And then she vanished, in her turn
To be forgotten, like old tunes.
So they were gone — all three of them, 65
I should have said, and said no more,
Had not a face once on Broadway
Been one that I had seen before.
The face and hands and hair were old,
But neither time nor penury 70
Could quench within Llewellyn’s eyes
The shine of his one victory.
The roses, faded and gone by,
Left ruin where they once had reigned;
But on the wreck, as on old shells, 75
The color of the rose remained.
His fictive merchandise I bought
For him to keep and show again,
Then led him slowly from the crush
Of his cold-shouldered fellow men. 80
“And so, Llewellyn,” I began —
“Not so,” he said; “not so at all:
I’ve tried the world, and found it good,
For more than twenty years this fall.
“And what the world has left of me 85
Will go now in a little while.”
And what the world had left of him
Was partly an unholy guile.
“That I have paid for being calm
Is what you see, if you have eyes; 90
For let a man be calm too long,
He pays for much before he dies.
“Be calm when you are growing old
And you have nothing else to do;
Pour not the wine of life too thin 95
If water means the death of you.
“You say I might have learned at home
The truth in season to be strong?
Not so; I took the wine of life
Too thin, and I was calm too long. 100
“Like others who are strong too late,
For me there was no going back;
For I had found another speed,
And I was on the other track.
“God knows how far I might have gone 105
Or what there might have been to see;
But my speed had a sudden end,
And here you have the end of me.”
The end or not, it may be now
But little farther from the truth 110
To say those worn satiric eyes
Had something of immortal youth.
He may among the millions here
Be one; or he may, quite as well,
Be gone to find again the Tree 115
Of Knowledge, out of which he fell.
He may be near us, dreaming yet
Of unrepented rouge and coral;
Or in a grave without a name
May be as far off as a moral. 120
Bewick Finzer
TIME was when his half million drew
The breath of six per cent;
But soon the worm of what-was-not
Fed hard on his content;
And something crumbled in his brain 5
When his half million went.
Time passed, and filled along with his
The place of many more;
Time came, and hardly one of us
Had credence to restore, 10
From what appeared one day, the man
Whom we had known before.
The broken voice, the withered neck,
The coat worn out with care,
The cleanliness of indigence, 15
The brilliance of despair,
The fond imponderable dreams
Of affluence, — all were there.
Poor Finzer, with his dreams and schemes,
Fares hard now in the race, 20
With heart and eye that have a task
When he looks in the face
Of one who might so easily
Have been in Finzer’s place.
He comes unfailing for the loan 25
We give and then forget;
He comes, and probably for years
Will he be coming yet, —
Familiar as an old mistake,
And futile as regret. 30
Bokardo
WELL, Bokardo, here we are;
Make yourself at home.
Look around — you haven’t far
To look — and why be dumb?
Not the place that used to be, 5
Not so many things to see;
But there’s room for you and me.
And you — you’ve come.
Talk a little; or, if not,
Show me with a sign 10
Why it was that you forgot
What was yours and mine.
Friends, I gather, are small things
In an age when coins are kings;
Even at that, one hardly flings 15
Friends before swine.
Rather strong? I knew as much,
For it made you speak.
No offense to swine, as such,
But why this hide-and-seek? 20
You have something on your side,
And you wish you might have died,
So you tell me. And you tried
One night last week?
You tried hard? And even then 25
Found a time to pause?
When you try as hard again,
You’ll have another cause.
When you find yourself at odds
With all dreamers of all gods, 30
You may smite yourself with rods —
But not the laws.
Though they seem to show a spite
Rather devilish,
They move on as with a might 35
Stronger than your wish.
Still, however strong they be,
They bide man’s authority:
Xerxes, when he flogged the sea,
May’ve scared a fish. 40
It’s a comfort, if you like,
To keep honor warm,
But as often as you strike
The laws, you do no harm.
To the laws, I mean. To you — 45
That’s another point of view,
One you may as well indue
With some alarm.
Not the most heroic face
To present, I grant; 50
Nor will you insure disgrace
By fearing what you want.
Freedom has a world of sides,
And if reason once derides
Courage, then your courage hides 55
A deal of cant.
Learn a little to forget
Life was once a feast;
You aren’t fit for dying yet,
So don’t be a beast. 60
Few men with a mind will say,
Thinking twice, that they can pay
Half their debts of yesterday,
Or be released.
There’s a debt now on your mind 65
More than any gold?
And there’s nothing you can find
Out there in the cold?
Only — what’s his name? — Remorse?
And Death riding on his horse? 70
Well, be glad there’s nothing worse
Than you have told.
Leave Remorse to warm his hands
Outside in the rain.
As for Death, he understands, 75
And he will come again.
Therefore, till your wits are clear,
Flourish and be quiet — here.
But a devil at each ear
Will be a strain? 80
Past a doubt they will indeed,
More than you have earned.
I say that because you need
Ablution, being burned?
Well, if you must have it so, 85
Your last flight went rather low.
Better say you had to know
What you have learned.
And that’s over. Here you are,
Battered by the past. 90
Time will have his little s
car,
But the wound won’t last.
Nor shall harrowing surprise
Find a world without its eyes
If a star fades when the skies 95
Are overcast.
God knows there are lives enough,
Crushed, and too far gone
Longer to make sermons of,
And those we leave alone. 100
Others, if they will, may rend
The worn patience of a friend
Who, though smiling, sees the end,
With nothing done.
