Chapter 1 of 3 · 3982 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

THE TOWN DOWN THE RIVER

A BOOK OF POEMS

BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1910

Published September, 1910

[Illustration]

TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE MASTER 1

THE TOWN DOWN THE RIVER 9

AN ISLAND 23

CALVERLY’S-- CALVERLY’S 41 LEFFINGWELL-- I. THE LURE 44 II. THE QUICKSTEP 46 III. REQUIESCAT 48 CLAVERING 50 LINGARD AND THE STARS 54

MISCELLANEOUS-- PASA THALASSA THALASSA 59 MOMUS 64 UNCLE ANANIAS 66 THE WHIP 68 THE WHITE LIGHTS 71 EXIT 73 NORMANDY 74 LEONORA 76 THE WISE BROTHERS 78 BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD 80 AU REVOIR 83 FOR ARVIA 85 THE SUNKEN CROWN 87 DOCTOR OF BILLIARDS 89 SHADRACH O’LEARY 91 HOW ANNANDALE WENT OUT 93 ALMA MATER 95 MINIVER CHEEVY 97 THE PILOT 100 VICKERY’S MOUNTAIN 102 BON VOYAGE 106 THE COMPANION 109 ATHERTON’S GAMBIT 111 FOR A DEAD LADY 114 TWO GARDENS IN LINNDALE 116

THE REVEALER 123

THE MASTER[1]

(LINCOLN)

A flying word from here and there Had sown the name at which we sneered, But soon the name was everywhere, To be reviled and then revered: A presence to be loved and feared, We cannot hide it, or deny That we, the gentlemen who jeered, May be forgotten by and by.

He came when days were perilous And hearts of men were sore beguiled; And having made his note of us, He pondered and was reconciled. Was ever master yet so mild As he, and so untamable? We doubted, even when he smiled, Not knowing what he knew so well.

He knew that undeceiving fate Would shame us whom he served unsought; He knew that he must wince and wait-- The jest of those for whom he fought; He knew devoutly what he thought Of us and of our ridicule; He knew that we must all be taught Like little children in a school.

We gave a glamour to the task That he encountered and saw through, But little of us did he ask, And little did we ever do. And what appears if we review The season when we railed and chaffed? It is the face of one who knew That we were learning while we laughed.

The face that in our vision feels Again the venom that we flung, Transfigured to the world reveals The vigilance to which we clung. Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among The mysteries that are untold, The face we see was never young Nor could it ever have been old.

For he, to whom we had applied Our shopman’s test of age and worth, Was elemental when he died, As he was ancient at his birth: The saddest among kings of earth, Bowed with a galling crown, this man Met rancor with a cryptic mirth, Laconic--and Olympian.

The love, the grandeur, and the fame Are bounded by the world alone; The calm, the smouldering, and the flame Of awful patience were his own: With him they are forever flown Past all our fond self-shadowings, Wherewith we cumber the Unknown As with inept, Icarian wings.

For we were not as other men: ’Twas ours to soar and his to see; But we are coming down again, And we shall come down pleasantly; Nor shall we longer disagree On what it is to be sublime, But flourish in our perigee And have one Titan at a time.

[1] Supposed to have been written not long after the Civil War.

THE TOWN DOWN THE RIVER

Said the Watcher by the Way To the young and the unladen, To the boy and to the maiden, “God be with you both to-day. First your song came ringing, Now you come, you two,-- Knowing naught of what you do, Or of what your dreams are bringing.

“Oh you children who go singing To the Town down the River, Where the millions cringe and shiver, Tell me what you know to-day; Tell me how far you are going, Tell me how you find your way. O you children who go dreaming, Tell me what you dream to-day.”

“He is old and we have heard him,” Said the boy then to the maiden; “He is old and heavy laden With a load we throw away. Care may come to find us, Age may lay us low; Still, we seek the light we know, And the dead we leave behind us.

“Did he think that he would blind us Into such a small believing As to live without achieving, When the lights have led so far? Let him watch or let him wither,-- Shall he tell us where we are? We know best who go together, Downward, onward, and so far.”

Said the Watcher by the Way To the fiery folk that hastened, To the loud and the unchastened, “You are strong, I see, to-day. Strength and hope may lead you To the journey’s end,-- Each to be the other’s friend If the Town should fail to need you.

“And are ravens there to feed you In the Town down the River, Where the gift appalls the giver And youth hardens day by day? O you brave and you unshaken, Are you truly on your way? And are sirens in the River, That you come so far to-day?”

“You are old, and we have listened,” Said the voice of one who halted; “You are sage and self-exalted, But your way is not our way. You that cannot aid us Give us words to eat. Be assured that they are sweet, And that we are as God made us.

