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  The Three Taverns

  A Book of Poems

  By Edwin Arlington Robinson

  Author of "The Man Against the Sky", "Merlin, A Poem", etc.

  [American (Maine) Poet.  1869-1935.]




  To THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY and LILLA CABOT PERRY




  Contents



  The Valley of the Shadow
  The Wandering Jew
  Neighbors
  The Mill
  The Dark Hills
  The Three Taverns
  Demos I
  Demos II
  The Flying Dutchman
  Tact
  On the Way
  John Brown
  The False Gods
  Archibald's Example
  London Bridge
  Tasker Norcross
  A Song at Shannon's
  Souvenir
  Discovery
  Firelight
  The New Tenants
  Inferential
  The Rat
  Rahel to Varnhagen
  Nimmo
  Peace on Earth
  Late Summer
  An Evangelist's Wife
  The Old King's New Jester
  Lazarus


Several poems included in this book appeared originally
in American periodicals, as follows:  The Three Taverns, London Bridge,
A Song at Shannon's, The New Tenants, Discovery, John Brown;
Archibald's Example, The Valley of the Shadow; Nimmo; The Wandering Jew,
Souvenir; Neighbors, Tact; Demos; The Mill, An Evangelist's Wife;
Firelight; Late Summer; Inferential; The Flying Dutchman;
On the Way, The False Gods; Peace on Earth; The Old King's New Jester.





     -------------------
      The Three Taverns
     -------------------





  The Valley of the Shadow

  There were faces to remember in the Valley of the Shadow,
  There were faces unregarded, there were faces to forget;
  There were fires of grief and fear that are a few forgotten ashes,
  There were sparks of recognition that are not forgotten yet.
  For at first, with an amazed and overwhelming indignation
  At a measureless malfeasance that obscurely willed it thus,
  They were lost and unacquainted -- till they found themselves in others,
  Who had groped as they were groping where dim ways were perilous.

  There were lives that were as dark as are the fears and intuitions
  Of a child who knows himself and is alone with what he knows;
  There were pensioners of dreams and there were debtors of illusions,
  All to fail before the triumph of a weed that only grows.
  There were thirsting heirs of golden sieves that held not wine or water,
  And had no names in traffic or more value there than toys:
  There were blighted sons of wonder in the Valley of the Shadow,
  Where they suffered and still wondered why their wonder made no noise.

  There were slaves who dragged the shackles of a precedent unbroken,
  Demonstrating the fulfilment of unalterable schemes,
  Which had been, before the cradle, Time's inexorable tenants
  Of what were now the dusty ruins of their father's dreams.
  There were these, and there were many who had stumbled up to manhood,
  Where they saw too late the road they should have taken long ago:
  There were thwarted clerks and fiddlers in the Valley of the Shadow,
  The commemorative wreckage of what others did not know.

  And there were daughters older than the mothers who had borne them,
  Being older in their wisdom, which is older than the earth;
  And they were going forward only farther into darkness,
  Unrelieved as were the blasting obligations of their birth;
  And among them, giving always what was not for their possession,
  There were maidens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes:
  There were daughters of the silence in the Valley of the Shadow,
  Each an isolated item in the family sacrifice.

  There were creepers among catacombs where dull regrets were torches,
  Giving light enough to show them what was there upon the shelves --
  Where there was more for them to see than pleasure would remember
  Of something that had been alive and once had been themselves.
  There were some who stirred the ruins with a solid imprecation,
  While as many fled repentance for the promise of despair:
  There were drinkers of wrong waters in the Valley of the Shadow,
  And all the sparkling ways were dust that once had led them there.

  There were some who knew the steps of Age incredibly beside them,
  And his fingers upon shoulders that had never felt the wheel;
  And their last of empty trophies was a gilded cup of nothing,
  Which a contemplating vagabond would not have come to steal.
  Long and often had they figured for a larger valuation,
  But the size of their addition was the balance of a doubt:
  There were gentlemen of leisure in the Valley of the Shadow,
  Not allured by retrospection, disenchanted, and played out.

  And among the dark endurances of unavowed reprisals
  There were silent eyes of envy that saw little but saw well;
  And over beauty's aftermath of hazardous ambitions
  There were tears for what had vanished as they vanished where they fell.
  Not assured of what was theirs, and always hungry for the nameless,
  There were some whose only passion was for Time who made them cold:
  There were numerous fair women in the Valley of the Shadow,
  Dreaming rather less of heaven than of hell when they were old.

  Now and then, as if to scorn the common touch of common sorrow,
  There were some who gave a few the distant pity of a smile;
  And another cloaked a soul as with an ash of human embers,
  Having covered thus a treasure that would last him for a while.
  There were many by the presence of the many disaffected,
  Whose exemption was included in the weight that others bore:
  There were seekers after darkness in the Valley of the Shadow,
  And they alone were there to find what they were looking for.

  So they were, and so they are; and as they came are coming others,
  And among them are the fearless and the meek and the unborn;
  And a question that has held us heretofore without an answer
  May abide without an answer until all have ceased to mourn.
  For the children of the dark are more to name than are the wretched,
  Or the broken, or the weary, or the baffled, or the shamed:
  There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow,
  And among them are the dying and the blinded and the maimed.




  The Wandering Jew

  I saw by looking in his eyes
  That they remembered everything;
  And this was how I came to know
  That he was here, still wandering.
  For though the figure and the scene
  Were never to be reconciled,
  I knew the man as I had known
  His image when I was a child.

  With evidence at every turn,
  I should have held it safe to guess
  That all the newness of New York
  Had nothing new in loneliness;
  Yet here was one who might be Noah,
  Or Nathan, or Abimelech,
  Or Lamech, out of ages lost, --
  Or, more than all, Melchizedek.

  Assured that he was none of these,
  I gave them back their names again,
  To scan once more those endless eyes
  Where all my questions ended then.
  I found in them what they revealed
  That I shall not live to forget,
  And wondered if they found in mine
  Compassion that I might regret.

  Pity, I learned, was not the least
  Of time's offending benefits
  That had now for so long impugned
  The conservation of his wits:
  Rather it was that I should yield,
  Alone, the fealty that presents
  The tribute of a tempered ear
  To an untempered eloquence.

  Before I pondered long enough
  On whence he came and who he was,
  I trembled at his ringing wealth
  Of manifold anathemas;
  I wondered, while he seared the world,
  What new defection ailed the race,
  And if it mattered how remote
  Our fathers were from such a place.

  Before there was an hour for me
  To contemplate with less concern
  The crumbling realm awaiting us
  Than his that was beyond return,
  A dawning on the dust of years
  Had shaped with an elusive light
  Mirages of remembered scenes
  That were no longer for the sight.

  For now the gloom that hid the man
  Became a daylight on his wrath,
  And one wherein my fancy viewed
  New lions ramping in his path.
  The old were dead and had no fangs,
  Wherefore he loved them -- seeing not
  They were the same that in their time
  Had eaten everything they caught.

  The world around him was a gift
  Of anguish to his eyes and ears,
  And one that he had long reviled
  As fit for devils, not for seers.
  Where, then, was there a place for him
  That on this other side of death
  Saw nothing good, as he had seen
  No good come out of Nazareth?

  Yet here there was a reticence,
  And I believe his only one,
  That hushed him as if he beheld
  A Presence that would not be gone.
  In such a silence he confessed
  How much there was to be denied;
  And he would look at me and live,
  As others might have looked and died.

  As if at last he knew again
  That he had always known, his eyes
  Were like to those of one who gazed
  On those of One who never dies.
  For such a moment he revealed
  What life has in it to be lost;
  And I could ask if what I saw,
  Before me there, was man or ghost.

  He may have died so many times
  That all there was of him to see
  Was pride, that kept itself alive
  As too rebellious to be free;
  He may have told, when more than once
  Humility seemed imminent,
  How many a lonely time in vain
  The Second Coming came and went.

  Whether he still defies or not
  The failure of an angry task
  That relegates him out of time
  To chaos, I can only ask.
  But as I knew him, so he was;
  And somewhere among men to-day
  Those old, unyielding eyes may flash,
  And flinch -- and look the other way.




  Neighbors

  As often as we thought of her,
    We thought of a gray life
  That made a quaint economist
    Of a wolf-haunted wife;
  We made the best of all she bore
    That was not ours to bear,
  And honored her for wearing things
    That were not things to wear.

  There was a distance in her look
    That made us look again;
  And if she smiled, we might believe
    That we had looked in vain.
  Rarely she came inside our doors,
    And had not long to stay;
  And when she left, it seemed somehow
    That she was far away.

  At last, when we had all forgot
    That all is here to change,
  A shadow on the commonplace
    Was for a moment strange.
  Yet there was nothing for surprise,
    Nor much that need be told:
  Love, with his gift of pain, had given
    More than one heart could hold.




  The Mill

  The miller's wife had waited long,
    The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
  And there might yet be nothing wrong
    In how he went and what he said:
  "There are no millers any more,"
    Was all that she had heard him say;
  And he had lingered at the door
    So long that it seemed yesterday.

  Sick with a fear that had no form
    She knew that she was there at last;
  And in the mill there was a warm
    And mealy fragrance of the past.
  What else there was would only seem
    To say again what he had meant;
  And what was hanging from a beam
    Would not have heeded where she went.

  And if she thought it followed her,
    She may have reasoned in the dark
  That one way of the few there were
    Would hide her and would leave no mark:
  Black water, smooth above the weir
    Like starry velvet in the night,
  Though ruffled once, would soon appear
    The same as ever to the sight.




  The Dark Hills

  Dark hills at evening in the west,
  Where sunset hovers like a sound
  Of golden horns that sang to rest
  Old bones of warriors under ground,
  Far now from all the bannered ways
  Where flash the legions of the sun,
  You fade -- as if the last of days
  Were fading, and all wars were done.




  The Three Taverns

  When the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us
  as far as Appii Forum, and The Three Taverns.
                                          (Acts 28:15)

  Herodion, Apelles, Amplias,
  And Andronicus?  Is it you I see --
  At last?  And is it you now that are gazing
  As if in doubt of me?  Was I not saying
  That I should come to Rome?  I did say that;
  And I said furthermore that I should go
  On westward, where the gateway of the world
  Lets in the central sea.  I did say that,
  But I say only, now, that I am Paul --
  A prisoner of the Law, and of the Lord
  A voice made free.  If there be time enough
  To live, I may have more to tell you then
  Of western matters.  I go now to Rome,
  Where Caesar waits for me, and I shall wait,
  And Caesar knows how long.  In Caesarea
  There was a legend of Agrippa saying
  In a light way to Festus, having heard
  My deposition, that I might be free,
  Had I stayed free of Caesar; but the word
  Of God would have it as you see it is --
  And here I am.  The cup that I shall drink
  Is mine to drink -- the moment or the place
  Not mine to say.  If it be now in Rome,
  Be it now in Rome; and if your faith exceed
  The shadow cast of hope, say not of me
  Too surely or too soon that years and shipwreck,
  And all the many deserts I have crossed
  That are not named or regioned, have undone
  Beyond the brevities of our mortal healing
  The part of me that is the least of me.
  You see an older man than he who fell
  Prone to the earth when he was nigh Damascus,
  Where the great light came down; yet I am he
  That fell, and he that saw, and he that heard.
  And I am here, at last; and if at last
  I give myself to make another crumb
  For this pernicious feast of time and men --
  Well, I have seen too much of time and men
  To fear the ravening or the wrath of either.

  Yes, it is Paul you see -- the Saul of Tarsus
  That was a fiery Jew, and had men slain
  For saying Something was beyond the Law,
  And in ourselves.  I fed my suffering soul
  Upon the Law till I went famishing,
  Not knowing that I starved.  How should I know,
  More then than any, that the food I had --
  What else it may have been -- was not for me?
  My fathers and their fathers and their fathers
  Had found it good, and said there was no other,
  And I was of the line.  When Stephen fell,
  Among the stones that crushed his life away,
  There was no place alive that I could see
  For such a man.  Why should a man be given
  To live beyond the Law?  So I said then,
  As men say now to me.  How then do I
  Persist in living?  Is that what you ask?
  If so, let my appearance be for you
  No living answer; for Time writes of death
  On men before they die, and what you see
  Is not the man.  The man that you see not --
  The man within the man -- is most alive;
  Though hatred would have ended, long ago,
  The bane of his activities.  I have lived,
  Because the faith within me that is life
  Endures to live, and shall, till soon or late,
  Death, like a friend unseen, shall say to me
  My toil is over and my work begun.

