note that able-bodied men might sound
Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet.
They might have made him sing by feeding him
Till he should march again, but probably 45
Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;
They found it more melodious to shout
Right on, with unmolested adoration,
To keep the tune as it had always been,
To trust in God, and let the Captain starve. 50
He must have understood that afterwards —
When we had laid some fuel to the spark
Of him, and oxidized it — for he laughed
Out loud and long at us to feel it burn,
And then, for gratitude, made game of us: 55
“You are the resurrection and the life,”
He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings;
O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”
We were not quite accoutred for a blast
Of any lettered nonchalance like that, 60
And some of us — the five or six of us
Who found him out — were singularly struck.
But soon there came assurance of his lips,
Like phrases out of some sweet instrument
Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt 65
“No penitential shame for what had come,
No virtuous regret for what had been, —
But rather a joy to find it in his life
To be an outcast usher of the soul
For such as had good courage of the Sun 70
To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair;
And on the bottom of it, like a king,
For longer time than I dare chronicle,
Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized
His opportunity. My friends got out, 75
Like brokers out of Arcady; but I —
May be for fascination of the thing,
Or may be for the larger humor of it —
Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung.
When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful ooze 80
Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled
At me and then continued, earnestly:
“Your friends have had enough of it; but you,
For a motive hardly vindicated yet
By prudence or by conscience, have remained; 85
And that is very good, for I have things
To tell you: things that are not words alone —
Which are the ghosts of things — but something firmer.
“First, would I have you know, for every gift
Or sacrifice, there are — or there may be — 90
Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind
We feel for what we take, the larger kind
We feel for what we give. Once we have learned
As much as this, we know the truth has been
Told over to the world a thousand times; — 95
But we have had no ears to listen yet
For more than fragments of it: we have heard
A murmur now and then, and echo here
And there, and we have made great music of it;
And we have made innumerable books 100
To please the Unknown God. Time throws away
Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows
No death denies not one: the books all count,
The songs all count; and yet God’s music has
No modes, his language has no adjectives.” 105
“You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I;
“But what has this that you are saying now —
This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk —
To do with you and me?” The Captain raised
His hand and held it westward, where a patched 110
And unwashed attic-window filtered in
What barren light could reach us, and then said,
With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines
The sun. Behold it. We go round and round,
And wisdom comes to us with every whirl 115
We count throughout the circuit. We may say
The child is born, the boy becomes a man,
The man does this and that, and the man goes, —
But having said it we have not said much,
Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think, 120
That it will be the end of anything
When I am gone? There was a soldier once
Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead.
Sad friends went after, and they brought him home
And had a brass band at his funeral, 125
As you should have at mine; and after that
A few remembered him. But he was dead,
They said, and they should have their friend no more. —
However, there was once a starveling child —
A ragged-vested little incubus, 130
Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all
Capacity for childhood’s happiness —
Who started out one day, quite suddenly,
To drown himself. He ran away from home,
Across the clover-fields and through the woods, 135
And waited on a rock above a stream,
Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived,
Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow,
There came along a man who looked at him
With such an unexpected friendliness, 140
And talked with him in such a common way,
That life grew marvelously different:
What he had lately known for sullen trunks
And branches, and a world of tedious leaves,
Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind 145
That once had made the loneliest of all
Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music;
And water that had called him once to death
Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man,
Born to go down a soldier, did this thing. 150
Not much to do? Not very much, I grant you:
Good occupation for a sonneteer,
Or for a clown, or for a clergyman,
But small work for a soldier. By the way,
When you are weary sometimes of your own 155
Utility, I wonder if you find
Occasional great comfort pondering
What power a man has in him to put forth?
‘Of all the many marvelous things that are,
Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’ 160
Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago;
‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods
He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth,
Turning the broken mould, year after year.’…
“I turned a little furrow of my own 165
Once on a time, and everybody laughed —
&nb
sp; As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not
The First Intelligence, which we have drawn
In our competitive humility
As if it went forever on two legs, 170
Had some diversion of it: I believe
God’s humor is the music of the spheres —
But even as we draft omnipotence
Itself to our own image, we pervert
The courage of an infinite ideal 175
To finite resignation. You have made
The cement of your churches out of tears
And ashes, and the fabric will not stand:
The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored
So long with unavailing compromise 180
Will crumble down to dust and blow away,
And younger dust will follow after them;
Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled
First atom of the least that ever flew
Shall be by man defrauded of the touch 185
God thrilled it with to make a dream for man
When Science was unborn. And after time,
When we have earned our spiritual ears,
And art’s commiseration of the truth
No longer glorifies the singing beast, 190
Or venerates the clinquant charlatan, —
Then shall at last come ringing through the sun,
Through time, through flesh, a music that is true.
For wisdom is that music, and all joy
That wisdom: — you may counterfeit, you think, 195
The burden of it in a thousand ways;
But as the bitterness that loads your tears
Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom,
The penance, and the woeful pride you keep,
Make bitterness your buoyance of the world. 200
And at the fairest and the frenziedest
Alike of your God-fearing festivals,
You so compound the truth to pamper fear
That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith
You clamor for the food that shadows eat. 205
You call it rapture or deliverance, —
Passion or exaltation, or what most
The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness
Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch
For something larger, something unfulfilled, 210
Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have