Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/109



lie was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was any more a brute than you or I; For when they told him that his wife must die, He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, And cried like a great baby half that night, And made the women cry to see him cry. And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed a lot of things that she had made Most mournfully away in an old chest Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

, remote, nor witting where I went, I found an altar builded in a dream— A fiery place, whereof there was a gleam So swift, so searching, and so eloquent Of upward promise, that love's murmur, blent With sorrow's warning, gave but a supreme Unending impulse to that human stream Whose flood was all for the flame's fury bent. Alas! I said, the world is in the wrong. But the same quenchless fever of unrest That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng Thrilled me, and I awoke. . . and was the same Bewildered insect plunging for the flame That burns, and must burn somehow for the best.