Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/164

 He said, "so beneficial in a sick-room As a well-bred spontaneity of manner. Your sympathetic scowl obtrudes itself, And is indeed surprising. After death, Were you to take it with you to your coffin An unimaginative man might think That you had lost your life in worrying To find out what it was that worried you. The ways of unimaginative men Are singularly fierce . . . Why do you stand? Sit here and watch me while I take this soup. The doctor likes it, therefore it is good. "The man who wrote the decalogue," pursued The Captain, having swallowed four or five Heroic spoonfuls of his lukewarm broth, "Forgot the doctors. And I think sometimes The man of Galilee (or, if you choose, The men who made the sayings of the man) Like Buddha, and the others who have seen, Was to men's loss the Poet though it be The Poet only of him we revere, The Poet we remember. We have put The prose of him so far away from us, The fear of him so crudely over us, That I have wondered—wondered."—Cautiously, But yet as one were cautious in a dream, He set the bowl down on the chair again, Crossed his thin fingers, looked me in the face, And looking smiled a little. "Go away," He said at last, "and let me go to sleep. I told you I should eat, but I shall not. To-morrow I shall eat; and I shall read Some clauses of a jocund instrument That I have been preparing here of late