Whom Asher had brought with him for a day 970
With nature. They had found me when they came;
And there was not much left of me to find.
I had not moved or known that I was there
Since I had seen his eyes and felt his breath;
And it was not for some uncertain hours 975
After they came that either would say how long
That might have been. It should have been much longer.
All you may add will be your own invention,
For I have told you all there is to tell.
Tomorrow I shall have another birthday, 980
And with it there may come another message —
Although I cannot see the need of it,
Or much more need of drowning, if that’s all
Men drown for — when they drown. You know as much
As I know about that, though I’ve a right, 985
If not a reason, to be on my guard;
And only God knows what good that will do.
Now you may get some air. Good night! — and thank you.”
He smiled, but I would rather he had not.
I wished that Avon’s wife would go to sleep, 990
But whether she found sleep that night or not
I do not know. I was awake for hours,
Toiling in vain to let myself believe
That Avon’s apparition was a dream,
And that he might have added, for romance, 995
The part that I had taken home with me
For reasons not in Avon’s dictionary.
But each recurrent memory of his eyes,
And of the man himself that I had known
So long and well, made soon of all my toil 1000
An evanescent and a vain evasion;
And it was half as in expectancy
That I obeyed the summons of his wife
A little before dawn, and was again
With Avon in the room where I had left him, 1005
But not with the same Avon I had left.
The doctor, an august authority,
With eminence abroad as well as here,
Looked hard at me as if I were the doctor
And he the friend. “I have had eyes on Avon 1010
For more than half a year,” he said to me,
“And I have wondered often what it was
That I could see that I was not to see.
Though he was in the chair where you are looking,
I told his wife — I had to tell her something — 1015
It was a nightmare and an aneurism;
And so, or partly so, I’ll say it was.
The last without the first will be enough
For the newspapers and the undertaker;
Yet if we doctors were not all immune 1020
From death, disease, and curiosity,
My diagnosis would be sorry for me.
He died, you know, because he was afraid —
And he had been afraid for a long time;
And we who knew him well would all agree 1025
To fancy there was rather more than fear.
The door was locked inside — they broke it in
To find him — but she heard him when it came.
There are no signs of any visitors,
Or need of them. If I were not a child 1030
Of science, I should say it was the devil.
I don’t believe it was another woman,
And surely it was not another man.”
Mr. Flood’s Party
OLD Eben Flood, climbing along one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily. 5
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:
“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more; 10
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood, 15
Since you propose it, I believe I will.”
Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn. 20
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.
Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child 25
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men 30
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:
“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was 35
We had a drop together. Welcome home!”
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might. 40
“Only a very little, Mr. Flood —
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.”
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness 45
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang —
“For auld lang syne.” The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done, 50
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below —
Where strangers would have shut the many doors 55
That many friends had opened long ago.
Ben Trovato
THE DEACON thought. “I know them,” he began,
“And they are all you ever heard of them —
Allurable to no sure theorem,
The scorn or the humility of man.
You say ‘Can I believe it?’ — and I can; 5
And I’m unwilling even to condemn
The benefaction of a stratagem
Like hers — and I’m a Presbyterian.
“Though blind, with but a wandering hour to live,
He felt the other woman in the fur 10
That now the wife had on. Could she forgive
All that? Apparently. Her rings were gone,
Of course; and when he found that she had none,
He smiled — as he had never smiled at her.”
The Tree in Pamela’s Garden
PAMELA was too gentle to deceive
Her roses. “Let the men stay where they are,”
She said, “and if Apollo’s avatar
Be one of them, I shall not have to grieve.”
And so she made all Tilbury Town believe 5
She sighed a little more for the North Star
Than over men, and only in so far
As she was in a garden was like Eve.
Her neighbors — doing all that neighbors can
To make romance of reticence meanwhile — 10
Seeing that she had never loved a man,
&nbs
p; Wished Pamela had a cat, or a small bird,
And only would have wondered at her smile
Could they have seen that she had overheard.
Vain Gratuities
NEVER was there a man much uglier
In eyes of other women, or more grim:
“The Lord has filled her chalice to the brim,
So let us pray she’s a philosopher,”
They said; and there was more they said of her — 5
Deeming it, after twenty years with him,
No wonder that she kept her figure slim
And always made you think of lavender.
But she, demure as ever, and as fair,
Almost, as they remembered her before 10
She found him, would have laughed had she been there;
And all they said would have been heard no more
Than foam that washes on an island shore
Where there are none to listen or to care.
Job the Rejected
THEY met, and overwhelming her distrust
With penitence, he praised away her fear;
They married, and Job gave him half a year
To wreck the temple, as we knew he must.
He fumbled hungrily to readjust 5
A fallen altar, but the road was clear
By which it was her will to disappear
That evening when Job found him in the dust.
Job would have deprecated such a way
Of heaving fuel on a sacred fire, 10
Yet even the while we saw it going out,
Hardly was Job to find his hour to shout;
And Job was not, so far as we could say,
The confirmation of her soul’s desire.
Lost Anchors
LIKE a dry fish flung inland far from shore,
There lived a sailor, warped and ocean-browned,
Who told of an old vessel, harbor-drowned
And out of mind a century before,
Where divers, on descending to explore 5
A legend that had lived its way around
The world of ships, in the dark hulk had found
Anchors, which had been seized and seen no more.
