Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson
Page 18
Five or none, the game goes on, and on goes the river.
“For after all that we have done and all that we have failed to do,
Life will be life and a world will have its work to do: 50
Every man who follows us will heed in his own fashion
The calling and the warning and the friends who do not know:
Each will hold an icy knife to punish his heart’s lover,
And each will go the frozen way to find the golden river.”
There you hear him, all he says, and the last we’ll ever get from him. 55
Now he wants to sleep, and that will be the best for him.
Let him have his own way — no, you needn’t shake him —
Your own turn will come, so let the man sleep.
For this is what we know: we are stalled here together —
Hands and feet and hearts of us, to find the golden river. 60
And there’s a quicker way than sleep? … Never mind the looks of him:
All he needs now is a finger on the eyes of him.
You there on the left hand, reach a little over —
Shut the stars away, or he’ll see them all night:
He’ll see them all night and he’ll see them all tomorrow, 65
Crawling down the frozen sky, cold and hard and yellow.
Won’t you move an inch or two — to keep the stars away from him?
— No, he won’t move, and there’s no need of asking him.
Never mind the twelve men, never mind the women;
Three while we last, we’ll let them all go; 70
And we’ll hold our thoughts north while we starve here together,
Looking each his own way to find the golden river.
The Growth of “Lorraine”
I
WHILE I stood listening, discreetly dumb,
Lorraine was having the last word with me:
“I know,” she said, “I know it, but you see
Some creatures are born fortunate, and some
Are born to be found out and overcome, — 5
Born to be slaves, to let the rest go free;
And if I’m one of them (and I must be)
You may as well forget me and go home.
“You tell me not to say these things, I know,
But I should never try to be content: 10
I’ve gone too far; the life would be too slow.
Some could have done it — some girls have the stuff;
But I can’t do it: I don’t know enough.
I’m going to the devil.” — And she went.
II
I DID not half believe her when she said 15
That I should never hear from her again;
Nor when I found a letter from Lorraine,
Was I surprised or grieved at what I read:
“Dear friend, when you find this, I shall be dead.
You are too far away to make me stop. 20
They say that one drop — think of it, one drop! —
Will be enough, — but I’ll take five instead.
“You do not frown because I call you friend,
For I would have you glad that I still keep
Your memory, and even at the end — 25
Impenitent, sick, shattered — cannot curse
The love that flings, for better or for worse,
This worn-out, cast-out flesh of mine to sleep.”
The Sage
FOREGUARDED and unfevered and serene,
Back to the perilous gates of Truth he went —
Back to fierce wisdom and the Orient,
To the Dawn that is, that shall be, and has been:
Previsioned of the madness and the mean, 5
He stood where Asia, crowned with ravishment,
The curtain of Love’s inner shrine had rent,
And after had gone scarred by the Unseen.
There at his touch there was a treasure chest,
And in it was a gleam, but not of gold; 10
And on it, like a flame, these words were scrolled:
“I keep the mintage of Eternity.
Who comes to take one coin may take the rest,
And all may come — but not without the key.”
Erasmus
WHEN he protested, not too solemnly,
That for a world’s achieving maintenance
The crust of overdone divinity
Lacked aliment, they called it recreance;
And when he chose through his own glass to scan 5
Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly,
The monk within the cassock to the man
Within the monk, they called it heresy.
And when he made so perilously bold
As to be scattered forth in black and white, 10
Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled
Their inward eyes in anguish and affright;
There were some of them did shake at what was told,
And they shook best who knew that he was right.
The Woman and The Wife
I — THE EXPLANATION
“YOU thought we knew,” she said, “but we were wrong.
This we can say, the rest we do not say;
Nor do I let you throw yourself away
Because you love me. Let us both be strong,
And we shall find in sorrow, before long, 5
Only the price Love ruled that we should pay:
The dark is at the end of every day,
And silence is the end of every song.
“You ask me for one proof that I speak right,
But I can answer only what I know; 10
You look for just one lie to make black white,
But I can tell you only what is true —
God never made me for the wife of you.
This we can say, — believe me! … Tell me so!”
