Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/108



THE man who cloaked his bitterness within This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries, God never gave to look with common eyea Upon a world of anguish and of sin: His brother was the branded man of Lynn; And there are woven with his jollities The nameless and eternal tragedies That render hope and hopelessness akin. We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel A still chord sorrow-swept, a weird unrest; And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal, As if the very ghost of mirth were dead As if the joys of time to dreams had fled, Or sailed away with Ines to the West.

you not, Leuconoe, to pore With unpermitted eyes on what may be Appointed by the gods for you and me, Nor on Chaldean figures any more. 'T were infinitely better to implore The present only:—whether Jove decree More winters yet to come, or whether he Make even this, whose hard, wave-eaten shore Shatters the Tuscan seas to-day, the last Be wise withal, and rack your wine, nor fill Your bosom with large hopes; for while I sing, The envious close of time is narrowing; So seize the day, or ever it be past, And let the morrow come for what it will