  How often, and how many a time again,
  Have I said I should be with you in Rome!
  He who is always coming never comes,
  Or comes too late, you may have told yourselves;
  And I may tell you now that after me,
  Whether I stay for little or for long,
  The wolves are coming.  Have an eye for them,
  And a more careful ear for their confusion
  Than you need have much longer for the sound
  Of what I tell you -- should I live to say
  More than I say to Caesar.  What I know
  Is down for you to read in what is written;
  And if I cloud a little with my own
  Mortality the gleam that is immortal,
  I do it only because I am I --
  Being on earth and of it, in so far
  As time flays yet the remnant.  This you know;
  And if I sting men, as I do sometimes,
  With a sharp word that hurts, it is because
  Man's habit is to feel before he sees;
  And I am of a race that feels.  Moreover,
  The world is here for what is not yet here
  For more than are a few; and even in Rome,
  Where men are so enamored of the Cross
  That fame has echoed, and increasingly,
  The music of your love and of your faith
  To foreign ears that are as far away
  As Antioch and Haran, yet I wonder
  How much of love you know, and if your faith
  Be the shut fruit of words.  If so, remember
  Words are but shells unfilled.  Jews have at least
  A Law to make them sorry they were born
  If they go long without it; and these Gentiles,
  For the first time in shrieking history,
  Have love and law together, if so they will,
  For their defense and their immunity
  In these last days.  Rome, if I know the name,
  Will have anon a crown of thorns and fire
  Made ready for the wreathing of new masters,
  Of whom we are appointed, you and I, --
  And you are still to be when I am gone,
  Should I go presently.  Let the word fall,
  Meanwhile, upon the dragon-ridden field
  Of circumstance, either to live or die;
  Concerning which there is a parable,
  Made easy for the comfort and attention
  Of those who preach, fearing they preach in vain.
  You are to plant, and then to plant again
  Where you have gathered, gathering as you go;
  For you are in the fields that are eternal,
  And you have not the burden of the Lord
  Upon your mortal shoulders.  What you have
  Is a light yoke, made lighter by the wearing,
  Till it shall have the wonder and the weight
  Of a clear jewel, shining with a light
  Wherein the sun and all the fiery stars
  May soon be fading.  When Gamaliel said
  That if they be of men these things are nothing,
  But if they be of God they are for none
  To overthrow, he spoke as a good Jew,
  And one who stayed a Jew; and he said all.
  And you know, by the temper of your faith,
  How far the fire is in you that I felt
  Before I knew Damascus.  A word here,
  Or there, or not there, or not anywhere,
  Is not the Word that lives and is the life;
  And you, therefore, need weary not yourselves
  With jealous aches of others.  If the world
  Were not a world of aches and innovations,
  Attainment would have no more joy of it.
  There will be creeds and schisms, creeds in creeds,
  And schisms in schisms; myriads will be done
  To death because a farthing has two sides,
  And is at last a farthing.  Telling you this,
  I, who bid men to live, appeal to Caesar.
  Once I had said the ways of God were dark,
  Meaning by that the dark ways of the Law.
  Such is the glory of our tribulations;
  For the Law kills the flesh that kills the Law,
  And we are then alive.  We have eyes then;
  And we have then the Cross between two worlds --
  To guide us, or to blind us for a time,
  Till we have eyes indeed.  The fire that smites
  A few on highways, changing all at once,
  Is not for all.  The power that holds the world
  Away from God that holds himself away --
  Farther away than all your works and words
  Are like to fly without the wings of faith --
  Was not, nor ever shall be, a small hazard
  Enlivening the ways of easy leisure
  Or the cold road of knowledge.  When our eyes
  Have wisdom, we see more than we remember;
  And the old world of our captivities
  May then become a smitten glimpse of ruin,
  Like one where vanished hewers have had their day
  Of wrath on Lebanon.  Before we see,
  Meanwhile, we suffer; and I come to you,
  At last, through many storms and through much night.

  Yet whatsoever I have undergone,
  My keepers in this instance are not hard.
  But for the chance of an ingratitude,
  I might indeed be curious of their mercy,
  And fearful of their leisure while I wait,
  A few leagues out of Rome.  Men go to Rome,
  Not always to return -- but not that now.
  Meanwhile, I seem to think you look at me
  With eyes that are at last more credulous
  Of my identity.  You remark in me
  No sort of leaping giant, though some words
  Of mine to you from Corinth may have leapt
  A little through your eyes into your soul.
  I trust they were alive, and are alive
  Today; for there be none that shall indite
  So much of nothing as the man of words
  Who writes in the Lord's name for his name's sake
  And has not in his blood the fire of time
  To warm eternity.  Let such a man --
  If once the light is in him and endures --
  Content himself to be the general man,
  Set free to sift the decencies and thereby
  To learn, except he be one set aside
  For sorrow, more of pleasure than of pain;
  Though if his light be not the light indeed,
  But a brief shine that never really was,
  And fails, leaving him worse than where he was,
  Then shall he be of all men destitute.
  And here were not an issue for much ink,
  Or much offending faction among scribes.

  The Kingdom is within us, we are told;
  And when I say to you that we possess it
  In such a measure as faith makes it ours,
  I say it with a sinner's privilege
  Of having seen and heard, and seen again,
  After a darkness; and if I affirm
  To the last hour that faith affords alone
  The Kingdom entrance and an entertainment,
  I do not see myself as one who says
  To man that he shall sit with folded hands
  Against the Coming.  If I be anything,
  I move a driven agent among my kind,
  Establishing by the faith of Abraham,
  And by the grace of their necessities,
  The clamoring word that is the word of life
  Nearer than heretofore to the solution
  Of their tomb-serving doubts.  If I have loosed
  A shaft of language that has flown sometimes
  A little higher than the hearts and heads
  Of nature's minions, it will yet be heard,
  Like a new song that waits for distant ears.
  I cannot be the man that I am not;
  And while I own that earth is my affliction,
  I am a man of earth, who says not all
  To all alike.  That were impossible,
  Even as it were so that He should plant
  A larger garden first.  But you today
  Are for the larger sowing; and your seed,
  A little mixed, will have, as He foresaw,
  The foreign harvest of a wider growth,
  And one without an end.  Many there are,
  And are to be, that shall partake of it,
  Though none may share it with an understanding
  That is not his alone.  We are all alone;
  And yet we are all parcelled of one order --
  Jew, Gentile, or barbarian in the dark
  Of wildernesses that are not so much
  As names yet in a book.  And there are many,
  Finding at last that words are not the Word,
  And finding only that, will flourish aloft,
  Like heads of captured Pharisees on pikes,
  Our contradictions and discrepancies;
  And there are many more will hang themselves
  Upon the letter, seeing not in the Word
  The friend of all who fail, and in their faith
  A sword of excellence to cut them down.

  As long as there are glasses that are dark --
  And there are many -- we see darkly through them;
  All which have I conceded and set down
  In words that have no shadow.  What is dark
  Is dark, and we may not say otherwise;
  Yet what may be as dark as a lost fire
  For one of us, may still be for another
  A coming gleam across the gulf of ages,
  And a way home from shipwreck to the shore;
  And so, through pangs and ills and desperations,
  There may be light for all.  There shall be light.
  As much as that, you know.  You cannot say
  This woman or that man will be the next
  On whom it falls; you are not here for that.
  Your ministration is to be for others
  The firing of a rush that may for them
  Be soon the fire itself.  The few at first
  Are fighting for the multitude at last;
  Therefore remember what Gamaliel said
  Before you, when the sick were lying down
  In streets all night for Peter's passing shadow.
  Fight, and say what you feel; say more than words.
  Give men to know that even their days of earth
  To come are more than ages that are gone.
  Say what you feel, while you have time to say it.
  Eternity will answer for itself,
  Without your intercession; yet the way
  For many is a long one, and as dark,
  Meanwhile, as dreams of hell.  See not your toil
  Too much, and if I be away from you,
  Think of me as a brother to yourselves,
  Of many blemishes.  Beware of stoics,
  And give your left hand to grammarians;
  And when you seem, as many a time you may,
  To have no other friend than hope, remember
  That you are not the first, or yet the last.

  The best of life, until we see beyond
  The shadows of ourselves (and they are less
  Than even the blindest of indignant eyes
  Would have them) is in what we do not know.
  Make, then, for all your fears a place to sleep
  With all your faded sins; nor think yourselves
  Egregious and alone for your defects
  Of youth and yesterday.  I was young once;
  And there's a question if you played the fool
  With a more fervid and inherent zeal
  Than I have in my story to remember,
  Or gave your necks to folly's conquering foot,
  Or flung yourselves with an unstudied aim,
  Less frequently than I.  Never mind that.
  Man's little house of days will hold enough,
  Sometimes, to make him wish it were not his,
  But it will not hold all.  Things that are dead
  Are best without it, and they own their death
  By virtue of their dying.  Let them go, --
  But think you not the world is ashes yet,
  And you have all the fire.  The world is here
  Today, and it may not be gone tomorrow;
  For there are millions, and there may be more,
  To make in turn a various estimation
  Of its old ills and ashes, and the traps
  Of its apparent wrath.  Many with ears
  That hear not yet, shall have ears given to them,
  And then they shall hear strangely.  Many with eyes
  That are incredulous of the Mystery
  Shall yet be driven to feel, and then to read
  Where language has an end and is a veil,
  Not woven of our words.  Many that hate
  Their kind are soon to know that without love
  Their faith is but the perjured name of nothing.
  I that have done some hating in my time
  See now no time for hate; I that have left,
  Fading behind me like familiar lights
  That are to shine no more for my returning,
  Home, friends, and honors, -- I that have lost all else
  For wisdom, and the wealth of it, say now
  To you that out of wisdom has come love,
  That measures and is of itself the measure
  Of works and hope and faith.  Your longest hours
  Are not so long that you may torture them
  And harass not yourselves; and the last days
  Are on the way that you prepare for them,
  And was prepared for you, here in a world
  Where you have sinned and suffered, striven and seen.
  If you be not so hot for counting them
  Before they come that you consume yourselves,
  Peace may attend you all in these last days --
  And me, as well as you.  Yes, even in Rome.
  Well, I have talked and rested, though I fear
  My rest has not been yours; in which event,
  Forgive one who is only seven leagues
  From Caesar.  When I told you I should come,
  I did not see myself the criminal
  You contemplate, for seeing beyond the Law
  That which the Law saw not.  But this, indeed,
  Was good of you, and I shall not forget;
  No, I shall not forget you came so far
  To meet a man so dangerous.  Well, farewell.
  They come to tell me I am going now --
  With them.  I hope that we shall meet again,
  But none may say what he shall find in Rome.




  Demos I

  All you that are enamored of my name
    And least intent on what most I require,
    Beware; for my design and your desire,
  Deplorably, are not as yet the same.
  Beware, I say, the failure and the shame
    Of losing that for which you now aspire
    So blindly, and of hazarding entire
  The gift that I was bringing when I came.

  Give as I will, I cannot give you sight
    Whereby to see that with you there are some
    To lead you, and be led.  But they are dumb
  Before the wrangling and the shrill delight
    Of your deliverance that has not come,
  And shall not, if I fail you -- as I might.




  Demos II

  So little have you seen of what awaits
    Your fevered glimpse of a democracy
    Confused and foiled with an equality
  Not equal to the envy it creates,
  That you see not how near you are the gates
    Of an old king who listens fearfully
    To you that are outside and are to be
  The noisy lords of imminent estates.

  Rather be then your prayer that you shall have
    Your kingdom undishonored.  Having all,
    See not the great among you for the small,
  But hear their silence; for the few shall save
    The many, or the many are to fall --
  Still to be wrangling in a noisy grave.




  The Flying Dutchman

  Unyielding in the pride of his defiance,
    Afloat with none to serve or to command,
  Lord of himself at last, and all by Science,
    He seeks the Vanished Land.

  Alone, by the one light of his one thought,
    He steers to find the shore from which we came, --
  Fearless of in what coil he may be caught
    On seas that have no name.

  Into the night he sails; and after night
    There is a dawning, though there be no sun;
  Wherefore, with nothing but himself in sight,
    Unsighted, he sails on.

  At last there is a lifting of the cloud
    Between the flood before him and the sky;
  And then -- though he may curse the Power aloud
    That has no power to die --

  He steers himself away from what is haunted
    By the old ghost of what has been before, --
  Abandoning, as always, and undaunted,
    One fog-walled island more.




  Tact

  Observant of the way she told
    So much of what was true,
  No vanity could long withhold
    Regard that was her due:
  She spared him the familiar guile,
    So easily achieved,
  That only made a man to smile
    And left him undeceived.

  Aware that all imagining
    Of more than what she meant
  Would urge an end of everything,
    He stayed; and when he went,
  They parted with a merry word
    That was to him as light
  As any that was ever heard
    Upon a starry night.

  She smiled a little, knowing well
    That he would not remark
  The ruins of a day that fell
    Around her in the dark:
  He saw no ruins anywhere,
    Nor fancied there were scars
  On anyone who lingered there,
    Alone below the stars.




