All Poems

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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.

And whoso reads may get him some shrewd skill;
And some unprofitable scorn resign,
To praise the very thing that he deplores;
So, friends (dear friends), remember, if you will,
The shame I win for singing is all mine,
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours.

Her Eyes

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Up from the street and the crowds that went,
Morning and midnight, to and fro,
Still was the room where his days he spent,
And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow.

Bon Voyage

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Child of a line accurst
And old as Troy,
Bringer of best and worst
In wild alloy
Light, like a linnet first,
He sang for joy.

Eros Turannos

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reason to refuse him.

Sonnet

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

What does it mean, this barren age of ours?
Here are the men, the women, and the flowers,
The seasons, and the sunset, as before.
What does it mean? Shall there not one arise
To wrench one banner from the western skies,
And mark it with his name forevermore?

Lost Anchors

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Improving a dry leiure to invest
Their misadventure with a manifest
Analogy that he may read who runs,
The sailor made it old as ocean grass--
Telling of much that once had come to pass
With him, whose mother should have had no sons.

Cliff Klingenhagen

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

And when I asked him what the deuce he meant
By doing that, he only looked at me
And smiled, and said it was a way of his.
And though I know the fellow, I have spent
Long time a-wondering when I shall be
As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is.

Calverly's

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

We go no more to Calverly's,
For there the lights are few and low;
And who are there to see by them,
Or what they see, we do not know.

Ballad of Dead Friends

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.

Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass's head in Fairyland
As he would add a shilling to more shillings,

Tact

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Observant of the way she told
So much of what was true,
No vanity could long withhold
Regard that was her due:

Villanelle of Change

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Since Persia fell at Marathon,
The yellow years have gathered fast:
Long centuries have come and gone.

Octaves

I We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel --

For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold

Still does a cry through sad Valhalla go
For Balder, pierced with Lok's unhappy spray --
For Balder, all but spared by Frea's charms;
And still does art's imperial vista show,
On the hushed sands of Oxus, far away,
Young Sohrab dying in his father's arms.

Thomas Hood

The man who cloaked his bitterness within
This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,
God never gave to look with common eyes
Upon a world of anguish and of sin:

The World

Some are the brothers of all humankind,
And own them, whatsoever their estate;
And some, for sorrow and self-scorn, are blind
With enmity for man's unguarded fate.

The Garden

My life! Ah, yes, there was my life, indeed!
And there were all the lives of humankind;
And they were like a book that I could read,
Whose every leaf, miraculously signed,
Outrolled itself from Thoughts eternal seed.
Love-rooted in Gods garden of the mind.