All Poems

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The Tavern has a story, but no man
Can tell us what it is. We only know
That once long after midnight, years ago,
A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town,
Who brushed, and scared, and all but overran
That skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.

Fleming Helphenstine

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

But soon, with a queer, quick frown, he looked at me,
And I looked hard at him; and there we gazed
In a strained way that made us cringe and wince:
Then, with a wordless clogged apology
That sounded half confused and half amazed,
He dodged,and I have never seen him since.

The Growth of Lorraine

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

You tell me not to say these things, I know,
But I should never try to be content:
Ive gone too far; the life would be too slow.
Some could have done itsome girls have the stuff;
But I cant do it: I dont know enough.
Im going to the devil.And she went.

The White Lights

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

When in from Delos came the gold
That held the dream of Pericles,
When first Athenian ears were told
The tumult of Euripides,

Two Sonnets

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

No, I have not your backward faith to shrink
Lone-faring from the doorway of Gods home
To find Him in the names of buried men;
Nor your ingenious recreance to think
We cherish, in the life that is to come,
The scattered features of dead friends again.

Llewellyn and the Tree

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Could he have made Priscilla share
The paradise that he had planned,
Llewellyn would have loved his wife
As well as any in the land.

The Voice of Age

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

She'd look upon us, if she could,
As hard as Rhadamanthus would;
Yet one may see,who sees her face,
Her crown of silver and of lace,

Stafford's Cabin

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Once there was a cabin here, and once there was a man;
And something happened here before my memory began.
Time has made the two of them the fuel of one flame
And all we have of them is now a legend and a name.

Souvenir

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Somewhere within there were dim presences
Of days that hovered and of years gone by.
I waited, and between their silences
There was an evanescent faded noise;
And though a child, I knew it was the voice
Of one whose occupation was to die.

Pasa Thalassa Thalassa

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Gonefaded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember?
Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign.
Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle,
Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea.

Erasmus

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

And when he made so perilously bold
As to be scattered forth in black and white,
Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled
Their inward eyes in anguish and affright;
There were some of them did shake at what was told,
And they shook best who knew that he was right.

The Pity of the Leaves

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

And then there were the leaves that plagued him so!
The brown, thin leaves that on the stones outside
Skipped with a freezing whisper. Now and then
They stopped, and stayed therejust to let him know
How dead they were; but if the old man cried,
They fluttered off like withered souls of men.

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

(AMSTERDAM, 1645)
And there you are again, now as you are.
Observe yourself as you discern yourself
In your discredited ascendency;

Caput Mortuum

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 Sage

There at his touch there was a treasure chest,
And in it was a gleam, but not of gold;
And on it, like a flame, these words were scrolled:
I keep the mintage of Eternity.
Who comes to take one coin may take the rest,
And all may comebut not without the key.

The Chorus of Old Men in Aegus

Ye gods that have a home beyond the world,
Ye that have eyes for all mans agony,
Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen,
Look with a just regard,

The Altar

Alas! I said,the world is in the wrong.
But the same quenchless fever of unrest
That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng
Thrilled me, and I awoke and was the same
Bewildered insect plunging for the flame
That burns, and must burn somehow for the best.