Fear poems
/ page 452 of 454 /
Demos
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
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.
The Master
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
A flying word from here and there
Had sown the name at which we sneered,
To be reviled and then revered:
A presence to be loved and feared--
Job the Rejected
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Job would have deprecated such a way
Of heaving fuel on a sacred fire,
Yet even the while we saw it going out,
Hardly was Job to find his hour to shout;
And Job was not, so far as we could say,
The confirmation of her souls desire.
Isaac and Archibald
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Isaac and Archibald were two old men.
I knew them, and I may have laughed at them
A little; but I must have honored them
For they were old, and they were good to me.
Hillcrest
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
No sound of any storm that shakes
Old island walls with older seas
Comes here where now September makes
An island in a sea of trees.
George Crabbe
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
On the Way
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
But why forget them? Theyre the same that winked
Upon the world when Alcibiades
Cut off his dogs tail to induce distinction.
There are dogs yet, and Alcibiades
Is not forgotten.
The Whip
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
The doubt you fought so long
The cynic net you cast,
The tyranny, the wrong,
The ruin, they are past;
The Poor Relation
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
No longer torn by what she knows
And sees within the eyes of others,
Her doubts are when the daylight goes,
Her fears are for the few she bothers.
Momus
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Where's the need of singing now?"--
Smooth your brow,
Momus, and be reconciled.
For king Kronos is a child--
The Valley of the Shadow
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
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.
The Clerks
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.
Lazarus
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
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.
Twilight Song
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Through the shine, through the rain
We have shared the days load;
To the old march again
We have tramped the long road;
Alma Mater
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
When had I known him? And what brought him here?
Love, warning, malediction, fear?
Surely I never thwarted such as he?--
Again, what soiled obscurity was this:
Out of what scum, and up from what abyss,
Had they arrived--these rags of memory.
Merlin
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Gawaine, Gawaine, what look ye for to see,
So far beyond the faint edge of the world?
Dye look to see the lady Vivian,
Pursued by divers ominous vile demons
The Man Against the Sky
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
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,
The Pilot
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
From the Past and Unavailing
Out of cloudland we are steering:
After groping, after fearing,
Into starlight we come trailing,
The Gift of God
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Blessed with a joy that only she
Of all alive shall ever know,
She wears a proud humility
For what it was that willed it so -
Lancelot
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Gawaine, aware again of Lancelot
In the Kings garden, coughed and followed him;
Whereat he turned and stood with folded arms
And weary-waiting eyes, cold and half-closed
