Death poems
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The Book of Annandale
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
IPartly to think, more to be left alone,
George Annandale said something to his friends
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gazeand went upstairs;
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:
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.
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;
The Chorus of Old Men in Aegus
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
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 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?
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 Wandering Jew
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
I saw by looking in his eyes
That they remembered everything;
And this was how I came to know
That he was here, still wandering.
Two Quatrains
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
As eons of incalculable strife
Are in the vision of one moment caught,
So are the common, concrete things of life
Divinely shadowed on the walls of Thought.
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.
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,
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,
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;
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.
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.
