Call him a type, and that will make him cry:
One of those not at all unusual,
Prophetic, would-be-Delphic manger-snappers
That always get replaced when they are gone; 555
Or one of those impenetrable men,
Who seem to carry branded on their foreheads,
“We are abstruse, but not quite so abstruse
As possibly the good Lord may have wished;”
One of those men who never quite confess 560
That Washington was great; — the kind of man
That everybody knows and always will, —
Shrewd, critical, facetious, insincere,
And for the most part harmless, I’m afraid.
But even then, you might be doing well 565
To tell him something.’ — And I said I would.
“So in one afternoon you see we have
The child in absence — or, to say the least,
In ominous defect, — and in excess
Commensurate, likewise. Now the question is, 570
Not which was right and which was wrong, for each,
By virtue of one-sidedness, was both;
But rather — to my mind, as heretofore —
Is it better to be blinded by the lights,
Or by the shadows? By the lights, you say? 575
The shadows are all devils, and the lights
Gleam guiding and eternal? Very good;
But while you say so do not quite forget
That sunshine has a devil of its own,
And one that we, for the great craft of him, 580
But vaguely recognize. The marvel is
That this persuasive and especial devil,
By grace of his extreme transparency,
Precludes all common vision of him; yet
There is one way to glimpse him and a way, 585
As I believe, to test him, — granted once
That we have ousted prejudice, which means
That we have made magnanimous advance
Through self-acquaintance. Not an easy thing
For some of us; impossible, may be, 590
For most of us: the woman and the man
I cited, for example, would have wrought
The most intractable conglomerate
Of everything, if they had set themselves
To analyze themselves and not each other; 595
If only for the sake of self-respect,
They would have come to no place but the same
Wherefrom they started; one would have lived awhile
In paradise without defending it,
And one in hell without enjoying it; 600
And each had been dissuaded neither more
Nor less thereafter. There are such on earth
As might have been composed primarily
For mortal warning: he was one of them,
And she — the devil makes us hesitate. 605
‘T is easy to read words writ well with ink
That makes a good black mark on smooth white paper;
But words are done sometimes with other ink
Whereof the smooth white paper gives no sign
Till science brings it out; and here we come 610
To knowledge, and the way to test a devil.
“To most of us, you say, and you say well,
This demon of the sunlight is a stranger;
But if you break the sunlight of yourself,
Project it, and observe the quaint shades of it, 615
I have a shrewd suspicion you may find
That even as a name lives unrevealed
In ink that waits an agent, so it is
The devil — or this devil — hides himself
To all the diagnoses we have made 620
Save one. The quest of him is hard enough —
As hard as truth; but once we seem to know
That his compound obsequiousness prevails
Unferreted within us, we may find
That sympathy, which aureoles itself 625
To superfluity from you and me,
May stand against the soul for five or six
Persistent and indubitable streaks
Of irritating brilliance, out of which
A man may read, if he have knowledge in him, 630
Proportionate attest of ignorance,
Hypocrisy, good-heartedness, conceit,
Indifference, — by which a man may learn
That even courage may not make him glad
For laughter when that laughter is itself 635
The tribute of recriminating groans.
Nor are the shapes of obsolescent creeds
Much longer to flit near enough to make
Men glad for living in a world like this;
For wisdom, courage, knowledge, and the faith 640
Which has the soul and is the soul of reason —
These are the world’s achievers. And the child —
The child that is the saviour of all ages,
The prophet and the poet, the crown-bearer,
Must yet with Love’s unhonored fortitude, 645
Survive to cherish and attain for us
The candor and the generosity,
By leave of which we smile if we bring back
The first revealing flash that wakened us
When wisdom like a shaft of dungeon-light 650
Came searching down to find us.
“Halfway back
I made a mild allusion to the Fates,
Not knowing then that ever I should have
Dream-visions of them, painted on the air, — 655
Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Faint-hued
They seem, but with a faintness never fading,
Unblurred by gloom, unshattered by the sun,
Still with eternal color, colorless,
They move and they remain. The while I write 660
These very words I see them, — Atropos,
Lachesis, Clotho; and the last is laughing.
When Clotho laughs, Atropos rattles her shears;
But Clotho keeps on laughing just the same.
Some time when I have dreamed that Atropos 665
Has laughed, I’ll tell you how the colors change —
The colors that are changeless, colorless.”
