No tonic and ambitious irritant Of increase or of want Has made an otherwise insensate waste Of ages overthrown A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste Of other ages that are still to be Depleted and rewarded variously Because a few, by fate's economy, Shall seem to move the world the way it goes;No soft evangel of equality, Safe cradled in a communal repose That huddles into death and may at last Be covered well with equatorial snows --And all for what, the devil only knows --Will aggregate an inkling to confirm The credit of a sage or of a worm, Or tell us why one man in five Should have a care to stay alive While in his heart he feels no violence Laid on his humor and intelligence When infant Science makes a pleasant face And waves again that hollow toy, the Race;No planetary trap where souls are wrought For nothing but the sake of being caught And sent again to nothing will attune Itself to any key of any reason Why man should hunger through another season To find out why 'twere better late than soon To go away and let the sun and moon And all the silly stars illuminate A place for creeping things, And those that root and trumpet and have wings, And herd and ruminate, Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas, Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees Hang screeching lewd victorious derision Of man's immortal vision.
Shall we, because Eternity records Too vast an answer for the time-born words We spell, whereof so many are dead that once In our capricious lexicons Were so alive and final, hear no more The Word itself, the living word no man Has ever spelt, And few have ever felt Without the fears and old surrenderings And terrors that began When Death let fall a feather from his wings And humbled the first man?
Because the weight of our humility, Wherefrom we gain A little wisdom and much pain, Falls here too sore and there too tedious, Are we in anguish or complacency, Not looking far enough ahead To see by what mad couriers we are led Along the roads of the ridiculous, To pity ourselves and laugh at faith And while we curse life bear it?
And if we see the soul's dead end in death, Are we to fear it?
What folly is here that has not yet a name Unless we say outright that we are liars?
What have we seen beyond our sunset fires That lights again the way by which we came?
Why pay we such a price, and one we give So clamoringly, for each racked empty day That leads one more last human hope away, As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes Our children to an unseen sacrifice?
If after all that we have lived and thought, All comes to Nought, --If there be nothing after Now, And we be nothing anyhow, And we know that, -- why live?
'Twere sure but weaklings' vain distress To suffer dungeons where so many doors Will open on the cold eternal shores That look sheer down To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness Where all who know may drown.
[End of text.]
From the original advertisements:
By the same author --------------
Captain Craig, A Book of PoemsRevised edition with additional poems, 12mo, cloth, $1.25"There are few poets writing in English to-day whose work is so permeated by individual charm as is Mr.Robinson's.
Always one feels the presence of a man behind the poet --a man who knows life and people and things and writes of them clearly, with a subtle poetic insight that is not visible in the work of any other living writer." -- `Brooklyn Daily Eagle'.