Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/150

 I fear I may have answered Captain Craig's Epistle Number One with what he chose, Good-humoredly but anxiously, to take For something that was not all reverence; From Number Two it would have seemed almost As if the flanges of the old man's faith Had slipped the treacherous rails of my allegiance, Leaving him by the roadside, humorously Upset, with nothing more convivial To do than be facetious and austere:— "If you decry Don Cesar de Bazan, There is an imperfection in your vitals. Flamboyant and old-fashioned? Overdone? Romantico-robustious?—Dear young man, There are fifteen thousand ways to be one-sided, And I have indicated two of them Already. Now you bait me with a third— As if it were a spider with nine legs; But what it is that you would have me do, What fatherly wrath you most anticipate, I lack the needed impulse to discern; Though I who shape no songs of any sort, I who have made no music, thrilled no canvas,— I who have added nothing to the world The world would reckon save long-squandered wit— Might with half-pardonable reverence Beguile my faith, maybe, to the forlorn Extent of some sequestered murmuring Anent the vanities. No doubt I should, If mine were the one life that I have lived; But with a few good glimpses I have had Of heaven through the little holes in hell, I can half understand what price it is The poet pays, at one time and another,