II — THE ANNIVERSARY
“GIVE me the truth, whatever it may be. 15
You thought we knew, now tell me what you miss:
You are the one to tell me what it is —
You are a man, and you have married me.
What is it worth tonight that you can see
More marriage in the dream of one dead kiss 20
Than in a thousand years of life like this?
Passion has turned the lock, Pride keeps the key.
“Whatever I have said or left unsaid,
Whatever I have done or left undone, —
Tell me. Tell me the truth.… Are you afraid? 25
Do you think that Love was ever fed with lies
But hunger lived thereafter in his eyes?
Do you ask me to take moonlight for the sun?”
The Book of Annandale
I
PARTLY to think, more to be left alone,
George Annandale said something to his friends —
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gaze — and went upstairs;
And there, in the one room that he could call 5
His own, he found a sort of meaningless
Annoyance in the mute familiar things
That filled it; for the grate’s monotonous gleam
Was not the gleam that he had known before,
The books were not the books that used to be, 10
The place was not the place. There was a lack
Of something; and the certitude of death
Itself, as with a furtive questioning,
Hovered, and he could not yet understand.
He knew that she was gone — there was no need 15
Of any argued proof to tell him that,
For they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the leaves and snow; and still there was
A doubt, a pitiless doubt, a plunging doubt,
That struck him, and upstartled when it struck, 20
The vision, the old thought in him. There was
A lack, and one that wrenched
him; but it was
Not that — not that. There was a present sense
Of something indeterminably near —
The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness 25
That would not be foreboding. And if not,
What then? — or was it anything at all?
Yes, it was something — it was everything —
But what was everything? or anything?
Tired of time, bewildered, he sat down; 30
But in his chair he kept on wondering
That he should feel so desolately strange
And yet — for all he knew that he had lost
More of the world than most men ever win —
So curiously calm. And he was left 35
Unanswered and unsatisfied: there came
No clearer meaning to him than had come
Before; the old abstraction was the best
That he could find, the farthest he could go;
To that was no beginning and no end — 40
No end that he could reach. So he must learn
To live the surest and the largest life
Attainable in him, would he divine
The meaning of the dream and of the words
That he had written, without knowing why, 45
On sheets that he had bound up like a book
And covered with red leather. There it was —
There in his desk, the record he had made,
The spiritual plaything of his life:
There were the words no eyes had ever seen 50
Save his; there were the words that were not made
For glory or for gold. The pretty wife
Whom he had loved and lost had not so much
As heard of them. They were not made for her.
His love had been so much the life of her, 55
And hers had been so much the life of him,
That any wayward phrasing on his part
Would have had no moment. Neither had lived enough
To know the book, albeit one of them
Had grown enough to write it. There it was, 60
However, though he knew not why it was:
There was the book, but it was not for her,
For she was dead. And yet, there was the book.
Thus would his fancy circle out and out,
And out and in again, till he would make 65
As if with a large freedom to crush down
Those under-thoughts. He covered with his hands
His tired eyes, and waited: he could hear —
Or partly feel and hear, mechanically —
The sound of talk, with now and then the steps 70
And skirts of some one scudding on the stairs,
Forgetful of the nerveless funeral feet
That she had brought with her; and more than once
There came to him a call as of a voice —
A voice of love returning — but not hers. 75
Whose he knew not, nor dreamed; nor did he know,
Nor did he dream, in his blurred loneliness
Of thought, what all the rest might think of him.
For it had come at last, and she was gone
With all the vanished women of old time, — 80
And she was never coming back again.
Yes, they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the frozen leaves and the cold earth,
Under the leaves and snow. The flickering week,
The sharp and certain day, and the long drowse 85
Were over, and the man was left alone.
He knew the loss — therefore it puzzled him
That he should sit so long there as he did,
And bring the whole thing back — the love, the trust,
The pallor, the poor face, and the faint way 90
She last had looked at him — and yet not weep,
Or even choose to look about the room
To see how sad it was; and once or twice
He winked and pinched his eyes against the flame
And hoped there might be tears. But hope was all, 95
And all to him was nothing: he was lost.