“Not in vain have you delayed us, Though the River still be calling Through the twilight that is falling And the Town be still so far. By the whirlwind of your wisdom Leagues are lifted as leaves are; But a king without a kingdom Fails us, who have come so far.”

III

Said the Watcher by the Way To the slower folk who stumbled, To the weak and the world-humbled, “Tell me how you fare to-day. Some with ardor shaken, All with honor scarred, Do you falter, finding hard The far chance that you have taken?

“Or, do you at length awaken To an antic retribution, Goading to a new confusion The drugged hopes of yesterday? O you poor mad men that hobble, Will you not return, or stay? Do you trust, you broken people, To a dawn without the day?”

“You speak well of what you know not,” Muttered one; and then a second: “You have begged and you have beckoned, But you see us on our way. Who are you to scold us, Knowing what we know? Jeremiah, long ago, Said as much as you have told us.

“As we are, then, you behold us: Derelicts of all conditions, Poets, rogues, and sick physicians, Plodding forward from afar; Forward now into the darkness Where the men before us are; Forward, onward, out of grayness, To the light that shone so far.”

Said the Watcher by the Way To some aged ones who lingered, To the shrunken, the claw-fingered, “So you come for me to-day.”-- “Yes, to give you warning; You are old,” one said; “You have old hairs on your head, Fit for laurel, not for scorning.

“From the first of early morning We have toiled along to find you; We, as others, have maligned you, But we need your scorn to-day. By the light that we saw shining, Let us not be lured alway; Let us hear no River calling When to-morrow is to-day.”

“But your lanterns are unlighted And the Town is far before you: Let us hasten, I implore you,” Said the Watcher by the Way. “Long have I waited, Longer have I known That the Town would have its own, And the call be for the fated.

“In the name of all created, Let us hear no more, my brothers; Are we older than all others? Are the planets in our way?”-- “Hark,” said one; “I hear the River, Calling always, night and day.”-- “Forward, then! The lights are shining,” Said the Watcher by the Way.

AN ISLAND

(SAINT HELENA, 1821)

Take it away, and swallow it yourself. Ha! Look you, there’s a rat. Last night there were a dozen on that shelf, And two of them were living in my hat. Look! Now he goes, but he’ll come back-- Ha? But he will, I say.... _Il reviendra-z-à Pâques, Ou à la Trinité...._ Be very sure that he’ll return again; For said the Lord: Imprimis, we have rats, And having rats, we have rain.-- So on the seventh day He rested, and made Pain. --Man, if you love the Lord, and if the Lord Love liars, I will have you at your word And swallow it. _Voilà._ Bah!

Where do I say it is That I have lain so long? Where do I count myself among the dead, As once above the living and the strong? And what is this that comes and goes, Fades and swells and overflows, Like music underneath and overhead? What is it in me now that rings and roars Like fever-laden wine? What ruinous tavern-shine Is this that lights me far from worlds and wars And women that were mine? Where do I say it is That Time has made my bed? What lowering outland hostelry is this For one the stars have disinherited?

An island, I have said: A peak, where fiery dreams and far desires Are rained on, like old fires: A vermin region by the stars abhorred, Where falls the flaming word By which I consecrate with unsuccess An acreage of God’s forgetfulness, Left here above the foam and long ago Made right for my duress; Where soon the sea, My foaming and long-clamoring enemy, Will have within the cryptic, old embrace Of her triumphant arms--a memory. Why then, the place? What forage of the sky or of the shore Will make it any more, To me, than my award of what was left Of number, time, and space?

And what is on me now that I should heed The durance or the silence or the scorn? I was the gardener who had the seed Which holds within its heart the food and fire That gives to man a glimpse of his desire; And I have tilled, indeed, Much land, where men may say that I have planted Unsparingly my corn-- For a world harvest-haunted And for a world unborn. Meanwhile, am I to view, as at a play, Through smoke the funeral flames of yesterday, And think them far away? Am I to doubt and yet be given to know That where my demon guides me, there I go?-- An island? Be it so. For islands, after all is said and done, Tell but a wilder game that was begun, When Fate, the mistress of iniquities, The mad Queen-spinner of all discrepancies, Beguiled the dyers of the dawn that day, And even in such a curst and sodden way Made my three colors one. --So be it, and the way be as of old: So be the weary truth again retold Of great kings overthrown Because they would be kings, and lastly kings alone. Fling to each dog his bone.