  On the Way

  (Philadelphia, 1794)

Note. --  The following imaginary dialogue between Alexander Hamilton
and Aaron Burr, which is not based upon any specific incident
in American history, may be supposed to have occurred a few months previous
to Hamilton's retirement from Washington's Cabinet in 1795
and a few years before the political ingenuities of Burr --
who has been characterized, without much exaggeration,
as the inventor of American politics -- began to be conspicuously formidable
to the Federalists.  These activities on the part of Burr resulted,
as the reader will remember, in the Burr-Jefferson tie for the Presidency
in 1800, and finally in the Burr-Hamilton duel at Weehawken in 1804.



          BURR

  Hamilton, if he rides you down, remember
  That I was here to speak, and so to save
  Your fabric from catastrophe.  That's good;
  For I perceive that you observe him also.
  A President, a-riding of his horse,
  May dust a General and be forgiven;
  But why be dusted -- when we're all alike,
  All equal, and all happy.  Here he comes --
  And there he goes.  And we, by your new patent,
  Would seem to be two kings here by the wayside,
  With our two hats off to his Excellency.
  Why not his Majesty, and done with it?
  Forgive me if I shook your meditation,
  But you that weld our credit should have eyes
  To see what's coming.  Bury me first if -I- do.


          HAMILTON

  There's always in some pocket of your brain
  A care for me; wherefore my gratitude
  For your attention is commensurate
  With your concern.  Yes, Burr, we are two kings;
  We are as royal as two ditch-diggers;
  But owe me not your sceptre.  These are the days
  When first a few seem all; but if we live,
  We may again be seen to be the few
  That we have always been.  These are the days
  When men forget the stars, and are forgotten.


          BURR

  But why forget them?  They're the same that winked
  Upon the world when Alcibiades
  Cut off his dog's tail to induce distinction.
  There are dogs yet, and Alcibiades
  Is not forgotten.


          HAMILTON

                     Yes, there are dogs enough,
  God knows; and I can hear them in my dreams.


          BURR

  Never a doubt.  But what you hear the most
  Is your new music, something out of tune
  With your intention.  How in the name of Cain,
  I seem to hear you ask, are men to dance,
  When all men are musicians.  Tell me that,
  I hear you saying, and I'll tell you the name
  Of Samson's mother.  But why shroud yourself
  Before the coffin comes?  For all you know,
  The tree that is to fall for your last house
  Is now a sapling.  You may have to wait
  So long as to be sorry; though I doubt it,
  For you are not at home in your new Eden
  Where chilly whispers of a likely frost
  Accumulate already in the air.
  I think a touch of ermine, Hamilton,
  Would be for you in your autumnal mood
  A pleasant sort of warmth along the shoulders.


          HAMILTON

  If so it is you think, you may as well
  Give over thinking.  We are done with ermine.
  What I fear most is not the multitude,
  But those who are to loop it with a string
  That has one end in France and one end here.
  I'm not so fortified with observation
  That I could swear that more than half a score
  Among us who see lightning see that ruin
  Is not the work of thunder.  Since the world
  Was ordered, there was never a long pause
  For caution between doing and undoing.


          BURR

  Go on, sir; my attention is a trap
  Set for the catching of all compliments
  To Monticello, and all else abroad
  That has a name or an identity.


          HAMILTON

  I leave to you the names -- there are too many;
  Yet one there is to sift and hold apart,
  As now I see.  There comes at last a glimmer
  That is not always clouded, or too late.
  But I was near and young, and had the reins
  To play with while he manned a team so raw
  That only God knows where the end had been
  Of all that riding without Washington.
  There was a nation in the man who passed us,
  If there was not a world.  I may have driven
  Since then some restive horses, and alone,
  And through a splashing of abundant mud;
  But he who made the dust that sets you on
  To coughing, made the road.  Now it seems dry,
  And in a measure safe.


          BURR

                          Here's a new tune
  From Hamilton.  Has your caution all at once,
  And over night, grown till it wrecks the cradle?
  I have forgotten what my father said
  When I was born, but there's a rustling of it
  Among my memories, and it makes a noise
  About as loud as all that I have held
  And fondled heretofore of your same caution.
  But that's affairs, not feelings.  If our friends
  Guessed half we say of them, our enemies
  Would itch in our friends' jackets.  Howsoever,
  The world is of a sudden on its head,
  And all are spilled -- unless you cling alone
  With Washington.  Ask Adams about that.


          HAMILTON

  We'll not ask Adams about anything.
  We fish for lizards when we choose to ask
  For what we know already is not coming,
  And we must eat the answer.  Where's the use
  Of asking when this man says everything,
  With all his tongues of silence?


          BURR

                                    I dare say.
  I dare say, but I won't.  One of those tongues
  I'll borrow for the nonce.  He'll never miss it.
  We mean his Western Majesty, King George.


          HAMILTON

  I mean the man who rode by on his horse.
  I'll beg of you the meed of your indulgence
  If I should say this planet may have done
  A deal of weary whirling when at last,
  If ever, Time shall aggregate again
  A majesty like his that has no name.


          BURR

  Then you concede his Majesty?  That's good,
  And what of yours?  Here are two majesties.
  Favor the Left a little, Hamilton,
  Or you'll be floundering in the ditch that waits
  For riders who forget where they are riding.
  If we and France, as you anticipate,
  Must eat each other, what Caesar, if not yourself,
  Do you see for the master of the feast?
  There may be a place waiting on your head
  For laurel thick as Nero's.  You don't know.
  I have not crossed your glory, though I might
  If I saw thrones at auction.


          HAMILTON

                                Yes, you might.
  If war is on the way, I shall be -- here;
  And I've no vision of your distant heels.


          BURR

  I see that I shall take an inference
  To bed with me to-night to keep me warm.
  I thank you, Hamilton, and I approve
  Your fealty to the aggregated greatness
  Of him you lean on while he leans on you.


          HAMILTON

  This easy phrasing is a game of yours
  That you may win to lose.  I beg your pardon,
  But you that have the sight will not employ
  The will to see with it.  If you did so,
  There might be fewer ditches dug for others
  In your perspective; and there might be fewer
  Contemporary motes of prejudice
  Between you and the man who made the dust.
  Call him a genius or a gentleman,
  A prophet or a builder, or what not,
  But hold your disposition off the balance,
  And weigh him in the light.  Once (I believe
  I tell you nothing new to your surmise,
  Or to the tongues of towns and villages)
  I nourished with an adolescent fancy --
  Surely forgivable to you, my friend --
  An innocent and amiable conviction
  That I was, by the grace of honest fortune,
  A savior at his elbow through the war,
  Where I might have observed, more than I did,
  Patience and wholesome passion.  I was there,
  And for such honor I gave nothing worse
  Than some advice at which he may have smiled.
  I must have given a modicum besides,
  Or the rough interval between those days
  And these would never have made for me my friends,
  Or enemies.  I should be something somewhere --
  I say not what -- but I should not be here
  If he had not been there.  Possibly, too,
  You might not -- or that Quaker with his cane.


          BURR

  Possibly, too, I should.  When the Almighty
  Rides a white horse, I fancy we shall know it.


          HAMILTON

  It was a man, Burr, that was in my mind;
  No god, or ghost, or demon -- only a man:
  A man whose occupation is the need
  Of those who would not feel it if it bit them;
  And one who shapes an age while he endures
  The pin pricks of inferiorities;
  A cautious man, because he is but one;
  A lonely man, because he is a thousand.
  No marvel you are slow to find in him
  The genius that is one spark or is nothing:
  His genius is a flame that he must hold
  So far above the common heads of men
  That they may view him only through the mist
  Of their defect, and wonder what he is.
  It seems to me the mystery that is in him
  That makes him only more to me a man
  Than any other I have ever known.


          BURR

  I grant you that his worship is a man.
  I'm not so much at home with mysteries,
  May be, as you -- so leave him with his fire:
  God knows that I shall never put it out.
  He has not made a cripple of himself
  In his pursuit of me, though I have heard
  His condescension honors me with parts.
  Parts make a whole, if we've enough of them;
  And once I figured a sufficiency
  To be at least an atom in the annals
  Of your republic.  But I must have erred.


          HAMILTON

  You smile as if your spirit lived at ease
  With error.  I should not have named it so,
  Failing assent from you; nor, if I did,
  Should I be so complacent in my skill
  To comb the tangled language of the people
  As to be sure of anything in these days.
  Put that much in account with modesty.


          BURR

  What in the name of Ahab, Hamilton,
  Have you, in the last region of your dreaming,
  To do with "people"?  You may be the devil
  In your dead-reckoning of what reefs and shoals
  Are waiting on the progress of our ship
  Unless you steer it, but you'll find it irksome
  Alone there in the stern; and some warm day
  There'll be an inland music in the rigging,
  And afterwards on deck.  I'm not affined
  Or favored overmuch at Monticello,
  But there's a mighty swarming of new bees
  About the premises, and all have wings.
  If you hear something buzzing before long,
  Be thoughtful how you strike, remembering also
  There was a fellow Naboth had a vineyard,
  And Ahab cut his hair off and went softly.


          HAMILTON

  I don't remember that he cut his hair off.


          BURR

  Somehow I rather fancy that he did.
  If so, it's in the Book; and if not so,
  He did the rest, and did it handsomely.


          HAMILTON

  Commend yourself to Ahab and his ways
  If they inveigle you to emulation;
  But where, if I may ask it, are you tending
  With your invidious wielding of the Scriptures?
  You call to mind an eminent archangel
  Who fell to make him famous.  Would you fall
  So far as he, to be so far remembered?


          BURR

  Before I fall or rise, or am an angel,
  I shall acquaint myself a little further
  With our new land's new language, which is not --
  Peace to your dreams -- an idiom to your liking.
  I'm wondering if a man may always know
  How old a man may be at thirty-seven;
  I wonder likewise if a prettier time
  Could be decreed for a good man to vanish
  Than about now for you, before you fade,
  And even your friends are seeing that you have had
  Your cup too full for longer mortal triumph.
  Well, you have had enough, and had it young;
  And the old wine is nearer to the lees
  Than you are to the work that you are doing.


          HAMILTON

  When does this philological excursion
  Into new lands and languages begin?


          BURR

  Anon -- that is, already.  Only Fortune
  Gave me this afternoon the benefaction
  Of your blue back, which I for love pursued,
  And in pursuing may have saved your life --
  Also the world a pounding piece of news:
  Hamilton bites the dust of Washington,
  Or rather of his horse.  For you alone,
  Or for your fame, I'd wish it might have been so.


          HAMILTON

  Not every man among us has a friend
  So jealous for the other's fame.  How long
  Are you to diagnose the doubtful case
  Of Demos -- and what for?  Have you a sword
  For some new Damocles?  If it's for me,
  I have lost all official appetite,
  And shall have faded, after January,
  Into the law.  I'm going to New York.


          BURR

  No matter where you are, one of these days
  I shall come back to you and tell you something.
  This Demos, I have heard, has in his wrist
  A pulse that no two doctors have as yet
  Counted and found the same, and in his mouth
  A tongue that has the like alacrity
  For saying or not for saying what most it is
  That pullulates in his ignoble mind.
  One of these days I shall appear again,
  To tell you more of him and his opinions;
  I shall not be so long out of your sight,
  Or take myself so far, that I may not,
  Like Alcibiades, come back again.
  He went away to Phrygia, and fared ill.


          HAMILTON

  There's an example in Themistocles:
  He went away to Persia, and fared well.


          BURR

  So?  Must I go so far?  And if so, why so?
  I had not planned it so.  Is this the road
  I take?  If so, farewell.


          HAMILTON

                             Quite so.  Farewell.




  John Brown

  Though for your sake I would not have you now
  So near to me tonight as now you are,
  God knows how much a stranger to my heart
  Was any cold word that I may have written;
  And you, poor woman that I made my wife,
  You have had more of loneliness, I fear,
  Than I -- though I have been the most alone,
  Even when the most attended.  So it was
  God set the mark of his inscrutable
  Necessity on one that was to grope,
  And serve, and suffer, and withal be glad
  For what was his, and is, and is to be,
  When his old bones, that are a burden now,
  Are saying what the man who carried them
  Had not the power to say.  Bones in a grave,
  Cover them as they will with choking earth,
  May shout the truth to men who put them there,
  More than all orators.  And so, my dear,
  Since you have cheated wisdom for the sake
  Of sorrow, let your sorrow be for you,
  This last of nights before the last of days,
  The lying ghost of what there is of me
  That is the most alive.  There is no death
  For me in what they do.  Their death it is
  They should heed most when the sun comes again
  To make them solemn.  There are some I know
  Whose eyes will hardly see their occupation,
  For tears in them -- and all for one old man;
  For some of them will pity this old man,
  Who took upon himself the work of God
  Because he pitied millions.  That will be
  For them, I fancy, their compassionate
  Best way of saying what is best in them
  To say; for they can say no more than that,
  And they can do no more than what the dawn
  Of one more day shall give them light enough
  To do.  But there are many days to be,
  And there are many men to give their blood,
  As I gave mine for them.  May they come soon!

