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Captain Craig

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,  As they had looked at ashes; but a few—Say five or six of us—had found somehow  The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,  Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,  By Tilbury prudence.

He had lived his life  And in his way had shared, with all mankind,

Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,  By some resplendent metamorphosis,  Whatever he was not.

And after time,  When it had come sufficiently to pass  That he was going patch-clad through the streets,

Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid  Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve,  And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence,  Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,”  He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on,

And after it moved others—one or two;  For Captain Craig, before the day was done,  Got back to the scant refuge of his bed  And shivered into it without a curse—  Without a murmur even.

He was cold,

And old, and hungry; but the worst of it  Was a forlorn familiar consciousness  That he had failed again.

There was a time  When he had fancied, if worst came to worst,  And he could do no more, that he might

Of whom he would.

But once had been enough,  And soon there would be nothing more to ask.  He was himself, and he had lost the speed  He started with, and he was left behind.  There was no mystery, no tragedy;

And if they found him lying on his back  Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might,—  Well, once upon a time there was a man—  Es war einmal ein König, if it pleased him.  And he was right: there were no men to blame:

There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune—  A note that able-bodied men might sound  Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet.  They might have made him sing by feeding him  Till he should march again, but

Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;  They found it more melodious to shout  Right on, with unmolested adoration,  To keep the tune as it had always been,  To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.  He must have understood that afterwards—  When we had laid some fuel to the spark  Of him, and oxidized it—for he laughed  Out loud and long at us to feel it burn,  And then, for gratitude, made game of us:“You are the resurrection and the life,”  He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings;  O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”  We were not quite accoutred for a blast  Of any lettered nonchalance like that,

And some of us—the five or six of us  Who found him out—were singularly struck.  But soon there came assurance of his lips,  Like phrases out of some sweet instrument  Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt“No penitential shame for what had come,  No virtuous regret for what had been,—  But rather a joy to find it in his life  To be an outcast usher of the soul  For such as had good courage of the

To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair;  And on the bottom of it, like a king,  For longer time than I dare chronicle,  Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized  His opportunity.

My friends got out,

Like brokers out of Arcady; but I—  May be for fascination of the thing,  Or may be for the larger humor of it—  Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung.  When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful

Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled  At me and then continued, earnestly:  “Your friends have had enough of it; but you,  For a motive hardly vindicated yet  By prudence or by conscience, have remained;

And that is very good, for I have things  To tell you: things that are not words alone—  Which are the ghosts of things—but something firmer.  “First, would I have you know, for every gift  Or sacrifice, there are—or there may be—Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind  We feel for what we take, the larger kind  We feel for what we give.

Once we have learned  As much as this, we know the truth has been  Told over to the world a thousand times;—But we have had no ears to listen yet  For more than fragments of it: we have heard  A murmur now and then, and echo here  And there, and we have made great music of it;  And we have made innumerable

To please the Unknown God.

Time throws away  Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows  No death denies not one: the books all count,  The songs all count; and yet God’s music has  No modes, his language has no adjectives.”  “You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I;  “But what has this that you are saying now—  This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk—  To do with you and me?” The Captain raised  His hand and held it westward, where a

And unwashed attic-window filtered in  What barren light could reach us, and then said,  With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines  The sun.

Behold it.

We go round and round,  And wisdom comes to us with every

We count throughout the circuit.

We may say  The child is born, the boy becomes a man,  The man does this and that, and the man goes,—  But having said it we have not said much,  Not very much.

Do I fancy, or you think,

That it will be the end of anything  When I am gone?

There was a soldier once  Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead.  Sad friends went after, and they brought him home  And had a brass band at his funeral,

As you should have at mine; and after that  A few remembered him.

But he was dead,  They said, and they should have their friend no more.—  However, there was once a starveling child—  A ragged-vested little incubus,

Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all  Capacity for childhood’s happiness—  Who started out one day, quite suddenly,  To drown himself.

