Life poems
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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.
Ballad of Broken Flutes
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
So, Rock, I join the common fray,
To fight where Mammon may decree;
And leave, to crumble as they may,
The broken flutes of Arcady.
The Dead Village
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Now there is nothing but the ghosts of things,
No life, no love, no children, and no men;
And over the forgotten place there clings
The strange and unrememberable light
That is in dreams. The music failed, and then
God frowned, and shut the village from His sight.
As a World Would Have It
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Shall I never make him look at me again?
I look at him, I look my life at him,
I tell him all I know the way to tell,
But there he stays the same.
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 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
Neighbors
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
As often as we thought of her,
We thought of a gray life
That made a quaint economist
Of a wolf-haunted wife;
Captain Craig
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
II doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,
Or called him by his name, or looked at him
So curiously, or so concernedly,
London Bridge
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Do I hear them? Yes, I hear the children singingand 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 youdriving at!
John Brown
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
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;
The Woman and the Wife
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
"You ask me for one more proof that I speak right,
But I can answer only what I know;
You look for just one lie to make black white,
But I can tell you only what is true--
God never made me for the wife of you.
This we can say,--believe me! . . . Tell me so!"
Old King Cole
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
In Tilbury Town did Old King Cole
A wise old age anticipate,
Desiring, with his pipe and bowl,
No Khans extravagant estate.
Aunt Imogen
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Aunt Imogen was coming, and therefore
The childrenJane, Sylvester, and Young George
Were eyes and ears; for there was only one
Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world,
The Children of the Night
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
For those that never know the light,
The darkness is a sullen thing;
And they, the Children of the Night,
Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing.
But for the Grace of God
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
There is a question that I ask,
And ask again:
What hunger was half-hidden by the mask
That he wore then?
Walt Whitman
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
The master-songs are ended? Rather say
No songs are ended that are ever sung,
And that no names are dead names. When we write
Men's letters on proud marble or on sand,
We write them there forever.
The Dark House
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Where a faint light shines alone,
Dwells a Demon I have known.
Most of you had better say
"The Dark House," and go your way.
Do not wonder if I stay.
A Happy Man
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
When these graven lines you see,
Traveller, do not pity me;
Though I be among the dead,
Let no mournful word be said.