  May they come soon, I say.  And when they come,
  May all that I have said unheard be heard,
  Proving at last, or maybe not -- no matter --
  What sort of madness was the part of me
  That made me strike, whether I found the mark
  Or missed it.  Meanwhile, I've a strange content,
  A patience, and a vast indifference
  To what men say of me and what men fear
  To say.  There was a work to be begun,
  And when the Voice, that I have heard so long,
  Announced as in a thousand silences
  An end of preparation, I began
  The coming work of death which is to be,
  That life may be.  There is no other way
  Than the old way of war for a new land
  That will not know itself and is tonight
  A stranger to itself, and to the world
  A more prodigious upstart among states
  Than I was among men, and so shall be
  Till they are told and told, and told again;
  For men are children, waiting to be told,
  And most of them are children all their lives.
  The good God in his wisdom had them so,
  That now and then a madman or a seer
  May shake them out of their complacency
  And shame them into deeds.  The major file
  See only what their fathers may have seen,
  Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing.
  I do not say it matters what they saw.
  Now and again to some lone soul or other
  God speaks, and there is hanging to be done, --
  As once there was a burning of our bodies
  Alive, albeit our souls were sorry fuel.
  But now the fires are few, and we are poised
  Accordingly, for the state's benefit,
  A few still minutes between heaven and earth.
  The purpose is, when they have seen enough
  Of what it is that they are not to see,
  To pluck me as an unripe fruit of treason,
  And then to fling me back to the same earth
  Of which they are, as I suppose, the flower --
  Not given to know the riper fruit that waits
  For a more comprehensive harvesting.

  Yes, may they come, and soon.  Again I say,
  May they come soon! -- before too many of them
  Shall be the bloody cost of our defection.
  When hell waits on the dawn of a new state,
  Better it were that hell should not wait long, --
  Or so it is I see it who should see
  As far or farther into time tonight
  Than they who talk and tremble for me now,
  Or wish me to those everlasting fires
  That are for me no fear.  Too many fires
  Have sought me out and seared me to the bone --
  Thereby, for all I know, to temper me
  For what was mine to do.  If I did ill
  What I did well, let men say I was mad;
  Or let my name for ever be a question
  That will not sleep in history.  What men say
  I was will cool no cannon, dull no sword,
  Invalidate no truth.  Meanwhile, I was;
  And the long train is lighted that shall burn,
  Though floods of wrath may drench it, and hot feet
  May stamp it for a slight time into smoke
  That shall blaze up again with growing speed,
  Until at last a fiery crash will come
  To cleanse and shake a wounded hemisphere,
  And heal it of a long malignity
  That angry time discredits and disowns.
  Tonight there are men saying many things;
  And some who see life in the last of me
  Will answer first the coming call to death;
  For death is what is coming, and then life.
  I do not say again for the dull sake
  Of speech what you have heard me say before,
  But rather for the sake of all I am,
  And all God made of me.  A man to die
  As I do must have done some other work
  Than man's alone.  I was not after glory,
  But there was glory with me, like a friend,
  Throughout those crippling years when friends were few,
  And fearful to be known by their own names
  When mine was vilified for their approval.
  Yet friends they are, and they did what was given
  Their will to do; they could have done no more.
  I was the one man mad enough, it seems,
  To do my work; and now my work is over.
  And you, my dear, are not to mourn for me,
  Or for your sons, more than a soul should mourn
  In Paradise, done with evil and with earth.
  There is not much of earth in what remains
  For you; and what there may be left of it
  For your endurance you shall have at last
  In peace, without the twinge of any fear
  For my condition; for I shall be done
  With plans and actions that have heretofore
  Made your days long and your nights ominous
  With darkness and the many distances
  That were between us.  When the silence comes,
  I shall in faith be nearer to you then
  Than I am now in fact.  What you see now
  Is only the outside of an old man,
  Older than years have made him.  Let him die,
  And let him be a thing for little grief.
  There was a time for service, and he served;
  And there is no more time for anything
  But a short gratefulness to those who gave
  Their scared allegiance to an enterprise
  That has the name of treason -- which will serve
  As well as any other for the present.
  There are some deeds of men that have no names,
  And mine may like as not be one of them.
  I am not looking far for names tonight.
  The King of Glory was without a name
  Until men gave him one; yet there He was,
  Before we found Him and affronted Him
  With numerous ingenuities of evil,
  Of which one, with His aid, is to be swept
  And washed out of the world with fire and blood.

  Once I believed it might have come to pass
  With a small cost of blood; but I was dreaming --
  Dreaming that I believed.  The Voice I heard
  When I left you behind me in the north, --
  To wait there and to wonder and grow old
  Of loneliness, -- told only what was best,
  And with a saving vagueness, I should know
  Till I knew more.  And had I known even then --
  After grim years of search and suffering,
  So many of them to end as they began --
  After my sickening doubts and estimations
  Of plans abandoned and of new plans vain --
  After a weary delving everywhere
  For men with every virtue but the Vision --
  Could I have known, I say, before I left you
  That summer morning, all there was to know --
  Even unto the last consuming word
  That would have blasted every mortal answer
  As lightning would annihilate a leaf,
  I might have trembled on that summer morning;
  I might have wavered; and I might have failed.

  And there are many among men today
  To say of me that I had best have wavered.
  So has it been, so shall it always be,
  For those of us who give ourselves to die
  Before we are so parcelled and approved
  As to be slaughtered by authority.
  We do not make so much of what they say
  As they of what our folly says of us;
  They give us hardly time enough for that,
  And thereby we gain much by losing little.
  Few are alive to-day with less to lose
  Than I who tell you this, or more to gain;
  And whether I speak as one to be destroyed
  For no good end outside his own destruction,
  Time shall have more to say than men shall hear
  Between now and the coming of that harvest
  Which is to come.  Before it comes, I go --
  By the short road that mystery makes long
  For man's endurance of accomplishment.
  I shall have more to say when I am dead.




  The False Gods

  "We are false and evanescent, and aware of our deceit,
  From the straw that is our vitals to the clay that is our feet.
  You may serve us if you must, and you shall have your wage of ashes, --
  Though arrears due thereafter may be hard for you to meet.

  "You may swear that we are solid, you may say that we are strong,
  But we know that we are neither and we say that you are wrong;
  You may find an easy worship in acclaiming our indulgence,
  But your large admiration of us now is not for long.

  "If your doom is to adore us with a doubt that's never still,
  And you pray to see our faces -- pray in earnest, and you will.
  You may gaze at us and live, and live assured of our confusion:
  For the False Gods are mortal, and are made for you to kill.

  "And you may as well observe, while apprehensively at ease
  With an Art that's inorganic and is anything you please,
  That anon your newest ruin may lie crumbling unregarded,
  Like an old shrine forgotten in a forest of new trees.

  "Howsoever like no other be the mode you may employ,
  There's an order in the ages for the ages to enjoy;
  Though the temples you are shaping and the passions you are singing
  Are a long way from Athens and a longer way from Troy.

  "When we promise more than ever of what never shall arrive,
  And you seem a little more than ordinarily alive,
  Make a note that you are sure you understand our obligations --
  For there's grief always auditing where two and two are five.

  "There was this for us to say and there was this for you to know,
  Though it humbles and it hurts us when we have to tell you so.
  If you doubt the only truth in all our perjured composition,
  May the True Gods attend you and forget us when we go."




  Archibald's Example

  Old Archibald, in his eternal chair,
  Where trespassers, whatever their degree,
  Were soon frowned out again, was looking off
  Across the clover when he said to me:

  "My green hill yonder, where the sun goes down
  Without a scratch, was once inhabited
  By trees that injured him -- an evil trash
  That made a cage, and held him while he bled.

  "Gone fifty years, I see them as they were
  Before they fell.  They were a crooked lot
  To spoil my sunset, and I saw no time
  In fifty years for crooked things to rot.

  "Trees, yes; but not a service or a joy
  To God or man, for they were thieves of light.
  So down they came.  Nature and I looked on,
  And we were glad when they were out of sight.

  "Trees are like men, sometimes; and that being so,
  So much for that."  He twinkled in his chair,
  And looked across the clover to the place
  That he remembered when the trees were there.




  London Bridge

  "Do I hear them?  Yes, I hear the children singing -- and what of it?
  Have you come with eyes afire to find me now and ask me that?
  If I were not their father and if you were not their mother,
  We might believe they made a noise. . . .  What are you -- driving at!"

  "Well, be glad that you can hear them, and be glad they are so near us, --
  For I have heard the stars of heaven, and they were nearer still.
  All within an hour it is that I have heard them calling,
  And though I pray for them to cease, I know they never will;
  For their music on my heart, though you may freeze it, will fall always,
  Like summer snow that never melts upon a mountain-top.
  Do you hear them?  Do you hear them overhead -- the children -- singing?
  Do you hear the children singing? . . .  God, will you make them stop!"

  "And what now in his holy name have you to do with mountains?
  We're back to town again, my dear, and we've a dance tonight.
  Frozen hearts and falling music?  Snow and stars, and -- what the devil!
  Say it over to me slowly, and be sure you have it right."

  "God knows if I be right or wrong in saying what I tell you,
  Or if I know the meaning any more of what I say.
  All I know is, it will kill me if I try to keep it hidden --
  Well, I met him. . . .  Yes, I met him, and I talked with him -- today."

  "You met him?  Did you meet the ghost of someone you had poisoned,
  Long ago, before I knew you for the woman that you are?
  Take a chair; and don't begin your stories always in the middle.
  Was he man, or was he demon?  Anyhow, you've gone too far
  To go back, and I'm your servant.  I'm the lord, but you're the master.
  Now go on with what you know, for I'm excited."

                                                   "Do you mean --
  Do you mean to make me try to think that you know less than I do?"

  "I know that you foreshadow the beginning of a scene.
  Pray be careful, and as accurate as if the doors of heaven
  Were to swing or to stay bolted from now on for evermore."

  "Do you conceive, with all your smooth contempt of every feeling,
  Of hiding what you know and what you must have known before?
  Is it worth a woman's torture to stand here and have you smiling,
  With only your poor fetish of possession on your side?
  No thing but one is wholly sure, and that's not one to scare me;
  When I meet it I may say to God at last that I have tried.
  And yet, for all I know, or all I dare believe, my trials
  Henceforward will be more for you to bear than are your own;
  And you must give me keys of yours to rooms I have not entered.
  Do you see me on your threshold all my life, and there alone?
  Will you tell me where you see me in your fancy -- when it leads you
  Far enough beyond the moment for a glance at the abyss?"

  "Will you tell me what intrinsic and amazing sort of nonsense
  You are crowding on the patience of the man who gives you -- this?
  Look around you and be sorry you're not living in an attic,
  With a civet and a fish-net, and with you to pay the rent.
  I say words that you can spell without the use of all your letters;
  And I grant, if you insist, that I've a guess at what you meant."

  "Have I told you, then, for nothing, that I met him?  Are you trying
  To be merry while you try to make me hate you?"

                                                   "Think again,
  My dear, before you tell me, in a language unbecoming
  To a lady, what you plan to tell me next.  If I complain,
  If I seem an atom peevish at the preference you mention --
  Or imply, to be precise -- you may believe, or you may not,
  That I'm a trifle more aware of what he wants than you are.
  But I shouldn't throw that at you.  Make believe that I forgot.
  Make believe that he's a genius, if you like, -- but in the meantime
  Don't go back to rocking-horses.  There, there, there, now."

                                                                "Make believe!
  When you see me standing helpless on a plank above a whirlpool,
  Do I drown, or do I hear you when you say it?  Make believe?
  How much more am I to say or do for you before I tell you
  That I met him!  What's to follow now may be for you to choose.
  Do you hear me?  Won't you listen?  It's an easy thing to listen. . . ."

  "And it's easy to be crazy when there's everything to lose."

  "If at last you have a notion that I mean what I am saying,
  Do I seem to tell you nothing when I tell you I shall try?
  If you save me, and I lose him -- I don't know -- it won't much matter.
  I dare say that I've lied enough, but now I do not lie."

  "Do you fancy me the one man who has waited and said nothing
  While a wife has dragged an old infatuation from a tomb?
  Give the thing a little air and it will vanish into ashes.
  There you are -- piff! presto!"