I fear I may have answered Captain Craig’s
Epistle Number One with what he chose,
Good-humoredly but anxiously, to take 670
For something that was not all reverence;
From Number Two it would have seemed almost
As if the flanges of the old man’s faith
Had slipped the treacherous rails of my allegiance,
Leaving him by the roadside, humorously 675
Upset, with nothing more convivial
To do than be facetious and austere: —
“If you decry Don César de Bazan,
There is an imperfection in your vitals.
Flamboyant and old-fashioned? Overdone? 680
Romantico-robustious? — Dear young man,
There are fifteen thousand ways to be one-sided,
And I have indicated two of them
Already. Now you bait me with a third —
As if it were a spider with nine legs; 685
But what it is that you would have me do,
What fatherly wrath you most anticipate,
I lack the needed impulse to discern;
Though I who shape no songs of any sort,
I who have made no music, thrilled no canvas, — 690
I who have added nothing to the world
The world would reckon save long-squandered wit —
Might with half-pardonable reverence
Beguile my faith, maybe, to the forlorn
Extent of some sequestered murmuring 695
Anent the vanities. No doubt I should,
If mine were the one life that I have lived;
But with a few go
od glimpses I have had
Of heaven through the little holes in hell,
I can half understand what price it is 700
The poet pays, at one time and another,
For those indemnifying interludes
That are to be the kernel in what lives
To shrine him when the new-born men come singing.
“So do I comprehend what I have read 705
From even the squeezed items of account
Which I have to my credit in that book
Whereof the leaves are ages and the text
Eternity. What do I care to-day
For pages that have nothing? I have lived, 710
And I have died, and I have lived again;
And I am very comfortable. Yes,
Though I look back through barren years enough
To make me seem — as I transmute myself
In downward retrospect from what I am — 715
As unproductive and as unconvinced
Of living bread and the soul’s eternal draught
As a frog on a Passover-cake in a streamless desert, —
Still do I trust the light that I have earned,
And having earned, received. You shake your head, 720
But do not say that you will shake it off.
“Meanwhile I have the flowers and the grass,
My brothers here the trees, and all July
To make me joyous. Why do you shake your head?
Why do you laugh? — because you are so young? 725
Do you think if you laugh hard enough the truth
Will go to sleep? Do you think of any couch
Made soft enough to put the truth to sleep?
Do you think there are no proper comedies
But yours that have the fashion? For example, 730
Do you think that I forget, or shall forget,
One friendless, fat, fantastic nondescript
Who knew the ways of laughter on low roads, —
A vagabond, a drunkard, and a sponge,
But always a free creature with a soul? 735
I bring him back, though not without misgivings,
And caution you to damn him sparingly.
“Count Pretzel von Würzburger, the Obscene
(The beggar may have had another name,
But no man to my knowledge ever knew it) 740
Was a poet and a skeptic and a critic,
And in his own mad manner a musician:
He found an old piano in a bar-room,
And it was his career — three nights a week,
From ten o’clock till twelve — to make it rattle; 745
And then, when I was just far down enough
To sit and watch him with his long straight hair,
And pity him, and think he looked like Liszt,
I might have glorified a musical
Steam-engine, or a xylophone. The Count 750
Played half of everything and ‘improvised’
The rest: he told me once that he was born
With a genius in him that ‘prohibited
Complete fidelity,’ and that his art
‘Confessed vagaries,’ therefore. But I made 755
Kind reckoning of his vagaries then:
I had the whole great pathos of the man
To purify me, and all sorts of music
To give me spiritual nourishment
And cerebral athletics; for the Count 760
Played indiscriminately — with an f,
And with incurable presto — cradle-songs
And carnivals, spring-songs and funeral marches,
The Marseillaise and Schubert’s Serenade —
And always in a way to make me think 765
Procrustes had the germ of music in him.
And when this interesting reprobate
Began to talk — then there were more vagaries:
He made a reeking fetich of all filth,
Apparently; but there was yet revealed 770
About him, through his words and on his flesh,
That ostracizing nimbus of a soul’s
Abject, apologetic purity —
That phosphorescence of sincerity —
Which indicates the curse and the salvation 775
Of a life wherein starved art may never perish.
“One evening I remember clearliest
Of all that I passed with him. Having wrought,
With his nerve-ploughing ingenuity,
The Träumerei into a Titan’s nightmare, 780
The man sat down across the table from me
And all at once was ominously decent.