Flags that are vanished, flags that are soiled and furled, Say what will be the word when I am gone: What learned little acrid archive men Will burrow to find me out and burrow again,-- But all for naught, unless To find there was another Island.... Yes, There are too many islands in this world, There are too many rats, and there is too much rain. So three things are made plain Between the sea and sky: Three separate parts of one thing, which is Pain.... Bah, what a way to die!-- To leave my Queen still spinning there on high, Still wondering, I dare say, To see me in this way.... _Madame a sa tour monte Si haut qu’elle peut monter_-- Like one of our Commissioners ... _ai! ai!_ Prometheus and the women have to cry, But no, not I.... Faugh, what a way to die!

But who are these that come and go Before me, shaking laurel as they pass? Laurel, to make me know For certain what they mean: That now my Fate, my Queen, Having found that she, by way of right reward, Will after madness go remembering, And laurel be as grass,-- Remembers the one thing That she has left to bring. The floor about me now is like a sward Grown royally. Now it is like a sea That heaves with laurel heavily, Surrendering an outworn enmity For what has come to be.

--But not for _you_, No, not for you, returning with your curled And haggish lips. And why are you alone? Why do you stay when all the rest are gone? Why do you bring those treacherous eyes that reek With venom and hate the while you seek To make me understand?-- _Laurel from every land, Laurel, but not the world?_

Fury, or perjured Fate, or whatsoever, Tell me the bloodshot word that is your name And I will pledge remembrance of the same That shall be crossed out never; Whereby posterity May know, being told, that you have come to me, You and your tongueless train without a sound, With covetous hands and eyes and laurel all around, Foreshowing your endeavor To mirror me the demon of my days, To make me doubt him, loathe him, face to face. Bowed with unwilling glory from the quest That was ordained and manifest, You shake it off and wish me joy of it? _Laurel from every place, Laurel, but not the rest?_ Such are the words in you that I divine, Such are the words of men. So be it, and what then? Poor, tottering counterfeit, Are you a thing to tell me what is mine?

Grant we the demon sees An inch beyond the line, What comes of mine and thine? A thousand here and there may shriek and freeze, Or they may starve in fine. The Old Physician has a crimson cure For such as these, And ages after ages will endure The minims of it that are victories, The wreath may go from brow to brow, The state may flourish, flame, and cease; But through the fury and the flood somehow The demons are acquainted and at ease, And somewhat hard to please. Mine, I believe, is laughing at me now In his primordial way, Quite as he laughed of old at Hannibal, Or rather at Alexander, let us say. Therefore, be what you may, Time has no further need Of you, or of your breed. My demon, irretrievably astray, Has ruined the last chorus of a play That will, so he avers, be played again some day; And you, poor glowering ghost, Have staggered under laurel here to boast Above me, dying, while you lean In triumph awkward and unclean, About some words of his that you have read? Thing, do I not know them all? He tells me how the storied leaves that fall Are tramped on, being dead? They are sometimes: with a storm foul enough They are seized alive and they are blown far off To mould on islands.--What else have you read? He tells me that great kings look very small When they are put to bed; And this being said, He tells me that the battles I have won Are not my own, But his--howbeit fame will yet atone For all defect, and sheave the mystery: The follies and the slaughters I have done Are mine alone, And so far History. So be the tale again retold And leaf by clinging leaf unrolled Where I have written in the dawn, With ink that fades anon, Like Cæsar’s, and the way be as of old.

Ho, is it you? I thought you were a ghost. Is it time for you to poison me again? Well, here’s our friend the rain,-- _Mironton, mironton, mirontaine...._ Man, I could murder you almost, You with your pills and toast. Take it away and eat it, and shoot rats. Ha! there he comes. Your rat will never fail, My punctual assassin, to prevail-- While he has power to crawl, Or teeth to gnaw withal-- Where kings are caged. Why has a king no cats? What!-- You say that I’ll achieve it if I try? Swallow it?--No, not I.... God, what a way to die!

CALVERLY’S

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. Poor strangers of another tongue May now creep in from anywhere, And we, forgotten, be no more Than twilight on a ruin there.

We two, the remnant. All the rest Are cold and quiet. You nor I, Nor fiddle now, nor flagon-lid, May ring them back from where they lie. No fame delays oblivion For them, but something yet survives: A record written fair, could we But read the book of scattered lives.

There’ll be a page for Leffingwell, And one for Lingard, the Moon-calf; And who knows what for Clavering, Who died because he couldn’t laugh? Who knows or cares? No sign is here, No face, no voice, no memory; No Lingard with his eerie joy, No Clavering, no Calverly.

We cannot have them here with us To say where their light lives are gone, Or if they be of other stuff Than are the moons of Ilion. So, be their place of one estate With ashes, echoes, and old wars,-- Or ever we be of the night, Or we be lost among the stars.

