That I, in having somewhat recognized
The formal measure of it, have endured
The discord of infirmity no less 1235
Through fortune than by failure. What men lose,
Man gains; and what man gains reports itself
In losses we but vaguely deprecate,
So they be not for us; — and this is right,
Except that when the devil in the sun 1240
Misguides us we go darkly where the shine
Misleads us, and we know not what we see:
We know not if we climb or if we fall;
And if we fly, we know not where we fly.
“And here do I insert an urging clause 1245
For climbers and up-fliers of all sorts,
Cliff-climbers and high-fliers: Phaethon,
Bellerophon, and Icarus did each
Go gloriously up, and each in turn
Did famously come down — as you have read 1250
In poems and elsewhere; but other men
Have mounted where no fame has followed them,
And we have had no sight, no news of them,
And we have heard no crash. The crash may count,
Undoubtedly, and earth be fairer for it; 1255
Yet none save creatures out of harmony
Have ever, in their fealty to the flesh,
Made crashing an ideal. It is the flesh
That ails us, for the spirit knows no qualm,
No failure, no down-falling: so climb high, 1260
And having set your steps regard not much
The downward laughter clinging at your feet,
Nor overmuch the warning; only know,
As well as you know dawn from lantern-light,
That far above you, for you, and within you, 1265
There burns and shines and lives, unwavering
And always yours, the truth. Take on yourself
But your sincerity, and you take on
Good promise for all climbing: fly for truth,
And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight, 1270
No laughter to vex down your loyalty.
“I think you may be smiling at me now —
And if I make you smile, so much the better;
For I would have you know that I rejoice
Always to see the thing that I would see — 1275
The righteous thing, the wise thing. I rejoice
Always to think that any thought of mine,
Or any word or any deed of mine,
May grant sufficient of what fortifies
Good feeling and the courage of calm joy 1280
To make the joke worth while. Contrariwise,
When I review some faces I have known —
Sad faces, hungry faces — and reflect
On thoughts I might have moulded, human words
I might have said, straightway it saddens me 1285
To feel perforce that had I not been mute
And actionless, I might have made them bright
Somehow, though only for the moment. Yes,
Howbeit I may confess the vanities,
It saddens me; and sadness, of all things 1290
Miscounted wisdom, and the most of all
When warmed with old illusions and regrets,
I mark the selfishest, and on like lines
The shrewdest. For your sadness makes you climb
With dragging footsteps, and it makes you groan; 1295
It hinders you when most you would be free,
And there are many days it wearies you
Beyond the toil itself. And if the load
It lays on you may not be shaken off
Till you have known what now you do not know — 1300
Meanwhile you climb; and he climbs best who sees
Above him truth burn faithfulest, and feels
Within him truth burn purest. Climb or fall,
One road remains and one firm guidance always;
One way that shall be taken, climb or fall. 1305
“But ‘falling, falling, falling.’ There’s your song,
The cradle-song that sings you to the grave.
What is it your bewildered poet says? —
“‘The toiling ocean thunders of unrest
And aching desolation; the still sea 1310
Paints but an outward calm that mocks itself
To the final and irrefragable sleep
That owns no shifting fury; and the shoals
Of ages are but records of regret
Where Time, the sun’s arch-phantom, writes on sand 1315
The prelude of his ancient nothingness.’
“‘T is easy to compound a dirge like that,
And it is easy to be deceived
And alienated by the fleshless note
Of half-world yearning in it; but the truth 1320
To which we all are tending, — charlatans
And architects alike, artificers
In tinsel as in gold, evangelists
Of ruin and redemption, all alike, —
The truth we seek and equally the truth 1325
We do not seek, but yet may not escape,
Was never found alone through flesh contempt
Or through flesh reverence. Look east and west
And we may read the story: where the light
Shone first the shade now darkens; where the shade 1330
Clung first, the light fights westward — though the shade
Still feeds, and there is yet the Orient.