                                   "When I came into this room,
  It seemed as if I saw the place, and you there at your table,
  As you are now at this moment, for the last time in my life;
  And I told myself before I came to find you, `I shall tell him,
  If I can, what I have learned of him since I became his wife.'
  And if you say, as I've no doubt you will before I finish,
  That you have tried unceasingly, with all your might and main,
  To teach me, knowing more than I of what it was I needed,
  Don't think, with all you may have thought, that you have tried in vain;
  For you have taught me more than hides in all the shelves of knowledge
  Of how little you found that's in me and was in me all along.
  I believed, if I intruded nothing on you that I cared for,
  I'd be half as much as horses, -- and it seems that I was wrong;
  I believed there was enough of earth in me, with all my nonsense
  Over things that made you sleepy, to keep something still awake;
  But you taught me soon to read my book, and God knows I have read it --
  Ages longer than an angel would have read it for your sake.
  I have said that you must open other doors than I have entered,
  But I wondered while I said it if I might not be obscure.
  Is there anything in all your pedigrees and inventories
  With a value more elusive than a dollar's?  Are you sure
  That if I starve another year for you I shall be stronger
  To endure another like it -- and another -- till I'm dead?"

  "Has your tame cat sold a picture? -- or more likely had a windfall?
  Or for God's sake, what's broke loose?  Have you a bee-hive in your head?
  A little more of this from you will not be easy hearing.
  Do you know that?  Understand it, if you do; for if you won't. . . .
  What the devil are you saying!  Make believe you never said it,
  And I'll say I never heard it. . . .  Oh, you. . . .  If you. . . ."

                                                                   "If I don't?"

  "There are men who say there's reason hidden somewhere in a woman,
  But I doubt if God himself remembers where the key was hung."

  "He may not; for they say that even God himself is growing.
  I wonder if he makes believe that he is growing young;
  I wonder if he makes believe that women who are giving
  All they have in holy loathing to a stranger all their lives
  Are the wise ones who build houses in the Bible. . . ."

                                                           "Stop -- you devil!"

  ". . . Or that souls are any whiter when their bodies are called wives.
  If a dollar's worth of gold will hoop the walls of hell together,
  Why need heaven be such a ruin of a place that never was?
  And if at last I lied my starving soul away to nothing,
  Are you sure you might not miss it?  Have you come to such a pass
  That you would have me longer in your arms if you discovered
  That I made you into someone else. . . .  Oh! . . .  Well, there are
    worse ways.
  But why aim it at my feet -- unless you fear you may be sorry. . . .
  There are many days ahead of you."

                                      "I do not see those days."

  "I can see them.  Granted even I am wrong, there are the children.
  And are they to praise their father for his insight if we die?
  Do you hear them?  Do you hear them overhead -- the children -- singing?
  Do you hear them?  Do you hear the children?"

                                                 "Damn the children!"

                                                                       "Why?
  What have THEY done? . . .  Well, then, -- do it. . . .  Do it now,
    and have it over."

  "Oh, you devil! . . .  Oh, you. . . ."

                                          "No, I'm not a devil, I'm a prophet --
  One who sees the end already of so much that one end more
  Would have now the small importance of one other small illusion,
  Which in turn would have a welcome where the rest have gone before.
  But if I were you, my fancy would look on a little farther
  For the glimpse of a release that may be somewhere still in sight.
  Furthermore, you must remember those two hundred invitations
  For the dancing after dinner.  We shall have to shine tonight.
  We shall dance, and be as happy as a pair of merry spectres,
  On the grave of all the lies that we shall never have to tell;
  We shall dance among the ruins of the tomb of our endurance,
  And I have not a doubt that we shall do it very well.
  There! -- I'm glad you've put it back; for I don't like it.
    Shut the drawer now.
  No -- no -- don't cancel anything.  I'll dance until I drop.
  I can't walk yet, but I'm going to. . . .  Go away somewhere,
    and leave me. . . .
  Oh, you children!  Oh, you children! . . .  God, will they never stop!"




  Tasker Norcross

  "Whether all towns and all who live in them --
  So long as they be somewhere in this world
  That we in our complacency call ours --
  Are more or less the same, I leave to you.
  I should say less.  Whether or not, meanwhile,
  We've all two legs -- and as for that, we haven't --
  There were three kinds of men where I was born:
  The good, the not so good, and Tasker Norcross.
  Now there are two kinds."

                             "Meaning, as I divine,
  Your friend is dead," I ventured.

                                     Ferguson,
  Who talked himself at last out of the world
  He censured, and is therefore silent now,
  Agreed indifferently:  "My friends are dead --
  Or most of them."

                     "Remember one that isn't,"
  I said, protesting.  "Honor him for his ears;
  Treasure him also for his understanding."
  Ferguson sighed, and then talked on again:
  "You have an overgrown alacrity
  For saying nothing much and hearing less;
  And I've a thankless wonder, at the start,
  How much it is to you that I shall tell
  What I have now to say of Tasker Norcross,
  And how much to the air that is around you.
  But given a patience that is not averse
  To the slow tragedies of haunted men --
  Horrors, in fact, if you've a skilful eye
  To know them at their firesides, or out walking, --"

  "Horrors," I said, "are my necessity;
  And I would have them, for their best effect,
  Always out walking."

                        Ferguson frowned at me:
  "The wisest of us are not those who laugh
  Before they know.  Most of us never know --
  Or the long toil of our mortality
  Would not be done.  Most of us never know --
  And there you have a reason to believe
  In God, if you may have no other.  Norcross,
  Or so I gather of his infirmity,
  Was given to know more than he should have known,
  And only God knows why.  See for yourself
  An old house full of ghosts of ancestors,
  Who did their best, or worst, and having done it,
  Died honorably; and each with a distinction
  That hardly would have been for him that had it,
  Had honor failed him wholly as a friend.
  Honor that is a friend begets a friend.
  Whether or not we love him, still we have him;
  And we must live somehow by what we have,
  Or then we die.  If you say chemistry,
  Then you must have your molecules in motion,
  And in their right abundance.  Failing either,
  You have not long to dance.  Failing a friend,
  A genius, or a madness, or a faith
  Larger than desperation, you are here
  For as much longer than you like as may be.
  Imagining now, by way of an example,
  Myself a more or less remembered phantom --
  Again, I should say less -- how many times
  A day should I come back to you?  No answer.
  Forgive me when I seem a little careless,
  But we must have examples, or be lucid
  Without them; and I question your adherence
  To such an undramatic narrative
  As this of mine, without the personal hook."

  "A time is given in Ecclesiastes
  For divers works," I told him.  "Is there one
  For saying nothing in return for nothing?
  If not, there should be."  I could feel his eyes,
  And they were like two cold inquiring points
  Of a sharp metal.  When I looked again,
  To see them shine, the cold that I had felt
  Was gone to make way for a smouldering
  Of lonely fire that I, as I knew then,
  Could never quench with kindness or with lies.
  I should have done whatever there was to do
  For Ferguson, yet I could not have mourned
  In honesty for once around the clock
  The loss of him, for my sake or for his,
  Try as I might; nor would his ghost approve,
  Had I the power and the unthinking will
  To make him tread again without an aim
  The road that was behind him -- and without
  The faith, or friend, or genius, or the madness
  That he contended was imperative.

  After a silence that had been too long,
  "It may be quite as well we don't," he said;
  "As well, I mean, that we don't always say it.
  You know best what I mean, and I suppose
  You might have said it better.  What was that?
  Incorrigible?  Am I incorrigible?
  Well, it's a word; and a word has its use,
  Or, like a man, it will soon have a grave.
  It's a good word enough.  Incorrigible,
  May be, for all I know, the word for Norcross.
  See for yourself that house of his again
  That he called home:  An old house, painted white,
  Square as a box, and chillier than a tomb
  To look at or to live in.  There were trees --
  Too many of them, if such a thing may be --
  Before it and around it.  Down in front
  There was a road, a railroad, and a river;
  Then there were hills behind it, and more trees.
  The thing would fairly stare at you through trees,
  Like a pale inmate out of a barred window
  With a green shade half down; and I dare say
  People who passed have said:  `There's where he lives.
  We know him, but we do not seem to know
  That we remember any good of him,
  Or any evil that is interesting.
  There you have all we know and all we care.'
  They might have said it in all sorts of ways;
  And then, if they perceived a cat, they might
  Or might not have remembered what they said.
  The cat might have a personality --
  And maybe the same one the Lord left out
  Of Tasker Norcross, who, for lack of it,
  Saw the same sun go down year after year;
  All which at last was my discovery.
  And only mine, so far as evidence
  Enlightens one more darkness.  You have known
  All round you, all your days, men who are nothing --
  Nothing, I mean, so far as time tells yet
  Of any other need it has of them
  Than to make sextons hardy -- but no less
  Are to themselves incalculably something,
  And therefore to be cherished.  God, you see,
  Being sorry for them in their fashioning,
  Indemnified them with a quaint esteem
  Of self, and with illusions long as life.
  You know them well, and you have smiled at them;
  And they, in their serenity, may have had
  Their time to smile at you.  Blessed are they
  That see themselves for what they never were
  Or were to be, and are, for their defect,
  At ease with mirrors and the dim remarks
  That pass their tranquil ears."

                                   "Come, come," said I;
  "There may be names in your compendium
  That we are not yet all on fire for shouting.
  Skin most of us of our mediocrity,
  We should have nothing then that we could scratch.
  The picture smarts.  Cover it, if you please,
  And do so rather gently.  Now for Norcross."

  Ferguson closed his eyes in resignation,
  While a dead sigh came out of him.  "Good God!"
  He said, and said it only half aloud,
  As if he knew no longer now, nor cared,
  If one were there to listen:  "Have I said nothing --
  Nothing at all -- of Norcross?  Do you mean
  To patronize him till his name becomes
  A toy made out of letters?  If a name
  Is all you need, arrange an honest column
  Of all the people you have ever known
  That you have never liked.  You'll have enough;
  And you'll have mine, moreover.  No, not yet.
  If I assume too many privileges,
  I pay, and I alone, for their assumption;
  By which, if I assume a darker knowledge
  Of Norcross than another, let the weight
  Of my injustice aggravate the load
  That is not on your shoulders.  When I came
  To know this fellow Norcross in his house,
  I found him as I found him in the street --
  No more, no less; indifferent, but no better.
  `Worse' were not quite the word:  he was not bad;
  He was not . . . well, he was not anything.
  Has your invention ever entertained
  The picture of a dusty worm so dry
  That even the early bird would shake his head
  And fly on farther for another breakfast?"

  "But why forget the fortune of the worm,"
  I said, "if in the dryness you deplore
  Salvation centred and endured?  Your Norcross
  May have been one for many to have envied."

  "Salvation?  Fortune?  Would the worm say that?
  He might; and therefore I dismiss the worm
  With all dry things but one.  Figures away,
  Do you begin to see this man a little?
  Do you begin to see him in the air,
  With all the vacant horrors of his outline
  For you to fill with more than it will hold?
  If so, you needn't crown yourself at once
  With epic laurel if you seem to fill it.
  Horrors, I say, for in the fires and forks
  Of a new hell -- if one were not enough --
  I doubt if a new horror would have held him
  With a malignant ingenuity
  More to be feared than his before he died.
  You smile, as if in doubt.  Well, smile again.
  Now come into his house, along with me:
  The four square sombre things that you see first
  Around you are four walls that go as high
  As to the ceiling.  Norcross knew them well,
  And he knew others like them.  Fasten to that
  With all the claws of your intelligence;
  And hold the man before you in his house
  As if he were a white rat in a box,
  And one that knew himself to be no other.
  I tell you twice that he knew all about it,
  That you may not forget the worst of all
  Our tragedies begin with what we know.
  Could Norcross only not have known, I wonder
  How many would have blessed and envied him!
  Could he have had the usual eye for spots
  On others, and for none upon himself,
  I smile to ponder on the carriages
  That might as well as not have clogged the town
  In honor of his end.  For there was gold,
  You see, though all he needed was a little,
  And what he gave said nothing of who gave it.
  He would have given it all if in return
  There might have been a more sufficient face
  To greet him when he shaved.  Though you insist
  It is the dower, and always, of our degree
  Not to be cursed with such invidious insight,
  Remember that you stand, you and your fancy,
  Now in his house; and since we are together,
  See for yourself and tell me what you see.
  Tell me the best you see.  Make a slight noise
  Of recognition when you find a book
  That you would not as lief read upside down
  As otherwise, for example.  If there you fail,
  Observe the walls and lead me to the place,
  Where you are led.  If there you meet a picture
  That holds you near it for a longer time
  Than you are sorry, you may call it yours,
  And hang it in the dark of your remembrance,
  Where Norcross never sees.  How can he see
  That has no eyes to see?  And as for music,
  He paid with empty wonder for the pangs
  Of his infrequent forced endurance of it;
  And having had no pleasure, paid no more
  For needless immolation, or for the sight
  Of those who heard what he was never to hear.
  To see them listening was itself enough
  To make him suffer; and to watch worn eyes,
  On other days, of strangers who forgot
  Their sorrows and their failures and themselves
  Before a few mysterious odds and ends
  Of marble carted from the Parthenon --
  And all for seeing what he was never to see,
  Because it was alive and he was dead --
  Here was a wonder that was more profound
  Than any that was in fiddles and brass horns.

