Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/110



I go by there nowadays And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass, The torn blue curtains and the broken glass, I seem to be afraid of the old place; And something stiffens up and down my face, For all the world as if I saw the ghost Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host, With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze. The Tavern has a story, but no man Can tell us what it is. We only know That once long after midnight, years ago, A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town, Who brushed, and scared, and all but overran That skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.

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 to flight Who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way, Songs without souls, that flicker for a day, To vanish in irrevocable night. What does it mean, this barren age of ours? Here are the men, the women, and the flowers, The seasons, and the sunset, as before. What does it mean? Shall there not one arise To wrench one banner from the western skies, And mark it with his name forevennore?