Time poems
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Three Quatrains
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
As long as Fame's imperious music rings
Will poets mock it with crowned words august;
And haggard men will clamber to be kings
As long as Glory weighs itself in dust.
Rembrandt to Rembrandt
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
(AMSTERDAM, 1645)
And there you are again, now as you are.
Observe yourself as you discern yourself
In your discredited ascendency;
Caput Mortuum
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Unfailing and exuberant all the time,
Having no gold he paid with golden rhyme,
Of older coinage than his old defeat,
A debt that like himself was obsolete
In Arts long hazard, where no man may choose
Whether he play to win or toil to lose.
The Clinging Vine
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Be calm? And was I frantic?
Youll have me laughing soon.
Im calm as this Atlantic,
And quiet as the moon;
Avon's Harvest
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Mightnt it be as well, my friend, I said,
For you to contemplate the uncompleted
With not such an infernal certainty?
John Gorham
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Tell me what youre doing over here, John Gorham,
Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when youre not;
Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight
Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot.
Fragment
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
There are the pillars, and all gone gray.
Briony's hair went white. You may see
Where the garden was if you come this way.
That sun-dial scared him, he said to me;
"Sooner or later they strike," said he,
But he knew too much for the life he led.
For Ariva
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
You say not; but you think, without a doubt;
And you have the whole world to think about,
With very little time for little things.
So let it be; and let it all be fair--
For you, and for the rest who cannot share
Your gold of unrevealed awakenings.
Uncle Ananias
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
His words were magic and his heart was true,
And everywhere he wandered he was blessed.
Out of all ancient men my childhood knew
I choose him and I mark him for the best.
Of all authoritative liars, too,
I crown him loveliest.
The Torrent
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
I found a torrent falling in a glen
Where the suns light shone silvered and leaf-split;
The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it
All made a magic symphony; but when
Two Gardens in Linndale
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Two brothers, Oakes and Oliver,
Two gentle men as ever were,
Would roam no longer, but abide
In Linndale, where their fathers died,
And each would be a gardener.
The Revealer
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
(ROOSEVELT)He turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion
And the men of the city said unto him, What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?Judges, 14.
The palms of Mammon have disowned
The gift of our complacency;
The bells of ages have intoned
The Klondike
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Never mind the day we left, or the day the women clung to us;
All we need now is the last way they looked at us.
Never mind the twelve men there amid the cheering
Twelve men or one man, t will soon be all the same;
For this is what we know: we are five men together,
Five left o twelve men to find the golden river.
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--
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.
Leonora
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
They have made for Leonora this low dwelling in the ground,
And with cedar they have woven the four walls round.
Like a little dryad hiding shell be wrapped all in green,
Better kept and longer valued than by ways that would have been.
Flammonde
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
The man Flammonde, from God knows where,
With firm address and foreign air
With news of nations in his talk
And something royal in his walk,
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.