  "He knew, and in his knowledge there was death.
  He knew there was a region all around him
  That lay outside man's havoc and affairs,
  And yet was not all hostile to their tumult,
  Where poets would have served and honored him,
  And saved him, had there been anything to save.
  But there was nothing, and his tethered range
  Was only a small desert.  Kings of song
  Are not for thrones in deserts.  Towers of sound
  And flowers of sense are but a waste of heaven
  Where there is none to know them from the rocks
  And sand-grass of his own monotony
  That makes earth less than earth.  He could see that,
  And he could see no more.  The captured light
  That may have been or not, for all he cared,
  The song that is in sculpture was not his,
  But only, to his God-forgotten eyes,
  One more immortal nonsense in a world
  Where all was mortal, or had best be so,
  And so be done with.  `Art,' he would have said,
  `Is not life, and must therefore be a lie;'
  And with a few profundities like that
  He would have controverted and dismissed
  The benefit of the Greeks.  He had heard of them,
  As he had heard of his aspiring soul --
  Never to the perceptible advantage,
  In his esteem, of either.  `Faith,' he said,
  Or would have said if he had thought of it,
  `Lives in the same house with Philosophy,
  Where the two feed on scraps and are forlorn
  As orphans after war.  He could see stars,
  On a clear night, but he had not an eye
  To see beyond them.  He could hear spoken words,
  But had no ear for silence when alone.
  He could eat food of which he knew the savor,
  But had no palate for the Bread of Life,
  That human desperation, to his thinking,
  Made famous long ago, having no other.
  Now do you see?  Do you begin to see?"

  I told him that I did begin to see;
  And I was nearer than I should have been
  To laughing at his malign inclusiveness,
  When I considered that, with all our speed,
  We are not laughing yet at funerals.
  I see him now as I could see him then,
  And I see now that it was good for me,
  As it was good for him, that I was quiet;
  For Time's eye was on Ferguson, and the shaft
  Of its inquiring hesitancy had touched him,
  Or so I chose to fancy more than once
  Before he told of Norcross.  When the word
  Of his release (he would have called it so)
  Made half an inch of news, there were no tears
  That are recorded.  Women there may have been
  To wish him back, though I should say, not knowing,
  The few there were to mourn were not for love,
  And were not lovely.  Nothing of them, at least,
  Was in the meagre legend that I gathered
  Years after, when a chance of travel took me
  So near the region of his nativity
  That a few miles of leisure brought me there;
  For there I found a friendly citizen
  Who led me to his house among the trees
  That were above a railroad and a river.
  Square as a box and chillier than a tomb
  It was indeed, to look at or to live in --
  All which had I been told.  "Ferguson died,"
  The stranger said, "and then there was an auction.
  I live here, but I've never yet been warm.
  Remember him?  Yes, I remember him.
  I knew him -- as a man may know a tree --
  For twenty years.  He may have held himself
  A little high when he was here, but now . . .
  Yes, I remember Ferguson.  Oh, yes."
  Others, I found, remembered Ferguson,
  But none of them had heard of Tasker Norcross.




  A Song at Shannon's

  Two men came out of Shannon's having known
  The faces of each other for as long
  As they had listened there to an old song,
  Sung thinly in a wastrel monotone
  By some unhappy night-bird, who had flown
  Too many times and with a wing too strong
  To save himself, and so done heavy wrong
  To more frail elements than his alone.

  Slowly away they went, leaving behind
  More light than was before them.  Neither met
  The other's eyes again or said a word.
  Each to his loneliness or to his kind,
  Went his own way, and with his own regret,
  Not knowing what the other may have heard.




  Souvenir

  A vanished house that for an hour I knew
  By some forgotten chance when I was young
  Had once a glimmering window overhung
  With honeysuckle wet with evening dew.
  Along the path tall dusky dahlias grew,
  And shadowy hydrangeas reached and swung
  Ferociously; and over me, among
  The moths and mysteries, a blurred bat flew.

  Somewhere within there were dim presences
  Of days that hovered and of years gone by.
  I waited, and between their silences
  There was an evanescent faded noise;
  And though a child, I knew it was the voice
  Of one whose occupation was to die.




  Discovery

  We told of him as one who should have soared
  And seen for us the devastating light
  Whereof there is not either day or night,
  And shared with us the glamour of the Word
  That fell once upon Amos to record
  For men at ease in Zion, when the sight
  Of ills obscured aggrieved him and the might
  Of Hamath was a warning of the Lord.

  Assured somehow that he would make us wise,
  Our pleasure was to wait; and our surprise
  Was hard when we confessed the dry return
  Of his regret.  For we were still to learn
  That earth has not a school where we may go
  For wisdom, or for more than we may know.




  Firelight

  Ten years together without yet a cloud,
  They seek each other's eyes at intervals
  Of gratefulness to firelight and four walls
  For love's obliteration of the crowd.
  Serenely and perennially endowed
  And bowered as few may be, their joy recalls
  No snake, no sword; and over them there falls
  The blessing of what neither says aloud.

  Wiser for silence, they were not so glad
  Were she to read the graven tale of lines
  On the wan face of one somewhere alone;
  Nor were they more content could he have had
  Her thoughts a moment since of one who shines
  Apart, and would be hers if he had known.




  The New Tenants

  The day was here when it was his to know
  How fared the barriers he had built between
  His triumph and his enemies unseen,
  For them to undermine and overthrow;
  And it was his no longer to forego
  The sight of them, insidious and serene,
  Where they were delving always and had been
  Left always to be vicious and to grow.

  And there were the new tenants who had come,
  By doors that were left open unawares,
  Into his house, and were so much at home
  There now that he would hardly have to guess,
  By the slow guile of their vindictiveness,
  What ultimate insolence would soon be theirs.




  Inferential

  Although I saw before me there the face
  Of one whom I had honored among men
  The least, and on regarding him again
  Would not have had him in another place,
  He fitted with an unfamiliar grace
  The coffin where I could not see him then
  As I had seen him and appraised him when
  I deemed him unessential to the race.

  For there was more of him than what I saw.
  And there was on me more than the old awe
  That is the common genius of the dead.
  I might as well have heard him:  "Never mind;
  If some of us were not so far behind,
  The rest of us were not so far ahead."




  The Rat

  As often as he let himself be seen
  We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored
  The inscrutable profusion of the Lord
  Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean --
  Who made him human when he might have been
  A rat, and so been wholly in accord
  With any other creature we abhorred
  As always useless and not always clean.

  Now he is hiding all alone somewhere,
  And in a final hole not ready then;
  For now he is among those over there
  Who are not coming back to us again.
  And we who do the fiction of our share
  Say less of rats and rather more of men.




  Rahel to Varnhagen

Note. --  Rahel Robert and Varnhagen von Ense were married,
after many protestations on her part, in 1814.  The marriage -- so far
as he was concerned, at any rate -- appears to have been satisfactory.

  Now you have read them all; or if not all,
  As many as in all conscience I should fancy
  To be enough.  There are no more of them --
  Or none to burn your sleep, or to bring dreams
  Of devils.  If these are not sufficient, surely
  You are a strange young man.  I might live on
  Alone, and for another forty years,
  Or not quite forty, -- are you happier now? --
  Always to ask if there prevailed elsewhere
  Another like yourself that would have held
  These aged hands as long as you have held them,
  Not once observing, for all I can see,
  How they are like your mother's.  Well, you have read
  His letters now, and you have heard me say
  That in them are the cinders of a passion
  That was my life; and you have not yet broken
  Your way out of my house, out of my sight, --
  Into the street.  You are a strange young man.
  I know as much as that of you, for certain;
  And I'm already praying, for your sake,
  That you be not too strange.  Too much of that
  May lead you bye and bye through gloomy lanes
  To a sad wilderness, where one may grope
  Alone, and always, or until he feels
  Ferocious and invisible animals
  That wait for men and eat them in the dark.
  Why do you sit there on the floor so long,
  Smiling at me while I try to be solemn?
  Do you not hear it said for your salvation,
  When I say truth?  Are you, at four and twenty,
  So little deceived in us that you interpret
  The humor of a woman to be noticed
  As her choice between you and Acheron?
  Are you so unscathed yet as to infer
  That if a woman worries when a man,
  Or a man-child, has wet shoes on his feet
  She may as well commemorate with ashes
  The last eclipse of her tranquillity?
  If you look up at me and blink again,
  I shall not have to make you tell me lies
  To know the letters you have not been reading.
  I see now that I may have had for nothing
  A most unpleasant shivering in my conscience
  When I laid open for your contemplation
  The wealth of my worn casket.  If I did,
  The fault was not yours wholly.  Search again
  This wreckage we may call for sport a face,
  And you may chance upon the price of havoc
  That I have paid for a few sorry stones
  That shine and have no light -- yet once were stars,
  And sparkled on a crown.  Little and weak
  They seem; and they are cold, I fear, for you.
  But they that once were fire for me may not
  Be cold again for me until I die;
  And only God knows if they may be then.
  There is a love that ceases to be love
  In being ourselves.  How, then, are we to lose it?
  You that are sure that you know everything
  There is to know of love, answer me that.
  Well? . . .  You are not even interested.

  Once on a far off time when I was young,
  I felt with your assurance, and all through me,
  That I had undergone the last and worst
  Of love's inventions.  There was a boy who brought
  The sun with him and woke me up with it,
  And that was every morning; every night
  I tried to dream of him, but never could,
  More than I might have seen in Adam's eyes
  Their fond uncertainty when Eve began
  The play that all her tireless progeny
  Are not yet weary of.  One scene of it
  Was brief, but was eternal while it lasted;
  And that was while I was the happiest
  Of an imaginary six or seven,
  Somewhere in history but not on earth,
  For whom the sky had shaken and let stars
  Rain down like diamonds.  Then there were clouds,
  And a sad end of diamonds; whereupon
  Despair came, like a blast that would have brought
  Tears to the eyes of all the bears in Finland,
  And love was done.  That was how much I knew.
  Poor little wretch!  I wonder where he is
  This afternoon.  Out of this rain, I hope.

  At last, when I had seen so many days
  Dressed all alike, and in their marching order,
  Go by me that I would not always count them,
  One stopped -- shattering the whole file of Time,
  Or so it seemed; and when I looked again,
  There was a man.  He struck once with his eyes,
  And then there was a woman.  I, who had come
  To wisdom, or to vision, or what you like,
  By the old hidden road that has no name, --
  I, who was used to seeing without flying
  So much that others fly from without seeing,
  Still looked, and was afraid, and looked again.
  And after that, when I had read the story
  Told in his eyes, and felt within my heart
  The bleeding wound of their necessity,
  I knew the fear was his.  If I had failed him
  And flown away from him, I should have lost
  Ingloriously my wings in scrambling back,
  And found them arms again.  If he had struck me
  Not only with his eyes but with his hands,
  I might have pitied him and hated love,
  And then gone mad.  I, who have been so strong --
  Why don't you laugh? -- might even have done all that.
  I, who have learned so much, and said so much,
  And had the commendations of the great
  For one who rules herself -- why don't you cry? --
  And own a certain small authority
  Among the blind, who see no more than ever,
  But like my voice, -- I would have tossed it all
  To Tophet for one man; and he was jealous.
  I would have wound a snake around my neck
  And then have let it bite me till I died,
  If my so doing would have made me sure
  That one man might have lived; and he was jealous.
  I would have driven these hands into a cage
  That held a thousand scorpions, and crushed them,
  If only by so poisonous a trial
  I could have crushed his doubt.  I would have wrung
  My living blood with mediaeval engines
  Out of my screaming flesh, if only that
  Would have made one man sure.  I would have paid
  For him the tiresome price of body and soul,
  And let the lash of a tongue-weary town
  Fall as it might upon my blistered name;
  And while it fell I could have laughed at it,
  Knowing that he had found out finally
  Where the wrong was.  But there was evil in him
  That would have made no more of his possession
  Than confirmation of another fault;
  And there was honor -- if you call it honor
  That hoods itself with doubt and wears a crown
  Of lead that might as well be gold and fire.
  Give it as heavy or as light a name
  As any there is that fits.  I see myself
  Without the power to swear to this or that
  That I might be if he had been without it.
  Whatever I might have been that I was not,
  It only happened that it wasn't so.
  Meanwhile, you might seem to be listening:
  If you forget yourself and go to sleep,
  My treasure, I shall not say this again.
  Look up once more into my poor old face,
  Where you see beauty, or the Lord knows what,
  And say to me aloud what else there is
  Than ruins in it that you most admire.