“But there is this to be remembered always:
Whatever be the altitude you reach,
You do not rise alone; nor do you fall 1335
But you drag others down to more or less
Than your preferred abasement. God forbid
That ever I should preach, and in my zeal
Forget that I was born an humorist;
But now, for once, before I go away, 1340
I beg of you to be magnanimous
A moment, while I speak to please myself:
“Though I have heard it variously sung
That even in the fury and the clash
Of battles, and the closer fights of men 1345
When silence gives the knowing world no sign,
One flower there is, though crushed and cursed it be,
Keeps rooted through all tumult and all scorn, —
Still do I find, when I look sharply down,
There’s yet another flower that grows well 1350
And has the most unconscionable roots
Of any weed on earth. Perennial
It grows, and has the name of Selfishness;
No doubt you call it Love. In either case,
You propagate it with a diligence 1355
That hardly were outmeasured had its leaf
The very juice in it of that famed herb
Which gave back breath to Glaucus; and I know
That in the twilight, after the day’s work,
You take your little children in your arms, 1360
Or lead them by their credulous frail hands
Benignly out and through the garden-gate
And show them there the things that you have raised;
Not everything, perchance, but always one
Miraculously rooted flower plot 1365
Which is your pride, their pattern. Socrates,
Could he be with you there at such a time,
Would have some unsolicited shrewd words
To say that you might hearken to; but I
Say nothing, for I am not Socrates. — 1370
So much, good friends, for flowers; and I thank you.
“There was a poet once who would have roared
Away the world and had an end of stars.
Where was he when I quoted him? — oh, yes:
‘T is easy for a man to link loud words 1375
With woeful pomp and unschooled emphasis
And add o
ne thundered contribution more
To the dirges of all-hollowness, I said;
But here again I find the question set
Before me, after turning books on books 1380
And looking soulward through man after man,
If there indeed be more determining
Play-service in remotely sounding down
The world’s one-sidedness. If I judge right,
Your pounding protestations, echoing 1385
Their burden of unfraught futility,
Surge back to mute forgetfulness at last
And have a kind of sunny, sullen end,
Like any cold north storm. — But there are few
Still seas that have no life to profit them, 1390
And even in such currents of the mind
As have no tide-rush in them, but are drowsed,
Crude thoughts may dart in armor and upspring
With waking sound, when all is dim with peace,
Like sturgeons in the twilight out of Lethe; 1395
And though they be discordant, hard, grotesque,
And all unwelcome to the lethargy
That you think means repose, you know as well
As if your names were shouted when they leap,
And when they leap you listen. — Ah! friends, friends, 1400
There are these things we do not like to know:
They trouble us, they make us hesitate,
They touch us, and we try to put them off.
We banish one another and then say
That we are left alone: the midnight leaf 1405
That rattles where it hangs above the snow —
Gaunt, fluttering, forlorn — scarcely may seem
So cold in all its palsied loneliness
As we, we frozen brothers, who have yet
Profoundly and severely to find out 1410
That there is more of unpermitted love
In most men’s reticence than most men think.
“Once, when I made it out fond-headedness
To say that we should ever be apprised
Of our deserts and their emolument 1415
At all but in the specious way of words,
The wisdom of a warm thought woke within me
And I could read the sun. Then did I turn
My long-defeated face full to the world,
And through the clouded warfare of it all 1420
Discern the light. Through dusk that hindered it,
I found the truth, and for the first whole time
Knew then that we were climbing. Not as one
Who mounts along with his experience
Bound on him like an Old Man of the Sea — 1425
Not as a moral pedant who drags chains
Of his unearned ideals after him
And always to the lead-like thud they make
Attunes a cold inhospitable chant
Of All Things Easy to the Non-Attached, — 1430
But as a man, a scarred man among men,
I knew it, and I felt the strings of thought
Between us to pull tight the while I strove;
And if a curse came ringing now and then
To my defended ears, how could I know 1435
The light that burned above me and within me,
And at the same time put on cap-and-bells
For such as yet were groping?”
Killigrew
Made there as if to stifle a small cough. 1440
I might have kicked him, but regret forbade
The subtle admonition; and indeed
When afterwards I reprimanded him,
The fellow never knew quite what I meant.
I may have been unjust. — The Captain read 1445
Right on, without a chuckle or a pause,
As if he had heard nothing:
“How, forsooth,
Shall any man, by curses or by groans,
Or by the laugh-jarred stillness of all hell, 1450
Be so drawn down to servitude again
That on some backward level of lost laws
And undivined relations, he may know
No longer Love’s imperative resource,
Firm once and his, well treasured then, but now 1455
Too fondly thrown away? And if there come
But once on all his journey, singing down
To find him, the gold-throated forward call,
What way but one, what but the forward way,
Shall after that call guide him? When his ears 1460
Have earned an inward skill to methodize
The clash of all crossed voices and all noises,
How shall he grope to be confused again,
As he has been, by discord? When his eyes
Have read the book of wisdom in the sun, 1465
And after dark deciphered it on earth,
How shall he turn them back to scan some huge
Blood-lettered protest of bewildered men
That hunger while he feeds where they would starve
And all absurdly perish?” 1470
Killigrew
Looked hard for a subtile object on the wall,
And, having found it, sighed. The Captain paused:
If he grew tedious, most assuredly
Did he crave pardon of us; he had feared 1475
Beforehand that he might be wearisome,
But there was not much more of it, he said, —
No more than just enough. And we rejoiced
That he should look so kindly on us then.