Improving a dry leisure to invest
Their misadventure with a manifest 10
Analogy that he may read who runs,
The sailor made it old as ocean grass —
Telling of much that once had come to pass
With him, whose mother should have had no sons.
Recalled
LONG after there were none of them alive
About the place — where there is now no place
But a walled hole where fruitless vines embrace
Their parent skeletons that yet survive
In evil thorns — none of us could arrive 5
At a more cogent answer to their ways
Than one old Isaac in his latter days
Had humor or compassion to contrive.
I mentioned them, and Isaac shook his head:
“The Power that you call yours and I call mine 10
Extinguished in the last of them a line
That Satan would have disinherited.
When we are done with all but the Divine,
We die.” And there was no more to be said.
Modernities
SMALL knowledge have we that by knowledge met
May not some day be quaint as any told
In almagest or chronicle of old,
Whereat we smile because we are as yet
The last — though not the last who may forget 5
What cleavings and abrasions manifold
Have marked an armor that was never scrolled
Before for human glory and regret.
With infinite unseen enemies in the way
We have encountered the intangible, 10
To vanquish where our fathers, who fought well,
Scarce had assumed endurance for a day;
Yet we shall have our darkness, even as they,
And there shall be another tale to tell.
Afterthoughts
WE parted where the old gas-lamp still burned
Under the wayside maple and walked on,
Into the dark, as we had always done;
And I, no doubt, if he had not returned,
Might yet be unaware that he had earned 5
More than earth gives to many who have won
More than it has to give when they are gone —
As duly and indelibly I learned.
The sum of all that he came back to say
Was little then, and would be less today: 10
With him there were no Delphic heights to climb,
Yet his were somehow nearer the sublime.
He spoke, and went again by the old way —
Not knowing it would be for the last time.
Caput Mortuum
NOT even if with a wizard force I might
Have summoned whomsoever I would name,
Should anyone else have come than he who came,
Uncalled, to share with me my fire that night;
For though I should have said that all was right, 5
Or right enough, nothing had been the same
As when I found him there before the flame,
Always a welcome and a useful sight.
Unfailing and exuberant all the time,
Having no gold he paid with golden rhyme, 10
Of older coinage than his old defeat,
A debt that like himself was obsolete
In Art’s long hazard, where no man may choose
Whether he play to win or toil to lose.
Monadnock Through the Trees
BEFORE there was in Egypt any sound
Of those who reared a more prodigious means
For the self-heavy sleep of kings and queens
Than hitherto had mocked the most renowned, —
Unvisioned here and waiting to be found, 5
Alone, amid remote and older scenes,
You loomed above ancestral evergreens
Before there were the first of us around.
And when the last of us, if we know how,
See farther from ourselves than we do now, 10
Assured with other sight than heretofore
That we have done our mortal best and worst, —
Your calm will be the same as when the first
Assyrians went howling south to war.
The Long Race
UP the old hill to the old house again
Where fifty years ago the friend was young
Who should be waiting somewhere there among
Old things that least remembered most remain,
He toiled on with a pleasure that was pain 5
To think how soon asunder would be flung
The curtain half a century had hung
Between the two ambitions they had slain.
They dredged an hour for words, and then were done.
“Good-bye!… You have the same old weather-vane — 10
Your little horse that’s always on the run.”
And all the way down back to the next train,
Down the old hill to the old road again,
It seemed as if the little horse had won.
Many Are Called
THE LORD APOLLO, who has never died,
Still holds alone his immemorial reign,
Supreme in an impregnable domain
That with his magic he has fortified;
And though melodious multitudes have tried 5
In ecstasy, in anguish, and in vain,
With invocation sacred and profane
To lure him, even the loudest are outside.
Only at unconjectured intervals,
By will of him on whom no man may gaze, 10
By word of him whose law no man has read,
A questing light may rift the sullen walls,
To cling where mostly its infrequent rays
&n
bsp; Fall golden on the patience of the dead.
Rembrandt to Rembrandt
(AMSTERDAM, 1645)
AND there you are again, now as you are.
Observe yourself as you discern yourself
In your discredited ascendency;
Without your velvet or your feathers now,
Commend your new condition to your fate, 5
And your conviction to the sieves of time.
Meanwhile appraise yourself, Rembrandt van Ryn,
Now as you are — formerly more or less
Distinguished in the civil scenery,
And once a painter. There you are again, 10
Where you may see that you have on your shoulders
No lovelier burden for an ornament
Than one man’s head that’s yours. Praise be to God
That you have that; for you are like enough
To need it now, my friend, and from now on; 15
For there are shadows and obscurities
Immediate or impending on your view,
That may be worse than you have ever painted
For the bewildered and unhappy scorn
Of injured Hollanders in Amsterdam 20
Who cannot find their fifty florins’ worth
Of Holland face where you have hidden it
In your new golden shadow that excites them,
Or see that when the Lord made color and light
He made not one thing only, or believe 25
That shadows are not nothing. Saskia said,
Before she died, how they would swear at you,
And in commiseration at themselves.
She laughed a little, too, to think of them —
And then at me.… That was before she died. 30
And I could wonder, as I look at you,
There as I have you now, there as you are,
Or nearly so as any skill of mine
Has ever caught you in a bilious mirror, —
Yes, I could wonder long, and with a reason, 35
If all but everything achievable
Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson Page 52