  No, there was never anything like that;
  Nature has never fastened such a mask
  Of radiant and impenetrable merit
  On any woman as you say there is
  On this one.  Not a mask?  I thank you, sir,
  But you see more with your determination,
  I fear, than with your prudence or your conscience;
  And you have never met me with my eyes
  In all the mirrors I've made faces at.
  No, I shall never call you strange again:
  You are the young and inconvincible
  Epitome of all blind men since Adam.
  May the blind lead the blind, if that be so?
  And we shall need no mirrors?  You are saying
  What most I feared you might.  But if the blind,
  Or one of them, be not so fortunate
  As to put out the eyes of recollection,
  She might at last, without her meaning it,
  Lead on the other, without his knowing it,
  Until the two of them should lose themselves
  Among dead craters in a lava-field
  As empty as a desert on the moon.
  I am not speaking in a theatre,
  But in a room so real and so familiar
  That sometimes I would wreck it.  Then I pause,
  Remembering there is a King in Weimar --
  A monarch, and a poet, and a shepherd
  Of all who are astray and are outside
  The realm where they should rule.  I think of him,
  And save the furniture; I think of you,
  And am forlorn, finding in you the one
  To lavish aspirations and illusions
  Upon a faded and forsaken house
  Where love, being locked alone, was nigh to burning
  House and himself together.  Yes, you are strange,
  To see in such an injured architecture
  Room for new love to live in.  Are you laughing?
  No?  Well, you are not crying, as you should be.
  Tears, even if they told only gratitude
  For your escape, and had no other story,
  Were surely more becoming than a smile
  For my unwomanly straightforwardness
  In seeing for you, through my close gate of years
  Your forty ways to freedom.  Why do you smile?
  And while I'm trembling at my faith in you
  In giving you to read this book of danger
  That only one man living might have written --
  These letters, which have been a part of me
  So long that you may read them all again
  As often as you look into my face,
  And hear them when I speak to you, and feel them
  Whenever you have to touch me with your hand, --
  Why are you so unwilling to be spared?
  Why do you still believe in me?  But no,
  I'll find another way to ask you that.
  I wonder if there is another way
  That says it better, and means anything.
  There is no other way that could be worse?
  I was not asking you; it was myself
  Alone that I was asking.  Why do I dip
  For lies, when there is nothing in my well
  But shining truth, you say?  How do you know?
  Truth has a lonely life down where she lives;
  And many a time, when she comes up to breathe,
  She sinks before we seize her, and makes ripples.
  Possibly you may know no more of me
  Than a few ripples; and they may soon be gone,
  Leaving you then with all my shining truth
  Drowned in a shining water; and when you look
  You may not see me there, but something else
  That never was a woman -- being yourself.
  You say to me my truth is past all drowning,
  And safe with you for ever?  You know all that?
  How do you know all that, and who has told you?
  You know so much that I'm an atom frightened
  Because you know so little.  And what is this?
  You know the luxury there is in haunting
  The blasted thoroughfares of disillusion --
  If that's your name for them -- with only ghosts
  For company?  You know that when a woman
  Is blessed, or cursed, with a divine impatience
  (Another name of yours for a bad temper)
  She must have one at hand on whom to wreak it
  (That's what you mean, whatever the turn you give it),
  Sure of a kindred sympathy, and thereby
  Effect a mutual calm?  You know that wisdom,
  Given in vain to make a food for those
  Who are without it, will be seen at last,
  And even at last only by those who gave it,
  As one or more of the forgotten crumbs
  That others leave?  You know that men's applause
  And women's envy savor so much of dust
  That I go hungry, having at home no fare
  But the same changeless bread that I may swallow
  Only with tears and prayers?  Who told you that?
  You know that if I read, and read alone,
  Too many books that no men yet have written,
  I may go blind, or worse?  You know yourself,
  Of all insistent and insidious creatures,
  To be the one to save me, and to guard
  For me their flaming language?  And you know
  That if I give much headway to the whim
  That's in me never to be quite sure that even
  Through all those years of storm and fire I waited
  For this one rainy day, I may go on,
  And on, and on alone, through smoke and ashes,
  To a cold end?  You know so dismal much
  As that about me? . . .  Well, I believe you do.




  Nimmo

  Since you remember Nimmo, and arrive
  At such a false and florid and far drawn
  Confusion of odd nonsense, I connive
  No longer, though I may have led you on.

  So much is told and heard and told again,
  So many with his legend are engrossed,
  That I, more sorry now than I was then,
  May live on to be sorry for his ghost.

  You knew him, and you must have known his eyes, --
  How deep they were, and what a velvet light
  Came out of them when anger or surprise,
  Or laughter, or Francesca, made them bright.

  No, you will not forget such eyes, I think, --
  And you say nothing of them.  Very well.
  I wonder if all history's worth a wink,
  Sometimes, or if my tale be one to tell.

  For they began to lose their velvet light;
  Their fire grew dead without and small within;
  And many of you deplored the needless fight
  That somewhere in the dark there must have been.

  All fights are needless, when they're not our own,
  But Nimmo and Francesca never fought.
  Remember that; and when you are alone,
  Remember me -- and think what I have thought.

  Now, mind you, I say nothing of what was,
  Or never was, or could or could not be:
  Bring not suspicion's candle to the glass
  That mirrors a friend's face to memory.

  Of what you see, see all, -- but see no more;
  For what I show you here will not be there.
  The devil has had his way with paint before,
  And he's an artist, -- and you needn't stare.

  There was a painter and he painted well:
  He'd paint you Daniel in the lions' den,
  Beelzebub, Elaine, or William Tell.
  I'm coming back to Nimmo's eyes again.

  The painter put the devil in those eyes,
  Unless the devil did, and there he stayed;
  And then the lady fled from paradise,
  And there's your fact.  The lady was afraid.

  She must have been afraid, or may have been,
  Of evil in their velvet all the while;
  But sure as I'm a sinner with a skin,
  I'll trust the man as long as he can smile.

  I trust him who can smile and then may live
  In my heart's house, where Nimmo is today.
  God knows if I have more than men forgive
  To tell him; but I played, and I shall pay.

  I knew him then, and if I know him yet,
  I know in him, defeated and estranged,
  The calm of men forbidden to forget
  The calm of women who have loved and changed.

  But there are ways that are beyond our ways,
  Or he would not be calm and she be mute,
  As one by one their lost and empty days
  Pass without even the warmth of a dispute.

  God help us all when women think they see;
  God save us when they do.  I'm fair; but though
  I know him only as he looks to me,
  I know him, -- and I tell Francesca so.

  And what of Nimmo?  Little would you ask
  Of him, could you but see him as I can,
  At his bewildered and unfruitful task
  Of being what he was born to be -- a man.

  Better forget that I said anything
  Of what your tortured memory may disclose;
  I know him, and your worst remembering
  Would count as much as nothing, I suppose.

  Meanwhile, I trust him; and I know his way
  Of trusting me, as always in his youth.
  I'm painting here a better man, you say,
  Than I, the painter; and you say the truth.




  Peace on Earth

  He took a frayed hat from his head,
  And "Peace on Earth" was what he said.
  "A morsel out of what you're worth,
  And there we have it:  Peace on Earth.
  Not much, although a little more
  Than what there was on earth before.
  I'm as you see, I'm Ichabod, --
  But never mind the ways I've trod;
  I'm sober now, so help me God."

  I could not pass the fellow by.
  "Do you believe in God?" said I;
  "And is there to be Peace on Earth?"

  "Tonight we celebrate the birth,"
  He said, "of One who died for men;
  The Son of God, we say.  What then?
  Your God, or mine?  I'd make you laugh
  Were I to tell you even half
  That I have learned of mine today
  Where yours would hardly seem to stay.
  Could He but follow in and out
  Some anthropoids I know about,
  The God to whom you may have prayed
  Might see a world He never made."

  "Your words are flowing full," said I;
  "But yet they give me no reply;
  Your fountain might as well be dry."

  "A wiser One than you, my friend,
  Would wait and hear me to the end;
  And for His eyes a light would shine
  Through this unpleasant shell of mine
  That in your fancy makes of me
  A Christmas curiosity.
  All right, I might be worse than that;
  And you might now be lying flat;
  I might have done it from behind,
  And taken what there was to find.
  Don't worry, for I'm not that kind.
  `Do I believe in God?'  Is that
  The price tonight of a new hat?
  Has He commanded that His name
  Be written everywhere the same?
  Have all who live in every place
  Identified His hidden face?
  Who knows but He may like as well
  My story as one you may tell?
  And if He show me there be Peace
  On Earth, as there be fields and trees
  Outside a jail-yard, am I wrong
  If now I sing Him a new song?
  Your world is in yourself, my friend,
  For your endurance to the end;
  And all the Peace there is on Earth
  Is faith in what your world is worth,
  And saying, without any lies,
  Your world could not be otherwise."

  "One might say that and then be shot,"
  I told him; and he said:  "Why not?"
  I ceased, and gave him rather more
  Than he was counting of my store.
  "And since I have it, thanks to you,
  Don't ask me what I mean to do,"
  Said he.  "Believe that even I
  Would rather tell the truth than lie --
  On Christmas Eve.  No matter why."

  His unshaved, educated face,
  His inextinguishable grace,
  And his hard smile, are with me still,
  Deplore the vision as I will;
  For whatsoever he be at,
  So droll a derelict as that
  Should have at least another hat.




  Late Summer

    (Alcaics)

  Confused, he found her lavishing feminine
  Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;
    And yet she smiled.  Why, then, should horrors
  Be as they were, without end, her playthings?

  And why were dead years hungrily telling her
  Lies of the dead, who told them again to her?
    If now she knew, there might be kindness
  Clamoring yet where a faith lay stifled.

  A little faith in him, and the ruinous
  Past would be for time to annihilate,
    And wash out, like a tide that washes
  Out of the sand what a child has drawn there.

  God, what a shining handful of happiness,
  Made out of days and out of eternities,
    Were now the pulsing end of patience --
  Could he but have what a ghost had stolen!

  What was a man before him, or ten of them,
  While he was here alive who could answer them,
    And in their teeth fling confirmations
  Harder than agates against an egg-shell?

  But now the man was dead, and would come again
  Never, though she might honor ineffably
    The flimsy wraith of him she conjured
  Out of a dream with his wand of absence.

  And if the truth were now but a mummery,
  Meriting pride's implacable irony,
    So much the worse for pride.  Moreover,
  Save her or fail, there was conscience always.

  Meanwhile, a few misgivings of innocence,
  Imploring to be sheltered and credited,
    Were not amiss when she revealed them.
  Whether she struggled or not, he saw them.

  Also, he saw that while she was hearing him
  Her eyes had more and more of the past in them;
    And while he told what cautious honor
  Told him was all he had best be sure of,

  He wondered once or twice, inadvertently,
  Where shifting winds were driving his argosies,
    Long anchored and as long unladen,
  Over the foam for the golden chances.

  "If men were not for killing so carelessly,
  And women were for wiser endurances,"
    He said, "we might have yet a world here
  Fitter for Truth to be seen abroad in;

  "If Truth were not so strange in her nakedness,
  And we were less forbidden to look at it,
    We might not have to look."  He stared then
  Down at the sand where the tide threw forward

  Its cold, unconquered lines, that unceasingly
  Foamed against hope, and fell.  He was calm enough,
    Although he knew he might be silenced
  Out of all calm; and the night was coming.

  "I climb for you the peak of his infamy
  That you may choose your fall if you cling to it.
    No more for me unless you say more.
  All you have left of a dream defends you:

  "The truth may be as evil an augury
  As it was needful now for the two of us.
    We cannot have the dead between us.
  Tell me to go, and I go."  -- She pondered:

  "What you believe is right for the two of us
  Makes it as right that you are not one of us.
    If this be needful truth you tell me,
  Spare me, and let me have lies hereafter."

  She gazed away where shadows were covering
  The whole cold ocean's healing indifference.
    No ship was coming.  When the darkness
  Fell, she was there, and alone, still gazing.




  An Evangelist's Wife

  "Why am I not myself these many days,
  You ask?  And have you nothing more to ask?
  I do you wrong?  I do not hear your praise
  To God for giving you me to share your task?

  "Jealous -- of Her?  Because her cheeks are pink,
  And she has eyes?  No, not if she had seven.
  If you should only steal an hour to think,
  Sometime, there might be less to be forgiven.

  "No, you are never cruel.  If once or twice
  I found you so, I could applaud and sing.
  Jealous of -- What?  You are not very wise.
  Does not the good Book tell you anything?

  "In David's time poor Michal had to go.
  Jealous of God?  Well, if you like it so."




  The Old King's New Jester

  You that in vain would front the coming order
  With eyes that meet forlornly what they must,
  And only with a furtive recognition
  See dust where there is dust, --
  Be sure you like it always in your faces,
  Obscuring your best graces,
  Blinding your speech and sight,
  Before you seek again your dusty places
  Where the old wrong seems right.

