Edwin Arlington Robinson

Dear Friends, reproach me not for what I do,
Nor counsel me, nor pity me; nor
That I am wearing half my life
For bubble-work that only fools pursue

Ten years together without yet a cloud They seek each other's eyes at intervals Of gratefulness to firelight and four walls For love's obliteration of the crowd
Serenely and perennially endowed And bowered as few may be, their joy recalls No ...

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...

I cannot find my way: there is no star In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air Of any living voice but one so far That I can hear it only as a bar Of lost, imperial music, played when fair And angel fingers...

At first I thought there was a
Persuasion in his face; but the free
That filled it when he stopped and cried, "Hollo
"Shone joyously, and so I let it shine

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

She fears him, and will always ask What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask All reason to refuse him
But what she meets and what she fears Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs ...

Time was when his half million drew The breath of six per cent;
But soon the worm of what-was-not Fed hard on his content;
And something crumbled in his brain When his half million went
Time passed, and filled along with his The pla...

I heard one who said: "Verily,
What word have I for children here
Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear

Slowly I smoke and hug my knee,
The while a witless masquerade Of things that only children see Floats in a mist of light and shade:
They pass, a flimsy cavalcade,
And with a weak, remindful glow,

Friendless and faint, with martyred steps and slow,
Faint for the flesh, but for the spirit free,
Stung by the mob that came to see the show,
The Master toiled along to Calvary;

Cliff Klingenhagen had me in to dine With him one day; and after soup and meat, And all the other things there were to eat, Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine And one with wormwood
Then, without a
For me to choose at all, he...