But your fervor to be free 105
Fled the faith it scorned;
Death demands a decency
Of you, and you are warned.
But for all we give we get
Mostly blows? Don’t be upset; 110
You, Bokardo, are not yet
Consumed or mourned.
There’ll be falling into view
Much to rearrange;
And there’ll be a time for you 115
To marvel at the change.
They that have the least to fear
Question hardest what is here;
When long-hidden skies are clear,
The stars look strange 120
The Man Against the Sky
BETWEEN me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill 5
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.
Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on 10
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man’s imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
What he may say thereafter to few men, — 15
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted over ways that save,
Or lured from all repose, 20
If he go on too far to find a grave,
Mostly alone he goes.
Even he, who stood where I had found him,
On high with fire all round him,
Who moved along the molten west, 25
And over the round hill’s crest
That seemed half ready with him to go down,
Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,
As if there were to be no last thing left
Of a nameless unimaginable town, — 30
Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken
Down to the perils of a depth not known,
From death defended though by men forsaken,
The bread that every man must eat alone;
He may have walked while others hardly dared 35
Look on to see him stand where many fell;
And upward out of that, as out of hell,
He may have sung and striven
To mount where more of him shall yet be given,
Bereft of all retreat, 40
To sevenfold heat, —
As on a day when three in Dura shared
The furnace, and were spared
For glory by that king of Babylon
Who made himself so great that God, who heard, 45
Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.
Again, he may have gone down easily,
By comfortable altitudes, and found,
As always, underneath him solid ground
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand 50
Possessed already of the promised land,
Far stretched and fair to see:
A good sight, verily,
And one to make the eyes of her who bore him
Shine glad with hidden tears. 55
Why question of his ease of who before him,
In one place or another where they left
Their names as far behind them as their bones,
And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft,
And shrewdly sharpened stones, 60
Carved hard the way for his ascendency
Through deserts of lost years?
Why trouble him now who sees and hears
No more than what his innocence requires,
And therefore to no other height aspires 65
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires?
He may do more by seeing what he sees
Than others eager for iniquities;
He may, by seeing all things for the best,
Incite futurity to do the rest. 70
Or with an even likelihood,
He may have met with atrabilious eyes
The fires of time on equal terms and passed
Indifferently down, until at last
His only kind of grandeur would have been, 75
Apparently, in being seen.
He may have had for evil or for good
No argument; he may have had no care
For what without himself went anywhere
To failure or to glory, and least of all 80
For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;
He may have been the prophet of an art
Immovable to old idolatries;
He may have been a player without a part,
Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies 85
For such a flaming way to advertise;
He may have been a painter sick at heart
With Nature’s toiling for a new surprise;
He may have been a cynic, who now, for all
Of anything divine that his effete 90
Negation may have tasted,
Saw truth in his own image, rather small,
Forbore to fever the ephemeral,
Found any barren height a good retreat
From any swarming street, 95
And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;
And when the primitive old-fashioned stars
Came out again to shine on joys and wars
More primitive, and all arrayed for doom,
He may have proved a world a sorry thing 100
In his imagining,
And life a lighted highway to the tomb.
Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread,
His hopes to chaos led,
He may have stumbled up there from the past, 105
And with an aching strangeness viewed the last
Abysmal conflagration of his dreams, —
A flame where nothing seems
To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;
And while it all went out, 110
Not even the faint anodyne of doubt
May then have eased a painful going down
From pictured heights of power and lost renown,
Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor
Remote and unapproachable forever; 115
And at his heart there may have gnawed
Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed
And long dishonored by the living death
Assigned alike by chance
To brutes and hierophants; 120
And anguish fallen on those he loved around him
May once have dealt the last blow to confound him,
And so have left him as death leaves a child,
Who sees it all too near;
And he who knows no young way to forget 125
May struggle to the tomb unreconciled.
Whatever suns may rise or set
There may be nothing kinder for him here
Than shafts and agonies;
And under these 130
He may cry out and stay on horribly;
Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear,
He may go forward like a stoic Roman
Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie, —
Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman, 135
Curse God and die.
Or maybe there, like many another one
Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead,
Black-drawn against wild red,
He may have built, unawed by fiery gules 140
That in him no commotion stirred,
A living reason out of molecules
Why molecules occurred,
And one for smiling when he might have sighed
Had he seen far enough, 145
And in the same inevitable stuff
Discovered an odd reason too for pride
In being what he must have been by laws
Infrangible and for no kind of cause.
Deterred by no confusion or surprise 150
He may have seen with his mechanic eyes
A world without a meaning, and had room,
Alone amid magnificence and doom,
To build himself an airy monument
That should, or fail him in his vague intent, 155
Outlast an accidental universe —
To call it nothing worse —
Or, by the burrowing guile
Of Time disintegrated and effaced,
Like once-remembered mighty trees go down 160
To ruin, of which by man may now be traced
No part sufficient even to be rotten,
And in the book of things that are forgotten
Is entered as a thing not quite worth while.
He may have been so great 165
That satraps would have shivered at his frown,
And all he prized alive may rule a state
No larger than a grave that holds a clown;
He may have been a master of his fate,
And of his atoms, — ready as another 170
In his emergence to exonerate
His father and his mother;
He may have been a captain of a host,
Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies,
Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees, 175
And then give up the ghost.
Nahum’s great grasshoppers were such as these,
Sun-scattered and soon lost.
Whatever the dark road he may have taken,
This man who stood on high 180
And faced alone the sky,
Whatever drove or lured or guided him, —
Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson Page 6
