Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/113



do you dig like long-clawed scavengers To touch the covered corpse of him that fled The uplands for the fens, and rioted Like a sick satyr with doom's worshippers? Come ! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse To tell the story of the life he led. Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead, And let the worms be its biographers. Song sloughs away the sin to find redress In art's complete remembrance: nothing clings For long but laurel to the stricken brow That felt the Muse's finger; nothing less Than hell's fulfilment of the end of things Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.

we can all so excellently give The measure of love's wisdom with a blow,— Why can we not in turn receive it so, And end this murmur for the life we live? And when we do so frantically strive To win strange faith, why do we shun to know That in love's elemental over-glow God's wholeness gleams with light superlative? Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all, Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, Or anything God ever made that grows,— Nor let the smallest vision of it slip, Till you may read, as on Belshazzar's wall, The glory of eternal partnership.