Edwin Arlington Robinson

For those that never know the light,
The darkness is a sullen thing;
And they, the Children of the Night,
Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons
Miniver loved the days of old When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold Would set ...

Blessed with a joy that only she Of all alive shall ever know, She wears a proud humility For what it was that willed it so - That her degree should be so great Among the favoured of the Lord That she may scarcely bear the weight Of her bewilderin...

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;

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night Over the hill between the town below And the forsaken upland hermitage That held as much as he should ever know On earth again of home, paused warily
The road was his with not a native near; And Eben, ...

Go to the western gate,
Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come

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 ...

They are all gone away, The House is shut and still, There is nothing more to say
Through broken walls and gray The winds blow bleak and shrill: They are all gone away
Nor is there one to-day To speak them good or ill: There is nothing m...

There is a drear and lonely tract of hell From all the common gloom removed afar: A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are, Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell
I walked among them and I knew them well: Men I had slandered on life's lit...

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...

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 — We dare not feel it yet — the splendid shame Of uncreated failure; we forget, T...

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...