He ran away from home,  Across the clover-fields and through the woods,

And waited on a rock above a stream,  Just like a kingfisher.

He might have dived,  Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow,  There came along a man who looked at him  With such an unexpected friendliness,

And talked with him in such a common way,  That life grew marvelously different:  What he had lately known for sullen trunks  And branches, and a world of tedious leaves,  Was all transmuted; a faint forest

That once had made the loneliest of all  Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music;  And water that had called him once to death  Now seemed a flowing glory.

And that man,  Born to go down a soldier, did this thing.

Not much to do?

Not very much,

I grant you:  Good occupation for a sonneteer,  Or for a clown, or for a clergyman,  But small work for a soldier.

By the way,  When you are weary sometimes of your

Utility,

I wonder if you find  Occasional great comfort pondering  What power a man has in him to put forth?  ‘Of all the many marvelous things that are,  Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago;  ‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods  He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth,  Turning the broken mould, year after year.’…    “I turned a little furrow of my

Once on a time, and everybody laughed—  As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not  The First Intelligence, which we have drawn  In our competitive humility  As if it went forever on two legs,

Had some diversion of it:

I believe  God’s humor is the music of the spheres—  But even as we draft omnipotence  Itself to our own image, we pervert  The courage of an infinite

To finite resignation.

You have made  The cement of your churches out of tears  And ashes, and the fabric will not stand:  The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored  So long with unavailing

Will crumble down to dust and blow away,  And younger dust will follow after them;  Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled  First atom of the least that ever flew  Shall be by man defrauded of the

God thrilled it with to make a dream for man  When Science was unborn.

And after time,  When we have earned our spiritual ears,  And art’s commiseration of the truth  No longer glorifies the singing beast,

Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,—  Then shall at last come ringing through the sun,  Through time, through flesh, a music that is true.  For wisdom is that music, and all joy  That wisdom:—you may counterfeit, you think,

The burden of it in a thousand ways;  But as the bitterness that loads your tears  Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom,  The penance, and the woeful pride you keep,  Make bitterness your buoyance of the world.

And at the fairest and the frenziedest  Alike of your God-fearing festivals,  You so compound the truth to pamper fear  That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith  You clamor for the food that shadows eat.

You call it rapture or deliverance,—  Passion or exaltation, or what most  The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness  Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch  For something larger, something unfulfilled,

Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have  Never, until you learn to laugh with God.”  And with a calm Socratic patronage,  At once half sombre and half humorous,  The Captain reverently twirled his

And fixed his eyes on something far away;  Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd,  And at the moment unendurable  For sheer beneficence, he looked at me.    “But the brass band?” I said, not quite at

With altruism yet.—He made a sort  Of reminiscent little inward noise,  Midway between a chuckle and a laugh,  And that was all his answer: not a word  Of explanation or suggestion

From those tight-smiling lips.

And when I left,  I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow  And had the world-wide air to breathe again,—  Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth  And honored the endurance of his hand—Whether or not, securely closeted  Up there in the stived haven of his den,  The man sat laughing at me; and I felt  My teeth grind hard together with a quaint  Revulsion—as I recognize it now—Not only for my Captain, but as well  For every smug-faced failure on God’s earth;  Albeit I could swear, at the same time,  That there were tears in the old fellow’s eyes.  I question if in tremors or in

There be more guidance to man’s worthiness  Than—well, say in his prayers.

But oftentimes  It humors us to think that we possess  By some divine adjustment of our own  Particular shrewd cells, or something else,

What others, for untutored sympathy,  Go spirit-fishing more than half their lives  To catch—like cheerful sinners to catch faith;  And I have not a doubt but I assumed  Some egotistic attribute like

When, cautiously, next morning I reduced  The fretful qualms of my novitiate,  For most part, to an undigested pride.  Only,

I live convinced that I regret  This enterprise no more than I

My life; and I am glad that I was born.    That evening, at “The Chrysalis,” I found  The faces of my comrades all suffused  With what I chose then to denominate  Superfluous good feeling.

