Edwin Arlington Robinson
L'envoy
Now in a thought, now in a shadowed word, Now in a voice that thrills eternity, Ever there comes an onward phrase to me Of some transcendent music I have heard; No piteous thing
Luke Havergal
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. The wind will moan, the leaves will whisper some
The Master
A flying word from here and there Had sown the name at which we sneered, To be reviled and then revered: A presence to be loved and feared We cannot hide it, or deny
Two Octaves
I Not by the grief that stuns and overwhelms All outward recognition of revealed And righteous omnipresence are the days Of most of us affrighted and diseased, But rather by the common snarls of
Hillcrest
(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell) 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. Between the sunlight and
An Evangelist's Wife
“Why am I not myself these many days, You ask? And have you nothing more to ask? I do you wrong? I do not hear your praise To God for giving you me to
Sonnet
Oh for a poet-for a beacon bright To rift this changless glimmer of dead gray; To spirit back the Muses, long astray, And flush Parnassus with a newer light; To put these little sonnet-men
Lancelot
Gawaine, aware again of Lancelot In the King’s garden, coughed and followed him; Whereat he turned and stood with folded arms And weary-waiting eyes, cold and half-closed – Hard eyes, where doubts at war
Vain Gratuities
Never was there a man much uglier In eyes of other women, or more grim: “The Lord has filled her chalice to the brim, So let us pray she’s a philosopher,” They said; and
Doctor of Billiards
Of all among the fallen from on high, We count you last and leave you to regain Your born dominion of a life made vain By three spheres of insidious ivory. You dwindle to
The World
Some are the brothers of all humankind, And own them, whatsoever their estate; And some, for sorrow and self-scorn, are blind With enmity for man’s unguarded fate. For some there is a music all
Dear Friends
Dear Friends, reproach me not for what I do, Nor counsel me, nor pity me; nor say That I am wearing half my life away For bubble-work that only fools pursue. And if my
Exit
For what we owe to other days, Before we poisoned him with praise, May we who shrank to find him weak Remember that he cannot speak. For envy that we may recall, And for
The Sage
Foreguarded and unfevered and serene, Back to the perilous gates of Truth he went – Back to fierce wisdom and the Orient, To the Dawn that is, that shall be, and has been: Previsioned
Tasker Norcross
“Whether all towns and all who live in them – So long as they be somewhere in this world That we in our complacency call ours – Are more or less the same, I