LEFFINGWELL

I--THE LURE

No, no,--forget your Cricket and your Ant, For I shall never set my name to theirs That now bespeak the very sons and heirs Incarnate of Queen Gossip and King Cant. The case of Leffingwell is mixed, I grant, And futile seems the burden that he bears; But are we sounding his forlorn affairs Who brand him parasite and sycophant? I tell you, Leffingwell was more than these; And if he prove a rather sorry knight, What quiverings in the distance of what light May not have lured him with high promises, And then gone down?--He may have been deceived; He may have lied,--he did; and he believed.

II--THE QUICKSTEP

The dirge is over, the good work is done, All as he would have had it, and we go; And we who leave him say we do not know How much is ended or how much begun. So men have said before of many a one; So men may say of us when Time shall throw Such earth as may be needful to bestow On you and me the covering hush we shun. Well hated, better loved, he played and lost, And left us; and we smile at his arrears; And who are we to know what it all cost, Or what we may have wrung from him, the buyer? The pageant of his failure-laden years Told ruin of high price. The place was higher.

III--REQUIESCAT

We never knew the sorrow or the pain Within him, for he seemed as one asleep-- Until he faced us with a dying leap, And with a blast of paramount, profane, And vehement valediction did explain To each of us, in words that we shall keep, Why we were not to wonder or to weep, Or ever dare to wish him back again. He may be now an amiable shade, With merry fellow-phantoms unafraid Around him--but we do not ask. We know That he would rise and haunt us horribly, And be with us o’ nights of a certainty. Did we not hear him when he told us so?

CLAVERING

I say no more for Clavering Than I should say of him who fails To bring his wounded vessel home When reft of rudder and of sails;

I say no more than I should say Of any other one who sees Too far for guidance of to-day, Too near for the eternities.

I think of him as I should think Of one who for scant wages played, And faintly, a flawed instrument That fell while it was being made;

I think of him as one who fared, Unfaltering and undeceived, Amid mirages of renown And urgings of the unachieved;

I think of him as one who gave To Lingard leave to be amused, And listened with a patient grace That we, the wise ones, had refused;

I think of metres that he wrote For Cubit, the ophidian guest: “What Lilith, or Dark Lady” ... Well, Time swallows Cubit with the rest.

I think of last words that he said One midnight over Calverly: “Good-by--good man.” He was not good; So Clavering was wrong, you see.

I wonder what had come to pass Could he have borrowed for a spell The fiery-frantic indolence That made a ghost of Leffingwell;

I wonder if he pitied us Who cautioned him till he was gray To build his house with ours on earth And have an end of yesterday;

I wonder what it was we saw To make us think that we were strong; I wonder if he saw too much, Or if he looked one way too long.

But when were thoughts or wonderings To ferret out the man within? Why prate of what he seemed to be, And all that he might not have been?

He clung to phantoms and to friends, And never came to anything. He left a wreath on Cubit’s grave. I say no more for Clavering.

LINGARD AND THE STARS

The table hurled itself, to our surprise, At Lingard, and anon rapped eagerly: “When earth is cold and there is no more sea, There will be what was Lingard. Otherwise, Why lure the race to ruin through the skies? And why have Leffingwell, or Calverly?”-- “I wish the ghost would give his name,” said he; And searching gratitude was in his eyes. He stood then by the window for a time, And only after the last midnight chime Smote the day dead did he say anything: “Come out, my little one, the stars are bright; Come out, you lælaps, and inhale the night.” And so he went away with Clavering.

MISCELLANEOUS

PASA THALASSA THALASSA

“_The sea is everywhere the sea._”

Gone--faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember? Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign. Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle, Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea.

Never again will he come, with rings in his ears like a pirate, Back to be living and seen, here with his roses and vines; Here where the tenants are shadows and echoes of years uneventful, Memory meets the event, told from afar by the sea.

Smoke that floated and rolled in the twilight away from the chimney Floats and rolls no more. Wheeling and falling, instead, Down with a twittering flash go the smooth and inscrutable swallows, Down to the place made theirs by the cold work of the sea.

Roses have had their day, and the dusk is on yarrow and wormwood-- Dusk that is over the grass, drenched with memorial dew; Trellises lie like bones in a ruin that once was a garden, Swallows have lingered and ceased, shadows and echoes are all.

Where is he lying to-night, as I turn away down to the valley, Down where the lamps of men tell me the streets are alive? Where shall I ask, and of whom, in the town or on land or on water, News of a time and a place buried alike and with him?