(“Commend me to a dying man’s grimace 1480
For absolute humor, always,” Killigrew
Maintains; but I know better.)
“Work for them,
You tell me? Work the folly out of them?
Go back to them and teach them how to climb; 1485
While you teach caterpillars how to fly?
You tell me that Alnaschar is a fool
Because he dreams? And what is this you ask?
I make him wise? I teach him to be still?
While you go polishing the Pyramids, 1490
I hold Alnaschar’s feet? And while you have
The ghost of Memnon’s image all day singing,
I sit with aching arms and hardly catch
A few spilled echoes of the song of songs —
The song that I should have as utterly 1495
For mine as other men should once have had
The sweetest a glad shepherd ever trilled
In Sharon, long ago? Is this the way
For me to do good climbing any more
Than Phaethon’s? Do you think the golden tone 1500
Of that far-singing call you all have heard
Means any more for you than you should be
Wise-heartedly, glad-heartedly yourselves?
Do this, there is no more for you to do;
And you have no dread left, no shame, no scorn. 1505
And while you have your wisdom and your gold,
Songs calling, and the Princess in your arms,
Remember, if you like, from time to time,
Down yonder where the clouded millions go,
Your bloody-knuckled scullions are not slaves, 1510
Your children of Alnaschar are not fools.
“Nor are they quite so foreign or far down
As you may think to see them. What you take
To be the cursedest mean thing that crawls
On earth is nearer to you than you know: 1515
You may not ever crush him but you lose,
You may not ever shield him but you gain —
As he, with all his crookedness, gains with you.
Your preaching and your teaching, your achieving,
Your lifting up and your discovering, 1520
Are more than often — more than you have dreamed —
The world-refracted evidence of what
Your dream denies. You cannot hide yourselves
> In any multitude or solitude,
Or mask yourselves in any studied guise 1525
Of hardness or of old humility,
But soon by some discriminating man —
Some humorist at large, like Socrates —
You get yourselves found out. — Now I should be
Found out without an effort. For example: 1530
When I go riding, trimmed and shaved again,
Consistent, adequate, respectable, —
Some citizen, for curiosity,
Will ask of a good neighbor, ‘What is this?’ —
‘It is the funeral of Captain Craig,’ 1535
Will be the neighbor’s word.— ‘And who, good man,
Was Captain Craig?’— ‘He was an humorist;
And we are told that there is nothing more
For any man alive to say of him.’ —
‘There is nothing very strange in that,’ says A; 1540
‘But the brass band? What has he done to be
Blown through like this by cornets and trombones?
And here you have this incompatible dirge —
Where are the jokes in that?’ — Then B should say:
‘Maintained his humor: nothing more or less. 1545
The story goes that on the day before
He died — some say a week, but that’s a trifle —
He said, with a subdued facetiousness,
“Play Handel, not Chopin; assuredly not
Chopin.”’ — He was indeed an humorist.” 1550
He made the paper fall down at arm’s length;
And with a tension of half-quizzical
Benignity that made it hard for us,
He looked up — first at Morgan, then at me —
Almost, I thought, as if his eyes would ask 1555
If we were satisfied; and as he looked,
The tremor of an old heart’s weariness
Was on his mouth. He gazed at each of us,
But spoke no further word that afternoon.
He put away the paper, closed his eyes, 1560
And went to sleep with his lips flickering;
And after that we left him. — At midnight
Plunket and I looked in; but he still slept,
And everything was going as it should.
The watchman yawned, rattled his newspaper, 1565
And wondered what it was that ailed his lamp.
Next day we found the Captain wide awake,
Propped up, and searching dimly with a spoon
Through another dreary dish of chicken-broth,
Which he raised up to me, at my approach, 1570
So fervently and so unconsciously,
That one could only laugh. He looked again
Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson Page 14