‘“The more we measure what is ours to use,”’
He said then, wiping his froth-plastered mouth
With the inside of his hand, ‘“the less we groan 785
For what the gods refuse.” I’ve had that sleeved
A decade for you. Now but one more stein,
And I shall be prevailed upon to read
The only sonnet I have ever made;
And after that, if you propitiate 790
Gambrinus, I shall play you that Andante
As the world has never heard it played before.’
So saying, he produced a piece of paper,
Unfolded it, and read, ‘SONNET UNIQUE
DE PRETZEL VON WURZBURGER, DIT L’OBSCÉNE: — 795
“‘Carmichael had a kind of joke-disease,
And he had queer things fastened on his wall.
There are three green china frogs that I recall
More potently than anything, for these
Three frogs have demonstrated, by degrees, 800
What curse was on the man to make him fall:
“They are not ordinary frogs at all,
They are the Frogs of Aristophanes.”
“‘God! how he laughed whenever he said that;
And how we caught from one another’s eyes 805
The flash of what a tongue could never tell!
We always laughed at him, no matter what
The joke was worth. But when a man’s brain dies,
We are not always glad … Poor Carmichael!’
“‘I am a sowbug and a necrophile,’ 810
Said Pretzel, ‘and the gods are growing old;
The stars are singing Golden hair to gray,
Green leaf to yellow leaf, — or chlorophyl
To xanthophyl, to be more scientific, —
So speed me one more stein. You may believe 815
That I’m a mendicant, but I am not:
For though it look to you that I go begging,
The truth is I go giving — giving all
My strength and all my personality,
My wisdom and experience — all myself, 820
To make it final — for your preservation;
Though I be not the one thing or the other,
Though I strike between the sunset and the dawn,
Though I be cliff-rubbed wreckage on the shoals
Of Circumstance, — doubt not that I comprise, 825
Far more than my appearance. Here he comes;
Now drink to good old Pretzel! Drink down Pretzel!
Quousque tandem, Pretzel, and O Lord,
How long! But let regret go hang: the good
Die first, and of the poor did many cease 830
To be. Beethoven after Wordsworth. Prosit!
There were geniuses among the trilobites,
And I suspect that I was one of them.’
“How much of him was earnest and how much
Fantastic, I know not; nor do I need 835
Profounder knowledge to exonerate
The squalor or the folly of a man
Than consciousness — though even the crude laugh
Of indigent Priapus follow it —
That I get good of him. And if you like him, 840
Then some time in the future, past a doubt,
You’ll have him in a book, mak
e metres of him, —
To the great delight of Mr. Killigrew,
And the grief of all your kinsmen. Christian shame
And self-confuted Orientalism 845
For the more sagacious of them; vulture-tracks
Of my Promethean bile for the rest of them;
And that will be a joke. There’s nothing quite
So funny as a joke that’s lost on earth
And laughed at by the gods. Your devil knows it. 850
“I come to like your Mr. Killigrew,
And I rejoice that you speak well of him.
The sprouts of human blossoming are in him,
And useful eyes — if he will open them;
But one thing ails the man. He smiles too much. 855
He comes to see me once or twice a week,
And I must tell him that he smiles too much.
If I were Socrates, it would be simple.”
Epistle Number Three was longer coming.
I waited for it, even worried for it — 860
Though Killigrew, and of his own free will,
Had written reassuring little scraps
From time to time, and I had valued them
The more for being his. “The Sage,” he said,
“From all that I can see, is doing well — 865
I should say very well. Three meals a day,
Siestas, and innumerable pipes —
Not to the tune of water on the stones,
But rather to the tune of his own Ego,
Which seems to be about the same as God. 870
But I was always weak in metaphysics,
And pray therefore that you be lenient.
I’m going to be married in December,
And I have made a poem that will scan —
So Plunket says. You said the other wouldn’t: 875
“Augustus Plunket, Ph.D.,
And oh, the Bishop’s daughter;
A very learned man was he
And in twelve weeks he got her;
And oh, she was as fair to see 880
As pippins on the pippin tree …
Tu, tui, tibi, te, — chubs in the mill water.
“Connotative, succinct, and erudite;
Three dots to boot. Now goodman Killigrew
May wind an epic one of these glad years, 885
And after that who knoweth but the Lord —
The Lord of Hosts who is the King of Glory?”
Still, when the Captain’s own words were before me,
I seemed to read from them, or into them,
The protest of a mortuary joy 890
Not all substantiating Killigrew’s
Off-hand assurance. The man’s face came back
The while I read them, and that look again,
Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson Page 12
