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The Child Dying
© Edwin Muir
Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse,
And bid you so farewell.
That I can leave you, quite go out,
Go out, go out beyond all doubt,
My father says, is the miracle.
Abraham
© Edwin Muir
The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
Understanding
© Constantine Cavafy
In the dissolute life of my youth
the desires of my poetry were being formed,
the scope of my art was being plotted.
Rahel to Varnhagen
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
NOTE.Rahel Robert and Varnhagen von Ense were married, after many protestations on her part, in 1814. The marriageso far as he was concerned at any rateappears to have been satisfactory.
Now you have read them all; or if not all,
As many as in all conscience I should fancy
To be enough. There are no more of them
Bokardo
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Well, Bokardo, here we are;
Make yourself at home.
Look aroundyou havent far
To lookand why be dumb?
Sainte-Nitouche
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Though not for common praise of him,
Nor yet for pride or charity,
Still would I make to Vanderberg
One tribute for his memory:
Nimmo
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Since you remember Nimmo, and arrive
At such a false and florid and far drawn
Confusion of odd nonsense, I connive
No longer, though I may have led you on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
The Unforgiven
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
When he, who is the unforgiven,
Beheld her first, he found her fair:
No promise ever dreamt in heaven
Could have lured him anywhere
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.
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,
Villanelle of Change
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Since Persia fell at Marathon,
The yellow years have gathered fast:
Long centuries have come and gone.