  Longer ago than cave-men had their changes
  Our fathers may have slain a son or two,
  Discouraging a further dialectic
  Regarding what was new;
  And after their unstudied admonition
  Occasional contrition
  For their old-fashioned ways
  May have reduced their doubts, and in addition
  Softened their final days.

  Farther away than feet shall ever travel
  Are the vague towers of our unbuilded State;
  But there are mightier things than we to lead us,
  That will not let us wait.
  And we go on with none to tell us whether
  Or not we've each a tether
  Determining how fast or far we go;
  And it is well, since we must go together,
  That we are not to know.

  If the old wrong and all its injured glamour
  Haunts you by day and gives your night no peace,
  You may as well, agreeably and serenely,
  Give the new wrong its lease;
  For should you nourish a too fervid yearning
  For what is not returning,
  The vicious and unfused ingredient
  May give you qualms -- and one or two concerning
  The last of your content.




  Lazarus

  "No, Mary, there was nothing -- not a word.
  Nothing, and always nothing.  Go again
  Yourself, and he may listen -- or at least
  Look up at you, and let you see his eyes.
  I might as well have been the sound of rain,
  A wind among the cedars, or a bird;
  Or nothing.  Mary, make him look at you;
  And even if he should say that we are nothing,
  To know that you have heard him will be something.
  And yet he loved us, and it was for love
  The Master gave him back.  Why did He wait
  So long before He came?  Why did He weep?
  I thought He would be glad -- and Lazarus --
  To see us all again as He had left us --
  All as it was, all as it was before."

  Mary, who felt her sister's frightened arms
  Like those of someone drowning who had seized her,
  Fearing at last they were to fail and sink
  Together in this fog-stricken sea of strangeness,
  Fought sadly, with bereaved indignant eyes,
  To find again the fading shores of home
  That she had seen but now could see no longer.
  Now she could only gaze into the twilight,
  And in the dimness know that he was there,
  Like someone that was not.  He who had been
  Their brother, and was dead, now seemed alive
  Only in death again -- or worse than death;
  For tombs at least, always until today,
  Though sad were certain.  There was nothing certain
  For man or God in such a day as this;
  For there they were alone, and there was he --
  Alone; and somewhere out of Bethany,
  The Master -- who had come to them so late,
  Only for love of them and then so slowly,
  And was for their sake hunted now by men
  Who feared Him as they feared no other prey --
  For the world's sake was hidden.  "Better the tomb
  For Lazarus than life, if this be life,"
  She thought; and then to Martha, "No, my dear,"
  She said aloud; "not as it was before.
  Nothing is ever as it was before,
  Where Time has been.  Here there is more than Time;
  And we that are so lonely and so far
  From home, since he is with us here again,
  Are farther now from him and from ourselves
  Than we are from the stars.  He will not speak
  Until the spirit that is in him speaks;
  And we must wait for all we are to know,
  Or even to learn that we are not to know.
  Martha, we are too near to this for knowledge,
  And that is why it is that we must wait.
  Our friends are coming if we call for them,
  And there are covers we'll put over him
  To make him warmer.  We are too young, perhaps,
  To say that we know better what is best
  Than he.  We do not know how old he is.
  If you remember what the Master said,
  Try to believe that we need have no fear.
  Let me, the selfish and the careless one,
  Be housewife and a mother for tonight;
  For I am not so fearful as you are,
  And I was not so eager."

                            Martha sank
  Down at her sister's feet and there sat watching
  A flower that had a small familiar name
  That was as old as memory, but was not
  The name of what she saw now in its brief
  And infinite mystery that so frightened her
  That life became a terror.  Tears again
  Flooded her eyes and overflowed.  "No, Mary,"
  She murmured slowly, hating her own words
  Before she heard them, "you are not so eager
  To see our brother as we see him now;
  Neither is He who gave him back to us.
  I was to be the simple one, as always,
  And this was all for me."  She stared again
  Over among the trees where Lazarus,
  Who seemed to be a man who was not there,
  Might have been one more shadow among shadows,
  If she had not remembered.  Then she felt
  The cool calm hands of Mary on her face,
  And shivered, wondering if such hands were real.

  "The Master loved you as He loved us all,
  Martha; and you are saying only things
  That children say when they have had no sleep.
  Try somehow now to rest a little while;
  You know that I am here, and that our friends
  Are coming if I call."

                          Martha at last
  Arose, and went with Mary to the door,
  Where they stood looking off at the same place,
  And at the same shape that was always there
  As if it would not ever move or speak,
  And always would be there.  "Mary, go now,
  Before the dark that will be coming hides him.
  I am afraid of him out there alone,
  Unless I see him; and I have forgotten
  What sleep is.  Go now -- make him look at you --
  And I shall hear him if he stirs or whispers.
  Go! -- or I'll scream and bring all Bethany
  To come and make him speak.  Make him say once
  That he is glad, and God may say the rest.
  Though He say I shall sleep, and sleep for ever,
  I shall not care for that . . . Go!"

                                        Mary, moving
  Almost as if an angry child had pushed her,
  Went forward a few steps; and having waited
  As long as Martha's eyes would look at hers,
  Went forward a few more, and a few more;
  And so, until she came to Lazarus,
  Who crouched with his face hidden in his hands,
  Like one that had no face.  Before she spoke,
  Feeling her sister's eyes that were behind her
  As if the door where Martha stood were now
  As far from her as Egypt, Mary turned
  Once more to see that she was there.  Then, softly,
  Fearing him not so much as wondering
  What his first word might be, said, "Lazarus,
  Forgive us if we seemed afraid of you;"
  And having spoken, pitied her poor speech
  That had so little seeming gladness in it,
  So little comfort, and so little love.

  There was no sign from him that he had heard,
  Or that he knew that she was there, or cared
  Whether she spoke to him again or died
  There at his feet.  "We love you, Lazarus,
  And we are not afraid.  The Master said
  We need not be afraid.  Will you not say
  To me that you are glad?  Look, Lazarus!
  Look at my face, and see me.  This is Mary."

  She found his hands and held them.  They were cool,
  Like hers, but they were not so calm as hers.
  Through the white robes in which his friends had wrapped him
  When he had groped out of that awful sleep,
  She felt him trembling and she was afraid.
  At last he sighed; and she prayed hungrily
  To God that she might have again the voice
  Of Lazarus, whose hands were giving her now
  The recognition of a living pressure
  That was almost a language.  When he spoke,
  Only one word that she had waited for
  Came from his lips, and that word was her name.

  "I heard them saying, Mary, that He wept
  Before I woke."  The words were low and shaken,
  Yet Mary knew that he who uttered them
  Was Lazarus; and that would be enough
  Until there should be more . . . "Who made Him come,
  That He should weep for me? . . .  Was it you, Mary?"
  The questions held in his incredulous eyes
  Were more than she would see.  She looked away;
  But she had felt them and should feel for ever,
  She thought, their cold and lonely desperation
  That had the bitterness of all cold things
  That were not cruel.  "I should have wept," he said,
  "If I had been the Master. . . ."

                                     Now she could feel
  His hands above her hair -- the same black hair
  That once he made a jest of, praising it,
  While Martha's busy eyes had left their work
  To flash with laughing envy.  Nothing of that
  Was to be theirs again; and such a thought
  Was like the flying by of a quick bird
  Seen through a shadowy doorway in the twilight.
  For now she felt his hands upon her head,
  Like weights of kindness:  "I forgive you, Mary. . . .
  You did not know -- Martha could not have known --
  Only the Master knew. . . .  Where is He now?
  Yes, I remember.  They came after Him.
  May the good God forgive Him. . . .  I forgive Him.
  I must; and I may know only from Him
  The burden of all this. . . .  Martha was here --
  But I was not yet here.  She was afraid. . . .
  Why did He do it, Mary?  Was it -- you?
  Was it for you? . . .  Where are the friends I saw?
  Yes, I remember.  They all went away.
  I made them go away. . . .  Where is He now? . . .
  What do I see down there?  Do I see Martha --
  Down by the door? . . .  I must have time for this."

  Lazarus looked about him fearfully,
  And then again at Mary, who discovered
  Awakening apprehension in his eyes,
  And shivered at his feet.  All she had feared
  Was here; and only in the slow reproach
  Of his forgiveness lived his gratitude.
  Why had he asked if it was all for her
  That he was here?  And what had Martha meant?
  Why had the Master waited?  What was coming
  To Lazarus, and to them, that had not come?
  What had the Master seen before He came,
  That He had come so late?

                             "Where is He, Mary?"
  Lazarus asked again.  "Where did He go?"
  Once more he gazed about him, and once more
  At Mary for an answer.  "Have they found Him?
  Or did He go away because He wished
  Never to look into my eyes again? . . .
  That, I could understand. . . .  Where is He, Mary?"

  "I do not know," she said.  "Yet in my heart
  I know that He is living, as you are living --
  Living, and here.  He is not far from us.
  He will come back to us and find us all --
  Lazarus, Martha, Mary -- everything --
  All as it was before.  Martha said that.
  And He said we were not to be afraid."
  Lazarus closed his eyes while on his face
  A tortured adumbration of a smile
  Flickered an instant.  "All as it was before,"
  He murmured wearily.  "Martha said that;
  And He said you were not to be afraid . . .
  Not you . . .  Not you . . .  Why should you be afraid?
  Give all your little fears, and Martha's with them,
  To me; and I will add them unto mine,
  Like a few rain-drops to Gennesaret."

  "If you had frightened me in other ways,
  Not willing it," Mary said, "I should have known
  You still for Lazarus.  But who is this?
  Tell me again that you are Lazarus;
  And tell me if the Master gave to you
  No sign of a new joy that shall be coming
  To this house that He loved.  Are you afraid?
  Are you afraid, who have felt everything --
  And seen . . . ?"

                     But Lazarus only shook his head,
  Staring with his bewildered shining eyes
  Hard into Mary's face.  "I do not know,
  Mary," he said, after a long time.
  "When I came back, I knew the Master's eyes
  Were looking into mine.  I looked at His,
  And there was more in them than I could see.
  At first I could see nothing but His eyes;
  Nothing else anywhere was to be seen --
  Only His eyes.  And they looked into mine --
  Long into mine, Mary, as if He knew."

  Mary began to be afraid of words
  As she had never been afraid before
  Of loneliness or darkness, or of death,
  But now she must have more of them or die:
  "He cannot know that there is worse than death,"
  She said.  "And you . . ."

                              "Yes, there is worse than death."
  Said Lazarus; "and that was what He knew;
  And that is what it was that I could see
  This morning in his eyes.  I was afraid,
  But not as you are.  There is worse than death,
  Mary; and there is nothing that is good
  For you in dying while you are still here.
  Mary, never go back to that again.
  You would not hear me if I told you more,
  For I should say it only in a language
  That you are not to learn by going back.
  To be a child again is to go forward --
  And that is much to know.  Many grow old,
  And fade, and go away, not knowing how much
  That is to know.  Mary, the night is coming,
  And there will soon be darkness all around you.
  Let us go down where Martha waits for us,
  And let there be light shining in this house."

  He rose, but Mary would not let him go:
  "Martha, when she came back from here, said only
  That she heard nothing.  And have you no more
  For Mary now than you had then for Martha?
  Is Nothing, Lazarus, all you have for me?
  Was Nothing all you found where you have been?
  If that be so, what is there worse than that --
  Or better -- if that be so?  And why should you,
  With even our love, go the same dark road over?"

  "I could not answer that, if that were so,"
  Said Lazarus, -- "not even if I were God.
  Why should He care whether I came or stayed,
  If that were so?  Why should the Master weep --
  For me, or for the world, -- or save Himself
  Longer for nothing?  And if that were so,
  Why should a few years' more mortality
  Make Him a fugitive where flight were needless,
  Had He but held his peace and given his nod
  To an old Law that would be new as any?
  I cannot say the answer to all that;
  Though I may say that He is not afraid,
  And that it is not for the joy there is
  In serving an eternal Ignorance
  Of our futility that He is here.
  Is that what you and Martha mean by Nothing?
  Is that what you are fearing?  If that be so,
  There are more weeds than lentils in your garden.
  And one whose weeds are laughing at his harvest
  May as well have no garden; for not there
  Shall he be gleaning the few bits and orts
  Of life that are to save him.  For my part,
  I am again with you, here among shadows
  That will not always be so dark as this;
  Though now I see there's yet an evil in me
  That made me let you be afraid of me.
  No, I was not afraid -- not even of life.
  I thought I was . . . I must have time for this;
  And all the time there is will not be long.
  I cannot tell you what the Master saw
  This morning in my eyes.  I do not know.
  I cannot yet say how far I have gone,
  Or why it is that I am here again,
  Or where the old road leads.  I do not know.
  I know that when I did come back, I saw
  His eyes again among the trees and faces --
  Only His eyes; and they looked into mine --
  Long into mine -- long, long, as if He knew."











End of Project Gutenberg's The Three Taverns, by Edwin Arlington Robinson