And yet he was not lost: he was astray —
Out of his life and in another life;
And in the stillness of this other life
He wondered and he drowsed. He wondered when 100
It was, and wondered if it ever was
On earth that he had known the other face —
The searching face, the eloquent, strange face —
That with a sightless beauty looked at him
And with a speechless promise uttered words 105
That were not the world’s words, or any kind
That he had known before. What was it, then?
What was it held him — fascinated him?
Why should he not be human? He could sigh,
And he could even groan, — but what of that? 110
There was no grief left in him. Was he glad?
Yet how could he be glad, or reconciled,
Or anything but wretched and undone?
How could he be so frigid and inert —
So like a man with water in his veins 115
Where blood had been a little while before?
How could he sit shut in there like a snail?
What ailed him? What was on him? Was he glad?
Over and over again the question came,
Unanswered and unchanged, — and there he was. 120
But what in heaven’s name did it all mean?
If he had lived as other men had lived,
If home had ever shown itself to be
The counterfeit that others had called home,
Then to this undivined resource of his 125
There were some key; but now … Philosophy?
Yes, he could reason in a kind of way
That he was glad for Miriam’s release —
Much as he might be glad to see his friends
Laid out around him with their grave-clothes on, 130
And this life done for them; but something else
There was that foundered reason, overwhelmed it,
And with a chilled, intuitive rebuff
Beat back the self-cajoling sophistries
That his half-tutored thought would half-project. 135
What was it, then? Had he become transformed
And hardened through long watches and long grief
Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing
That brooded like a man, breathed like a man, —
Did everything but ache? And was a day 140
To come some time when feeling should return
Forever to drive off that other face —
The lineless, indistinguishable face —
That once had thrilled itself between his own
And hers there on the pillow, — and again 145
Between him and the coffin-lid had flashed
Like fate before it closed, — and at the last
Had come, as it should seem, to stay with him,
Bidden or not? He were a stranger then,
Foredrowsed awhile by some deceiving draught 150
Of poppied anguish, to the covert grief
And the stark loneliness that waited him,
And for the time were cursedly endowed
With a dull trust that shammed indifference
To knowing there would be no touch again 155
Of her small hand on his, no silencing
Of her quick lips on his, no feminine
Completeness and love-fragrance in the house,
No sound of some one singing any more,
No smoothing of slow fingers on his hair, 160
No shimmer of pink slippers on brown tiles.
But there was nothing, nothing, in all that:
He had not fooled himself so much as that;
He might be dreaming or he might be sick,
But not like that. There was no place
for fear, 165
No reason for remorse. There was the book
That he had made, though.… It might be the book;
Perhaps he might find something in the book;
But no, there could be nothing there at all —
He knew it word for word; but what it meant — 170
He was not sure that he had written it
For what it meant; and he was not quite sure
That he had written it; — more likely it
Was all a paper ghost.… But the dead wife
Was real: he knew all that, for he had been 175
To see them bury her; and he had seen
The flowers and the snow and the stripped limbs
Of trees; and he had heard the preacher pray;
And he was back again, and he was glad.
Was he a brute? No, he was not a brute: 180
He was a man — like any other man:
He had loved and married his wife Miriam,
They had lived a little while in paradise
And she was gone; and that was all of it.
But no, not all of it — not all of it: 185
There was the book again; something in that
Pursued him, overpowered him, put out
The futile strength of all his whys and wheres,
And left him unintelligibly numb —
Too numb to care for anything but rest. 190
It must have been a curious kind of book
That he had made it: it was a drowsy book
At any rate. The very thought of it
Was like the taste of some impossible drink —
A taste that had no taste, but for all that 195
Had mixed with it a strange thought-cordial,
So potent that it somehow killed in him
The ultimate need of doubting any more —
Of asking any more. Did he but live
The life that he must live, there were no more 200
To seek. — The rest of it was on the way.
Still there was nothing, nothing, in all this —
Nothing that he cared now to reconcile
With reason or with sorrow. All he knew
For certain was that he was tired out: 205
His flesh was heavy and his blood beat small;
Something supreme had been wrenched out of him