In return,

They loaded me with titles of odd form  And unexemplified significance,  Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,”  “Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,”  “Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing,” with one

That I remember, and a dozen more  That I forget.

I may have been disturbed,  I do not say that I was not annoyed,  But something of the same serenity  That fortified me later made me

For their skin-pricking arrows not so much  Of pain as of a vigorous defect  In this world’s archery.

I might have tried,  With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate  What they had only snapped at and

Made out of my best evidence no more  Than comfortable food for their conceit;  But patient wisdom frowned on argument,  With a side nod for silence, and I smoked  A series of incurable dry

While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care,  Things that I wished he wouldn’t.

Killigrew,  Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass,  Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made  Remarks.

The learned Plunket made remarks.  It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats  That night, but I have rather to believe  As I lay turning, twisting, listening,  And wondering, between great sleepless yawns,  What possible satisfaction those dead

Could find in sending shadows to my room  And swinging them like black rags on a line,  That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness  Was ekeing out probation.

I had sinned  In fearing to believe what I believed,

And I was paying for it.—Whimsical,  You think,—factitious; but “there is no luck,  No fate, no fortune for us, but the old  Unswerving and inviolable price  Gets paid:

God sells himself eternally,

But never gives a crust,” my friend had said;  And while I watched those leaves, and heard those cats,  And with half mad minuteness analyzed  The Captain’s attitude and then my own,  I felt at length as one who throws

Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark,  And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up  And opens them again, what seems at first  An unfamiliar sunlight in his room  And in his life—as if the child in

Had laughed and let him see; and then I knew  Some prowling superfluity of child  In me had found the child in Captain Craig  And let the sunlight reach him.

While I slept,  My thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams,

And in the morning it was with me still.    Through March and shifting April to the time  When winter first becomes a memory  My friend the Captain—to my other friend’s  Incredulous regret that such as

Should ever get the talons of his talk  So fixed in my unfledged credulity—  Kept up the peroration of his life,  Not yielding at a threshold, nor,

I think,  Too often on the stairs.

He made me

Sometimes, and then again he made me weep  Almost; for I had insufficiency  Enough in me to make me know the truth  Within the jest, and I could feel it there  As well as if it were the folded noteI felt between my fingers.

I had said  Before that I should have to go away  And leave him for the season; and his eyes  Had shone with well-becoming interest  At that intelligence.

There was no

In them that I remember; but I marked  An unmistakable self-questioning  And a reticence of unassumed regret.  The two together made anxiety—  Not selfishness,

I ventured.

I should

No more of him for six or seven months,  And I was there to tell him as I might  What humorous provision we had made  For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town.  That finished—with a few more

Prosaics on the certified event  Of my return to find him young again—  I left him neither vexed,

I thought, with us,  Nor over much at odds with destiny.  At any rate, save always for a

That I had seen too often to mistake  Or to forget, he gave no other sign.    That train began to move; and as it moved,  I felt a comfortable sudden change  All over and inside.

Partly it

As if the strings of me had all at once  Gone down a tone or two; and even though  It made me scowl to think so trivial  A touch had owned the strength to tighten them,  It made me laugh to think that I was free.

But free from what—when I began to turn  The question round—was more than I could say:  I was no longer vexed with Killigrew,  Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig;  But I was eased of some restraint,

I thought,

Not qualified by those amenities,  And I should have to search the matter down;  For I was young, and I was very keen.  So I began to smoke a bad cigar  That Plunket, in his love, had given

The night before; and as I smoked I watched  The flying mirrors for a mile or so,  Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint,  They gave me of the woodland over west,  A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous

Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail,  With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky;  And yawning out of that I set myself  To face again the loud monotonous ride  That lay before me like a vista

Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson (December 22, 1869 – April 6, 1935) was an American poet. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on three occasions…

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